What are you currently working on?

Our VR opera Songs for a Passerby is now on tour, and we’re looking into a continuation of that. And we’re just stopping to take a breath because we have made two major VR productions in the past two years. Productions working with technology don't usually promise their premiere ahead of time, but we managed to do that which meant it was a very intense period. The advantage is that you get into a very creative field. But it also caused a lot of stress. Everything we have built up artistically, our signature, I’m really happy with. But I also wonder how to make our way of working healthier. We worked deep into the night. A lot.

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In what sense do you consider Songs for a Passerby to be an opera?

I adopted the term VR opera because it is a fictional and musical universe. Not so much a story. An aria can spend minutes purely on sadness. Not necessarily about how it got that way. The teasing out of that feeling, which makes it possible for me to experience grief by crying from music, that touches me. And that's a nice match with VR. You experience directly. That relationship with the viewer has become very dear to me.

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So Songs for a Passerby is poetic rather than narrative?

In immersive dramaturgy, one maxim is that people only feel free when they know the frameworks. Only then will people start playing. If the framework isn’t clear, people remain expectant. That's also why we have a carpet at the entrance: then people know what they are going to walk on. Within that framework, that’s where I can create.

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What you experience are loops. The dying horse dies infinitely. The people you meet think infinitely hard. You are the one who meets them and moves on again; the one who also leaves everything behind.

Can we better accept our finitude if we are given frameworks for it in the arts?

Last week I had a conversation with someone who said: I find it interesting that it's like life. That, as in Songs, is not a story, you experience things. But when you recount them the next day, you do make it a story. So the story arises because you experience it and retell it. You go out in a different way than you came in. Parallel to this are also the stories of religions, the great spiritual stories. A framework for how to live and perhaps also how to die. Being carried by those stories yourself is an inspiration.

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When we started Songs, I really read the Bible for the first time. Like many Limburg Catholics, I am a cultural Catholic with a love of music and mysticism. My parents-in-law are Reformed: they believe in the Word. For them, that is an answer to everything. I find it incredibly interesting to talk to them about that. At the same time, I feel that for me spirituality it’s the opposite: a love of questions, of mystery. To elevate the ongoing search into a religion an sich. Questioning what it is to be human, whether reality is all there is, or is that just the dimension we can perceive. And what should we do in it? These are questions that keep coming back when we are working.

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I think it is good to zoom out from everyday life. There is so little time to distance yourself. You experience this when you look at the sea or at the stars, and when you look at art. That is also what we are trying to do with this work. In Songs, you end up in an overview scene where you look at yourself with a helicopter view. To me, that's a healthy way to reflect on who you are. People also find it quite a sad work. But it brings us back to enjoying the here and now. I read poems by Pessoa from a phase where he talks about life with a lot of love, precisely about everyday things. I think being in the here and now is something to enjoy.

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It is striking that your work touches on larger existential questions. Is a medium like VR ideally suited to talk about that?

What I find interesting about it is that it's about perception. You participate in another world through those glasses. At the same time, our bodies are in the physical world. This almost automatically questions how we should relate to both. In Songs, the spectator takes centre stage, rather than sitting watching "heroes" on stage. You yourself are part of the scene and therefore it is really about your associations. In response to those universal questions, people formulate their own answers. That's what VR and the idea of immersion allow me to do: I can create an instrument through which people can formulate their own thoughts.

How does your background contribute to your vision?

I do have a fascination with people who are no longer present in the physical world but have disappeared inwardly, so to speak. I find that ugly and beautiful at the same time, like melancholy. In Songs, you look at your own body as a kind of ghost, which makes you wonder: am I the body in front of me or am I the ghost looking at it? That’s exciting. When I made VR Opera of the Falling Man four years ago, I was already working around these themes but the focus then was more towards the mental health sector. There is a certain sensitivity in my family, though. For example, my grandfather was depressed. He was considered the village idiot at the time and even received electroshocks. So these themes proliferate somewhere but what I want to avoid is that the viewer ends up on an empathy trajectory. Like: now I know how this person feels. The beauty of Songs is precisely that people talk about how what they experience in it relates to their own lives, that they just lost someone, for example, or felt helpless when they stood next to the dying horse. That first person experience is most relevant.

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I read that the Buddhist idea of an in-between space also inspired you?

Indeed, our research began with the theme of an in-between world. But we explore various sources including from Christianity and other religions. The world of Songs is also a spiritual place. You perceive an exodus of people passing by. Other images are more mundane, like people on the underground. Movement flows through them.

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There is often a suspense of disbelief in VR but I don't want to pretend. I think it is more exciting to assume that you are always in different places at the same time. When you connect and engage with someone, you are in fact also travelling and being somewhere else at the same time, in the non-physical sense of the word. That layer, the experiential world, is deeply human and I find it very interesting.

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Furthermore, the idea of in-between space is also expressed in the concrete space in which it takes place. You wear VR glasses as you walk round and round an area of 5 by 6 metres. Yet each time you enter new spaces. So in the experience, time is a dimension. This has a relationship with the world of dreams.

Does VR also sometimes work in a limiting way, for example because you can't code an artistic idea?

It is a medium in which matter does not exist. On stage, you just say: come up from the right, and an actor comes up and brings all sorts of things that are human. We try to make human things out of inhuman matter. Everything you 3D model is perfect, it's a game-like aesthetic. In that respect, I thought The Opera of the Falling Man (2019) failed. We scanned the singer with photogrammetry, which is a technique where lots of photos are taken simultaneously and stitched together, giving you a photo-realistic 3D object. With a human, this is a lot harder than with an object. Our 3D singer felt uncanny, an inhuman thing. This time we started working with volumetric video. That has other limitations, but rather a half-characterised human than an avatar. It's a difficult and sometimes frustrating process. But when we get deep into it, it yields more than we could have imagined. The most beautiful things emerge from limitations, for example in Songs, the surface on which the viewer walks around.

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You won the Venice Immersive Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival with Songs for a Passerby. What did that prize mean to you?

International attention. I get so many emails that I can hardly process them. Our tour has grown, we are even already getting requests for 2025. But I also got a request from Los Angeles from a major film producer. Furthermore, there is interest from funds and for co-producing. I want to be able to keep what has made us good so far. That's in working together in one space, interacting with each other, listening to the music. So it forces me to stay true to myself and ask myself where I want to go.

And do you already have an answer to that question? Where do you want to go?

What we make is about immersion, music, and transdisciplinary work. We are not married to Virtual Reality. In the coming years, for example, we will also be making sound installations. We are playing with ideas such as thinking of it as an instrument played by the audience. The common thread remains the emancipation of the spectator. They are allowed to use their body and initiative to discover a work. We provide a framework but not at the expense of the experience. In Songs for a Passerby, the spectator is still somewhat preoccupied with 'I have to turn a corner here'. Sometimes you just have to let something wash over you. It is this balance we are looking for. We want to allow more room for this, to give people time to be in the moment and explore.

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What will your next project be?

We have lots of plans, including international ones, all the projects are now in the writing stage. For example, we have two big productions coming up for the theatre and we are going to make a few smaller ones for public spaces. I hope we will get some help in professionalising. We have grown a lot but don't yet have the foundation to handle all that growth. We need a functioning structure and bigger budgets. What we do remains tailor-made.

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Published on 5 February 2024.

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Photos: Florian Braakman