Staying soft through fierce resistance
A people pleasing soft-activist decides to confront himself with the emotion he fears most: for the first time, he wants to become furious.
Mees van Rijswijk is often described as ‘sweet,’ ‘calm’ and ‘enthusiastic,’ a ‘friend to everyone,’ a ‘nice guy, but really nice.’ Someone once even called him ‘harmless.’ And that’s where it went wrong. Naturally, that means he’s not taken seriously at all. Since then, Mees has had one wish: he wants to become furious.
A soft-activist decides to no longer deny his own anger. He asks angry people for tips: partly to study their art, and partly to discover whether there’s also something in their anger that connects them. Maybe world peace actually begins in a mosh pit, or in the meeting of a knuckle and a jaw. AAAARGH is a musical spoken word performance about an abrasive search for anger. It is not a manual, not therapy, not a safe space. It isn’t even a word. AAAARGH is a radical attempt to stay soft, precisely through fierce resistance.
About Mees
Mees van Rijswijk (1999) is a spoken word poet, theatre maker and (former?) soft-activist from Leeuwarden. He takes being human with a grain of salt and prefers to describe things exactly as they are, in as few syllables as possible. Mees has won various prizes for his spoken word pieces, travels the whole country for performances, and likes to solve sudokus along the way.
Spoken word poet Mees van Rijswijk (26) would like to resist sexism, racism, transphobia and ‘the fact that everything always revolves around money’, but first he has to manage to become angry. During Aaaargh, singing and rapping, with musical support from guitarist Sander Koning, he reports on attempts to tap into the wolf within himself. He does this engagingly well, precisely by dissecting his own gentleness in a playful way. – de Volkskrant ★★★★
Credits
Concept, text, performance: Mees van Rijswijk
Music: Sander Koning
Direction: Sjaan Flikweert
Set design: Caya Emmelkamp
Costume design: ChaPauw
Production: Annemarie Venema
Artistic and business guidance: Eva van Netten, Marleen Nagtegaal and Mark Hospers
Marketing: Merel Hoekstra & Mathé Többen
With thanks to | Het Cultuurfonds & Gemeente Leeuwarden
