Follow a manual added link
RESEARCH LOG
Felix De Rooij’s Theater:
a Cosmic Colonial Climax
by Maarten van Hinte
Proto Artaud
At first glance, Desiree is not a typical De Rooij piece. The grim reality of a New York newspaper clipping seems worlds away from work like Ceremonia di Siglo XX, Felix’s first piece, a highly symbolic mythical showdown between Mother Earth and the Gods of Decadence and War. But De Rooij and De Palm turned Desiree’s gritty ‘well-made play’ premise on its head by drawing the audience into the young woman’s psychotic, delusional world, where religion, sex and oppression intersect—a spiritual battlefield where a young black mother manically confronts the forces of evil.
Figure 1. Felix de Rooy, Desiree (1981). Photo: Hajo Piebenga
The performance becomes larger than life, a ritual with a powerful social and political message. And this is where Desiree exemplifies De Rooij’s artistic vision as much as any other piece in his body of theater work. De Rooij’s theater is ritual theater. Rituals to explore cosmic paradoxes and traumas, rituals to harness spiritual powers, rituals to heal generational pain. Western theater critics would definitely classify De Rooij’s work as ‘theatre de la cruauté’ (Theater of Cruelty), as championed by Antonin Artaud. But De Rooij’s inspiration isn’t Artaud. His inspiration is the rites and the rituals of Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous people he grew up with: Proto-Artaud. His theater is about energies—creative energies, erotic energies, spiritual energies—colliding, colluding, merging, emerging.
Why identify?
De Rooij’s plays aren’t meant to be watched, they are meant to be experienced. Love it or hate it, there is no escape. The same holds true for the intensity of the performances Felix coaxes from the people he works with, whether professional and non-professional. It’s either all the way, or no way. The intensity of the acting Felix requested from his performers contrasted sharply with the irony and the Brechtian alienation that was prevalent in Dutch theater when he arrived in Amsterdam in the early eighties. De Rooij’s work detonated in the face of the cold dispassion of the regional scene: it was in your face. His plays were controversial—too ‘black’ for mainstream Dutch theater critics, too queer for the Surinamese and Antillean cultural elite. It didn’t matter to De Rooij, he doesn’t much care for categories anyway. He doesn’t particularly identify as ‘black’ or ‘queer’, or rather: he proudly identifies as both, and a shitload of other things too, including indigenous, and white, and male and female.
De Rooij’s theater is firmly rooted in his Caribbean identity as the ‘heir to the colonial orgasm.’ As a nomad in the ‘no man’s land of the mongrel’, his identity is in constant movement, full of boiling contradictions, unrestricted desires and unresolved conflicts. De Rooij’s theater can be defined as extraverted introspection, reflections on the fluidity of his gender, his ethnicity, his cultural creolité. His personal multi-identity is a dynamic prism through which he views the world.
A is for Allochtoon
De Rooij’s theater was never explicitly political, but in Netherlands the 1980’s simply being considered black made everything he did in the performing arts political, as both he and Norman de Palm were fully aware. Theater by black artists was generally considered to be minority work with no mainstream artistic relevance. There were special labels—migrant-theater, minority-theater, the pseudoscientific term allochtonen-theater—and there was special funding that set it apart from ‘regular’ theater. But Felix did not stick to the script: the first two plays he made after settling in Amsterdam, Lippenschrift and Een Nacht Nu, featured white performers and explored themes like sexual identity, family trauma, and existential solitude.
Figure 2. Theater poster, Een nacht nu (1984). Courtesy Felix de Rooy.
People were confused as to why a black theater group would take on such ‘white’ subjects. The consensus was Cosmic Illusion should stick to making plays for their ‘own’ audience, like Desiree. But which audience? Black? American? When de Rooij and de Palm helped Rufus Collins and Henk Tjon launch DNA in 1986, Felix addressed the Dutch denial of Hollands multi-ethnic and multicultural reality head on. DNA’s first production was Voor vrouwen die in regenbogen geloven maar ook zelfmoord overwogen, an adaptation of African-American playwright Ntozake Shange’s iconic choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Shange’s piece, a combination of performance poetry and dance, tells the stories of seven American women who suffer oppression in a racist and sexist society. The American production featured an all-female cast of African-American and Latinx performers. De Palm and De Rooij set the play in the Netherlands, and cast it with women from different Dutch minorities, Surinamese, Antillean, Indonesian, Indian––openly addressing racism and sexism as a Dutch problem.
Figure 3. Felix de Rooy, Voor Vrouwen die in regenbogen geloven maar ook zelfmoord overwogen (1986). Photo: Jean van Lingen.
Figure 4. Rehearsal image from Voor Vrouwen die in regenbogen geloven maar ook zelfmoord overwogen (1986). Photo: Jean van Lingen
The play also introduced so-called spoken word poetry as a performance form in Dutch theater. Unsurprisingly, some critics at the time felt this particularly African-American form was not appropriate for a multiracial Dutch cast. Little did they know how ubiquitous spoken word would be on Dutch stages, 40 years later. Voor vrouwen die in regenbogen geloven was the first in a series of plays by writers of color that DNA brought to Dutch stages. The company went on to perform plays by people like August Wilson, Derek Wallcott, George C. Wollfe, Reinaldo Arenas and Astrid Roemer, of which Felix would direct two. All of these authors were well known outside of Holland, yet unknown in Dutch theater. This highlights another important characteristic of De Rooij’s artistic breadth: his frame of reference is much, much bigger than the provincial polder. His scope is international, and he knows what he’s talking about. Felix’s Caribbean upbringing was steeped in culture: his parents were artists, their friends were artists, and as a child he learned all there is to know about Western European art and literature, as well as being introduced to writers like James Baldwin and Franz Fanon, and the music of Carlos Gardel, Celia Cruz and Louis Armstrong. All this in addition to the sounds, songs and rituals of Afro Caribbean and Indigenous cultures. When he came to Holland to study art in 1971, he brought all of this to the table, as well as an inquisitive mind, a taste for hallucinogenics and a fascination for African art. After art school he went back to Curaçao to found Ilushón Kosmiko. After locally producing three plays in Papiamento, he went to New York to study filmmaking. After the tour of Desiree, in 1981 De Rooij and De Palm settled in Holland.
Within a few years of being in Amsterdam, Norman and Felix had their own theater space in a former tobacco warehouse in Amsterdam’s theater district. It became a hub for actors, writers, and performers of color—artists with roots in former Dutch colonies. By this time, Cosmic and DNA were labelled ‘multicultural,’ a euphemism for all things black and foreign that had no place in mainstream Dutch theater. Funding for multicultural or allochtonen theater was seen as helping minorities ‘catch up’ to ‘real, quality’ theater. Special courses were set up to prepare minority students for preparatory courses that prepared white students for auditions to theater schools. These theater schools were completely ignorant of the plethora of international playwrights, historians, filmmakers and philosophers that were challenging Western colonial thinking—people who Felix knew, met, worked with, people like Derek Wallcott and Spike Lee. Cosmic and DNA were consistently treated as irrelevant minority organisations for a local target audience when in fact, led by people like Felix de Rooij and Rufus Collins, they were the only independent cultural spaces that viewed Dutch history and Dutch identity from an international, postcolonial, and non-white perspective. These kinds of spaces were and still are essential for our common future, but unfortunately they are few and far between.
Don’t hate. Curate.
De Rooij tired of the bureaucracy and politics that came with running a publicly funded theater organisation in a cultural environment where he wasn’t taken seriously. His friend and colleague Rufus Collins, who ran DNA, collected stereotypical images of black people—Gollywogs, Zwarte Piet, Aunt Jemima—to remind himself and his actors and students what kind of representation they were up against. Felix was fascinated by Rufus’ collection. He asked if he could expand on it, and within a few years he turned it into a dizzying spectacle of colonial stereotypes and racist tropes. In 1989, he asked the Tropenmuseum if he could exhibit his collection there. Felix was known as a theater director, not as a curator, or a historian. In fact, the Tropenmuseum assigned an official art historian next to Felix to justify the exhibition’s ‘legitimacy’.
Figure 5. Exhibition photograph, Wit over Zwart (1989) at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo: Pierre Verhoeff
But Wit over Zwart wasn’t just an exhibition. It was a theatrical event, a public intervention, an exorcism in the heart of Holland’s biggest colonial monument. Wit over Zwart was a watershed moment in Dutch cultural history that resonates to this day. It was also a ‘fuck you’ to the constant condescension Felix had to deal with as the head of a black owned cultural institution. The exhibit essentially unmasked binary black-white thinking as a European concept designed to enforce oppression. It underscored Felix’ refusal to comply with this binary thinking about his or anyone else’s identity, and reflected his frustration in coping with the bureaucracy and politics that came along with running a ‘black’ theater company in a ‘white’ theater world. It sent a shockwave through a young generation of aspiring theater makers and artists of color, and can be considered as the beginning of a larger post-colonial awakening in the performing arts.
From a mongrel past to a mutant future
Felix left Cosmic in the early 1990s in order to focus on his art and his new found fame as a curator, but still freelanced as a theater director, as confrontational as ever. In Marival, a documentary theater production, he worked with five unemployed cross-dressing Antillean queens, who would have been completely ostracized in notoriously homophobic Curaçao but managed to survive in the margins of Amsterdam society, loud and proudly Antillean.
Figure 6. Felix de Rooy, Marival (1996). Photo: Jean van Lingen
Deliberately provocative, exhilarating, and very, very real, Marival was a statement about the right to self-identify, right down to its script written entirely in Papiamento.
With Duet/Duel, he created a semi-documentary, multi-media performance set in the future featured a mixed-race murder suspect doomed to play out an immersive therapeutic video game with deadly outcome.
De Kleur van Droes, portrayed an ambitious black artist commissioned to paint the portrait of Jakobus Capteijn—a black preacher that used the bible to justify slavery—who ultimately is possessed by the self-loathing spirit of the preacher.
Figure 7. Felix de Rooy, De Kleur van Droes (2004). Photography: Mark Kohn.
Celebrations, ceremonies, exorcisms: each play is a ritual, performed, as Felix puts it, to transform ‘mongrel heirs to the colonial orgasms’ into ‘mutants with double and multiblood that fuses and nurtures.’
Felix’s theater work is groundbreaking for its unapologetic refusal to comply to any one format or esthetic.
Felix’s theater work is fundamental in its recognition of theater as a ritual space, a place of sharing and of being, in real time. Theater is by definition multidisciplinary, confrontational and immediate. It is at the core of Felix’s artistic identity
Felix’s theater work is liberating in its embrace of Caribbean Creole identity as proof of a hybrid, interconnected world of freedom and renewal, where nothing is off limits and everything can and will combine. Henk Tjon called it ‘Ala Kondré’, Edouard Glissant called it ‘le Tout Monde’, Felix de Rooij calls it het Kolonial Orgasme.
Felix’s theater work is empowering because it is about more than imagining the future.
It is about reclaiming the past.
About the Author
Maarten van Hinte is a creative force behind RIGHTABOUTNOW INC. along with Marjorie Boston. Together, they pioneered hip-hop theater in the Netherlands and were founders and curators of the legendary MC Theater – a production house and stage for theater, dance, music, and club culture. In 2013, they founded RIGHTABOUTNOW INC.
Van Hinte works as a writer, director and coach. His artistic roots are in hiphop, his theater career started under the mentorship of Rufus Collins and Henk Tjon at De Nieuwe Amsterdam (DNA). Recent productions include Queen of Disco, STATUS (for RIGHTABOUTNOW INC.) and Hoe ANANSI the stories of the world bevrijdde (for the National Opera and Ballet)He has written several plays for RIGHTABOUTNOW, including Queen of Disco, STATUS, and TORI (in collaboration with the National Theater). As a coach/dramaturg, he recently worked with Ritzah Statia, Mathieu Wijdeven and Gavin Viano.
Van Hinte lectures on cultural history and dramaturgy at the Amsterdam School of the Arts and is a sought-after guest lecturer and moderator at arts education institutions.
