Marjolein Van der Meer

Marjolein van der Meer (The Netherlands, 1986) is a spoken word artist, a singer and musician, performer and director of performance. Loosely combining music, image and text she creates multi-layered songs, concepts and performances, soundscapes and audio pieces that reveal her way of looking at the world. Her work is playful and combines the abstract with daily life, trying to reach beyond the surface through building structures of language and music, using the subconscious, poetry and movement. Together with musician Raymond Deirkauf, Marjolein has an electronic music duo called I, poor romantic. The duo released their first single Cool, oh no Cool in 2017 and an EP based on Grimm fairy tales in 2019. Grimm toured extensively through theaters in The Netherlands and Belgium. Marjolein van der Meer previously created performances for Frascati and de Brakke Grond in Amsterdam. Her audio documentaries were broadcast on the Dutch national radio (Hollanddoc) and online through national newspaper NRC.

About the project

I AM SEVERAL is an electronic music piece leading up to a performance, using a polyphony of voices to address diversity. It is about the different people we can be, pluriformity versus surrender, the individual versus the group. The piece uses everyday situations, sounds and movement to create a certain unity, a choir of people in which each individual’s autonomy can be reflected. This project is about finding ones voice, about being autonomous and the loneliness this can bring forth, but also about ways in which we are so elementary alike. Made in collaboration with choreographer Merel Franx.