Witch Hunt
Noord Nederlands Toneel and Club Guy & Roni, Noord Nationaal Toneel, 2023
The young archaeologist Esther returns to her home village to carry out an investigation into a mysterious grave. The bones of five women have been found, which hint at a much larger story. What follows is an evocative, magical and intuitive quest for the potency andknowledge of a group of women from the past along with the question as to why this knowledge and potency have been lost.
The idea for the show started with a lullaby that director Eline Arbo remembered from her childhood. Uti vår hage (In our gardens)
appears to be an innocent enough summation of plants and herbs. It was not until much later that she found out that it was a recipe for a drink to induce an abortion. The naive children’s song turned out to be a form of oral tradition that women used to preserve and pass on knowledge and at the same time keep it under lock and key. Hidden in plain sight. The song became the common thread in an existential production where in a young woman sets out in search of her native soil, her mother and her history.
Together with Nina de Jong and Thijs van Vuuren we scored the piece and performed it live.