Luuk Mellema

Name: Luuk Mellema
Internship: Totale Uitverkoop – Theatergroep De Horde
Graduation Performance: The Grey End (with Koen Bordewijk)

Luuk Mellema (2002) is a graduate of the ArtEZ School of Acting in Arnhem. He grew up in Nieuwleusen, a village near Zwolle.

As an actor, Luuk feels most at home in performances where language, physical theatre, absurdism, and musicality come together. He is drawn to bold characters, striking visual storytelling, and the limitless possibilities of imagination. And give him a great costume, and he'll bring it to life.

Graduation Performance – The Grey End

For his graduation production, created under the supervision of Koen Verheijden, Luuk developed an absurdist performance exploring themes of loneliness, transience, and human connection. In The Grey End, he combined his fascination with language and absurdism with a love of bold visual design and costume. The result is a distinctive performance in which humour and melancholy exist side by side.

Internship – Totale Uitverkoop

During his internship with Theatergroep De Horde, Luuk performed in Totale Uitverkoop (Total Clearance), a visually driven theatre production for audiences aged 8 and up in which almost no words are spoken. The story is told entirely through physical performance, movement, and imagination.

What begins as an ordinary evening in a supermarket gradually transforms into an exhilarating battle between people and their increasingly intrusive groceries. Combining slapstick, cinematic effects, and a generous dose of absurdism, the performance offers a playful critique of contemporary consumer culture.

For Luuk, this production provided the opportunity to further develop his passion for physical theatre and to explore how a compelling story can be told without the use of language.

Graduation Thesis

For his graduation thesis, Luuk explored another of his great passions: video games. Driven by his interest in storytelling, he investigated how video games are adapted into other media, such as film, television, and theatre.

Approaching adaptation as a form of translation, he drew on The Task of the Translator by the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. His research focused on how stories are transformed when they move from one medium to another, and on the creative possibilities this process opens up for both artists and audiences.