Student - November 6, 2010

House-to-house art

A bald fifty-plus hurls in a fascinating way his flow of emotions on the table. It's the table in a student home. A taste of 'room service' in Wageningen.

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Language is fantastic; it's a puzzle with millions of solutions', says the poet softly. He begins with a few love poems. Five students are sitting on the edge of their seats in the small living room on the Oude Eekmolenweg. Candles light up the room and their flames rock to and fro with the rhythm of the voice of the man whose lower arms are completely covered with tattoos. If I should come across him in a pub, I would have run off in the other direction, but I am now captivated by his words, which he binds together effortlessly with rhymes for minutes on end into beautiful, albeit heavy, sentences describing dying girls, Pamela Anderson and more.
Uri Geller
Together with my friend Stefan, I cycle briskly to the next location: a student home in the Heerenstraat. It is more crowded here. I have to make my way among some 30 people to a seat on the floor. Suddenly, exciting music fills the swelteringly hot room. 'Usually, fireworks would explode right now, but alas, that's not allowed here', says Fritze the magician. 'By the way, have you seen me in De nieuwe Uri Geller on tv?' he asks. 'I did very badly in it.' In his show, however, he conjures up a cell phone in a balloon and makes playing cards appear and disappear with ease.
Primal sounds
The last act takes place in Droevendaal. A young man, clearly very taken up with sounds, stands behind a sound mixer. It is pitch dark in the living room and his face is barely visible. Using a fiddlestick, a glass, an electric toothbrush, a sound mixer and his own self-made analogue synthesizer, he concocts the most hypnotizing and mysterious mixture of primal sounds.
For five euros, I was entertained for the whole evening by various artistes during the 'student home theatre festival'. 'You'd be foolish if you weren't present', says Stefan afterwards while cycling home. He's so right.