2007 – 2014

A performance event for and with a pre-school audience.

concept, dance, drawing Katrina Brown
voice & vocal sound Han Buhrs

ETSbeest is a collaboration of choreographer Katrina Brown and singer/composer Han Buhrs – a performance project with and for pre-school children in which we work with movement, sound and drawing – interested in working with the resonance and materiality of our disciplines of moving/drawing and acoustic voice/sound score.

In 2007, we were invited by Ingrid Wolff, artistic director of Stichting Tweeturvenhoog to make a short event and experiment for the annual Tweeturvenhoog Festival in Almere, outside Amsterdam. We did not want to make a performance FOR children but to create a situation in which we could invite a young audience into the work and into an encounter – with one-another – with materials – with us-  and to create a situation of doing together.

In ETSbeest we have composed a simple set of clearly defined parameters which gradually dissolve as the performance event unfolds.

There is a large sheet of paper on the ground. The young audience enter and sit round the paper sheet. There are two performers.  One is making small non-vocal sounds on the edge of the paper and the other tiny movements close and between the audience. As they play with voice and movement, black charcoal traces of movement and sound are drawn on the paper.  At a certain moment the young audience are invited onto the paper to join the action- this transition is always different. Sometimes the audience pre-empt our invite and sometimes it takes many minutes before someone dares to step onto the paper. Either way it always happens!- the audience decide their own time and are free to participate how and when they want.

We work with a score which we are able to improvise within and which welcomes the unpredictability of our audience.  The event becomes messy, the audience becomes dirty, the paper becomes full of action with layers of charcoal marks, lines and smudges. When the audience has left, there remains a large canvas- an artwork – a record and memory of doing together. Sometimes the canvas is taken away to hang in the school or creche.

International festival- Tweeturvenhoog – and artistic director Ingrid Wolff  are encouraging discussion between artists, programmers, educators, and researchers in issues around art and performance for young ages-  they produced and supported ETSbeest and have opened up a network of contacts for us.  Our ETSbeest experiment was seen at Tweeturvenhoog Festival 2007 by Agnès Desfosses director of Compagnie Acta and she invited us to play in Premieres Rencontres 2008, travelling to different neighourhoods in the northern suburbs of Paris for 3 weeks. Since then 2009-2012 we have had wonderful invites and experiences at Onyx Nantes, Charleroi, Luxembourg, Helsinki, Salzburg, Hamm, Rotterdam, La Rochelle, Grenoble and with a return this year to Tweeturvenhoog 2012 . TakeOff Festival Durham 2012 was our first UK performance and from that we took part in the first, fresh, inspired and dynamic Fratz Festival & Symposium in Berlin in April 2013. Since then we have also visited Brighton Family Fringe 2013 and Cockermouth Cumbria 2014 as well as returning to France to Nantes and Strasbourg 2014. Etsbeest works best when invited for a week with the host venue arranging creche and school groups.