#533 Is It? It Is!
It is Portable Vaudeville. The soundtrack for The Theatre for Moveable People, Objects and Music. First performed in 1983 during the Holland Festival at the City Theatre in Amsterdam. The recordings were made during four nights in a row, edited at the EXART studio in IJmuiden and released a few days after the show on a C-60 music-cassette.
Was It? It Was!
It was part of Willem de Ridder’s art-works-performances during the Holland Festival in June 1983. The main show in the City Theatre was a combination of city walks, playing with everyday moveable objects, suspense, fear therapy, storytelling and absurd perverse performance art. All ‘created’ by the audience itself. The soundtrack was a collage of picked up daily sounds, simple kitschy rhythm structures and cheap noisy machine harmonies. The first night Kees van Ede and Hessel Veldman performed with a violinist from the Dutch Symphony Orchestra. But his approach didn’t fit to our non conventional and improvised stage set-up. The next three nights Kees and Hessel performed together.
The complete show was a pain in the ass of the Holland Festival organization. The press reviewed it as a disgusting display. “The show was a misrepresentation full of fairground attractions. A woman with chained nipples was dragged through the audience. A woman/man in bondage was strung up into the roof ridge. While another woman was smoking cigars with her cunt. And bull boss Willem de Ridder was telling scary fairytale stories. This wasn’t ART.”
And after several live shows in 2024 there is this radio-edit of the Soundart Radio Portable Vaudeville performance in Dartington, Devon, UK. A refurbished show that takes you back to 1983 and brings you the same eighties experience of ‘disgust, love and beauty’. Watch the show in your mind. Using your most erotic, scary and perverse fantasies. O yeh, don’t mind touching your body or start moving it.
A Soundart Radio / WORM radio / Concertzender Radio production.
