DIEHELEDING: carving out their niche in the professional field
The theatre collective DIEHELEDING was founded by second-year students in the ArtEZ School of Acting. The six members of the collective were already actively carving out their niche in the professional field while finishing up their education. Nowadays, DIEHELEDING performs at venues throughout the Netherlands, from De Parade and Karavaan to DOX and Festival Tweetakt. Nick, one of the members, talks about the collective, the School of Acting and the professional field.
The DIEHELEDING collective consists of six people, five of whom are School of Acting students: Steven Ivo, Annebel Overbeeke, Nick Livramento Silva, Dalorim Wartes and Merel Pauw, and one director and co-creator: Jip Vuik.
How it started
Nick: "DIEHELEDING came about in 2016 during my time at the School of Acting, where you talk a lot about the job and your own development. What you want from the job is essential. This created the space to give our love of rap and hip-hop a place.
We were given an introductory project in our third year where we could create what we wanted to create in a group format. What tied our group together was the affinity for hip-hop. There were directors with whom we could speed-date. That is how I met Jip Vuik, who is now also a member of DIEHELEDING. He brought our ideas together better than we could have done ourselves.
Performing rap became our performance format, and it caught on. Our very first performance LIL’ ARIAL BLACK was even allowed to play at De Parade. In 2018, we created a graduation performance, Fox Populi, which we also performed a shortened version of at De Parade."
Entering the professional field with a mission
While studying at the School of Acting, DIEHELEDING created performances that already caught on in the work field. "It was great to make this from our own fascination," says Nick. "Our mission was to make theatre for everyone – inclusive. After graduation, we contacted DOX and Theater Utrecht. We have also been able to develop ourselves further there in the past two years and have created many performances. We have done a great many things and our agenda is fully booked.
Our new location performance Dashboard has premiered. Dashboard is about loneliness in the city. The visitor gets in a taxi, gets a monologue performed by someone and our music plays on the car radio."
"We have done so much. Now, years later, we are repositioning ourselves. We rap and use pop music styles. By doing so, we can examine how we relate to the theatre field." And it shows - in the new performance about Tupac Shakur, for which DIEHELEDING recently won DNA Next's incentive prize.
Education
"Education has become an important aspect of our work. Our group has an affinity for teaching. With DIEHELEDING, we do projects with the ArtEZ School of Acting and Music Theatre programmes and create performances. We share our self-discovered form of theatre with others, so they can learn and develop their own style of performing as well.
I'm working on a few other things as well. I play a lot of sports, write my own rap songs, do acting training and I’m on the ArtEZ graduation committee. It's so much fun to be in the community like this and learn about other fields."
About the course
"I already had quite a bit of prior training: secondary vocational education, two years of DOX and even a year of Drama School in Maastricht. At the School of Acting in Arnhem, I discovered that the process of discovering what suits you begins with yourself. Starting from yourself is essential. That mindset helped me a lot, and is also something that transcends the field of acting. At the same time, you learn a craft, like a baker learning how to bake bread. That combination makes me feel like I have had the best education that exists in the Netherlands."
Follow DIEHELEDING
DIEHELEDING combines theatre and rap and links rap to (classical) stories. They write their own lyrics and produce their own music. The collective creates performances for everyone through its personal approach to themes and old stories, always with one foot in (theatre) history and the other in contemporary (music) culture.
