Yara turned a nightmare into an experience
Music Theatre student Yara Snelder struggled with nightmares for years. What fascinated her was that, although the dreams weren’t real, the feelings they left behind were. For her final, she explored how to translate that experience into music theatre. ‘I wanted to see if I could share that lingering feeling with an audience. The way a dream can keep resonating in your body long after you wake up.’
Trailer OOG EN SCHIJNLIJK
Several fellow students and other makers contributed to this music theatre production. You can find the full credits list here.
This final was part of the ArtEZ Music Theatre Festival in Arnhem.
The sound of a nightmare
The idea for Yara’s graduation performance emerged during a period when she had no contact with her father. During those three years, he often appeared in her dreams. ‘In those nightmares, I would end up confronting him again and again. Whether I wanted to or not – usually not.’
What fascinated her was how those dreams continued to affect her after she woke up. ‘If you have a lot of nightmares, it’s quite difficult to explain what that feels like,’ Yara says. ‘Ideally, you want people to feel it, rather than just understand it.’
As she searched for the right form, the music began to take shape as well. While playing the piano in a rehearsal room, she wrote a musical motif that later became the foundation of the performance. The motif kept returning throughout the piece, though not always in a recognisable way. ‘It ended on a very dissonant note. It wasn’t really in a key either, which makes it sound unsettling and slightly uncomfortable to listen to.’
‘One of the most important things I learned during the programme was to dare to fail. There’s beauty in that. By discovering what doesn’t work, you eventually find what does. The magic happens when you surrender to the process, rather than chasing the perfect outcome.’
Playing with shadows
When Yara first saw the space at Popcentrum de Jacobiberg, her immediate thought was: ‘Oh, this is a really weird space. Perfect.’ During the performance, the audience sat in a pit at the centre of the room. Around them, Yara and the other performers acted behind sheets of plastic, using light, shadows and distorted imagery to create an unsettling atmosphere.
During rehearsals, it was difficult to judge how the scenes would come across. Because the performers were hidden behind the plastic, they could hardly see what effect their actions had on the audience. To solve this, they built a small-scale version of the set-up in a classroom. One by one, they would step into the square in the middle to observe what the lighting, shadows and movements looked like from the audience’s perspective.
During the performance itself, Yara barely saw the audience. ‘You could feel a certain tension coming from the centre, but you couldn’t actually see anyone.’ That meant trusting everything they had explored and rehearsed throughout the making process. Afterwards, audience members told her they had felt angry, sad, anxious and trapped.
‘It doesn’t matter to me if someone doesn’t fully understand my performance. As long as they feel something.’
A dream with an audience
The way the audience was welcomed was also part of the performance. The sense of disorientation began before the show had even started. Visitors were guided to their seats by torchlight and positioned in a very specific way. Sitting closely together on the floor and facing different directions, they became part of each other’s experience.
It worked exactly as Yara had hoped. After the performance, a friend told her: ‘There was this man, and every time a scene was happening behind him, he refused to turn around. I found it so irritating.’ Yara was delighted by that response. ‘His irritation became part of his experience of the performance.’
The absence of music
The musical structure received a great deal of attention during the making process. That led to a striking decision: for much of the performance, there was no music at all.
‘When something is recognisable as music, people tend to experience it as something safe,’ Yara explains. She wanted to stretch that feeling of unease for as long as possible. Only later in the performance did a more substantial musical piece emerge. ‘By delaying the sound, we were able to create both tension and relief.’
