A musical, personal and intimate theatre performance by and with Marlies Ruigrok
“‘What do you think the sound of ice is?’ a man asked me three years ago during an encounter on my first long walk. It is one of the most beautiful questions I have ever heard, and it has walked alongside me ever since. It is the starting point of this musical narrative.” – Marlies
Ice symbolizes the protective, hardened outer layer of ourselves. What emerges when that top layer melts? When we allow what is frozen within us to thaw? When we dare to let go of what we may be clinging to desperately. What waters, layers of earth and colors reveal themselves?
And how does it sound? Is it a sound from the past? From deeply hidden parts of ourselves, from that which must remain concealed? A sound of resistance, or a sound of the future? A voice full of longing? For something new that can come into being? A sound—of rebirth?
Over the past years, Marlies has traveled on foot through various countries. At four kilometers per hour across vast Spanish landscapes, walking through mystical Iceland, and meandering through New York and unexplored Central Asia. She draws inspiration from different cultures, people, colors, and rituals—Marlies feels at home in the unknown. In this musical narrative, she embraces the richness of these diverse sources of inspiration as well as her own artistic versatility, ultimately allowing everything to melt together into a musical narrative about identity, transformation, stretching boundaries, and discovering new territories within yourself.
Expect a hyper-musical, colorful, and energetic performance in which music, language, and design merge into a unique theatrical ritual.
“Maybe the journey isn’t about becoming anything.
Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you,
so that you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.” – Paulo Coelho
About Marlies
Anyone who has ever seen a performance by Marlies comes back. Her impressive singing voice, captivating storytelling, and warm, inviting interaction with the audience make her performances unmissable. Marlies’s work is infused with a longing for an intense experience of life. She has a distinctive style of creating theatre music at the crossroads of contemporary world music, pop, and chanson, with incisive lyrics. It is dynamic, poetic, inquisitive, and always intimate. With her graduation performance, Marlies won the Entree Prize at Festival Boulevard. In recent years she created and performed the successful site-specific productions De Kleur Oranje and Sobremesa in collaboration with Makershuis Alkmaar/Karavaan, where she is a resident maker. She also released her EP Papel, which attracted the attention of Dutch radio stations such as NPO Radio 1 and 5. The Sound of Ice is the third (autonomous) part of Marlies’s trilogy on transformation and also her debut in the theatre hall. Previously, Marlies sang in various international projects, including The Kyteman Orchestra, Collectief Wunderbaum, Paco Peña, and Het Muziek (formerly Asko|Schönberg Ensemble).
Credits
By and with Marlies Ruigrok
Director: Ruut Weissman
Multi-instrumentalist: TBA
(Lyric) texts: Antoine Uitdehaag, Marlies Ruigrok, et al.
De Klank van Ijs is a co-production with Makershuis Alkmaar/Karavaan and is created within the framework of Oproer.