fringe Songcycle for a Sad Clown

This programme is part of Amsterdam Fringe Festival.

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A strange creature invites you to make light of her troubles. She weeps in tune, craving your laughter, your applause, and most of all your pity. Her voice trembles as she navigates various moods — she is hungry to be understood, but thrives on her own alienation. Her off-kilter ensemble echoes her lament.

As the music unravels, so does the logic of this world. What emerges is a sonic theatre-of-the-absurd.

This work uses voice, sound, text and physicality to explore the performativity of sadness, catharsis, and alienation. With equal doses satire, whimsy and sincerity, the clown emerges as an extreme poetic response to the pain of living: a departure from the normal attitude to life.

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Sabine Pendry is an American performer, theatremaker, singer and sound artist based in Amsterdam. Alongside performance for theatre, music theatre and film, she creates independent stage work, moving fluidly between composing, writing, and direction. Her pieces are sound-and–language-driven, relying on the intimacy of the sung voice, heightened poetic texts and stark stage images to create peculiar and immersive worlds. In treating the voice as a primary theatrical and compositional tool, her work reflects a fascination with the highly subjective, interior, and emotionally-charged forms of reality — and often centers itself around the existential and the absurd. Sabine has performed in festivals and venues such as O. Festival, Rewire Festival, Opera Forward Festival, Frascati Theater, Amsterdam Fringe Festival, the Concertgebouw, Venice Film Festival and Nederlandse Film Festival. She is a member of the re:master Opera performance collective.