Theatre-making player to music-playing maker
Rosa Berman, Musical Theatre, Conservatory Arnhem: “If I am walking on the street I always have the feeling that I can not reveal my true self. When I meet new people I struggle to be open. Sometimes I feel that women are expected to be soft, or contrarily, brittle. I am confronted with the fact that I can not meet other people´s expectations – and my own. On the one hand I want to be included and on the other I want to be unique. The discordance between these two is intriguing. How do I translate this to music and how can we keep asking ourselves this question? That is the broad subject of my graduation performance, I hope that it does not only apply to myself, but to many others too.”
From violinist to performance maker
“I played violin from my sixth and I sang a lot too, but I also really like the theatre. That combination comes together perfectly in the study Musical theatre. You can choose between the making- and performance-side. I wanted to learn how to make my own performances; to learn how to stand upon the stage, because this worked well for me.
I want to keep music, text and image one and to show that the one can not exist without the other. That is a difficult quest, but that challenge makes it fun to investigate. Now I make my own performance and I try to communicate the equality between these components.”
“We are stimulated to conceive of our own scenes, to make our own performances. This aspect of artistic making has come up in recent years. We truly graduate with our own performance of which we are our own boss. You work towards this over the course of four years.”
Thinking and working form music
“I am in a violin quartet with three other women, Four Frogs in the Woods. That playful title comes from the passion to experiment as you wish. We work a lot with improvisation, classical music, jazz and everything in between. I like multi-disciplinary collaborations. We continued with the three of us for my finals-show and my two co-players (Anne Eding en Tania Bräcklein) are from the study Jazz & Pop. My final is a musical performance, an almost theatrical concert.”
“In our class we are all completely different. I am not predisposed to working digitally, I really need a live audience and really wanted to make a live performance. That will work, but because of corona I will have to play for a lot less people.”
What is your graduation work about?
“It is about three women who earn their money and feel a discordance between their inner and external experience of the world. We began this concept before corona and it seems to connect perfectly to the current situation. Corona is by now deeply entwined into the work. We are a real hybrid: we work a lot with music and our own experiences. We are very flexible with the three of us and I would like to bring the show to theatres. After my graduation I will approach theatres for this purpose.”
Music-Theatre: making players and playing makers
“How can I make my own performances and simultaneously be a making player within this? Maverick makers who have their own story, that is what the study aspires towards. We are truly a makers study in which theatre and music come together. We are not trained to act. ArtEZ has a very good theatre school for this purpose. I considered going to the conservatory for a while, but I thought it focused too much on one thing. Musical theatre matched my own mindset.
