Broeinest with Nyk de Vries & Sam de Laat (Droom Dit)
Music and poetry are like coffee and cake. Taste good on their own and even better together. Obviously, we know this already, but for some of the students at local schools, it might be a discovery. During their lesson programme Broeinest facilitated by Huis van Gedichten teachers, they may discover just how good that coffee/cake combo is.
Huis van Gedichten (literally: House of Poems) is a Den Haag-based foundation that believes in the power of spoken word and poetry. Their mission is to enable children and young adults to experience this playfulness with language at school.
The Broeinest lesson programme combines in-class teaching and a live festival experience. Huis van Gedichten believes that everyone has a story to tell, and where better to experience that than with writers, musicians and poets?
During the lessons at school, students listen to work by two Crossing Border artists, either a poet or writer and a musician. We explore the effect of music, sound and rhythm on a text, and students consider what music means to them. Our teachers guide the students in writing their own poetry or spoken word pieces inspired by the work of the festival artists. The cherry on the cake is the student's presentation of their work live on stage on Friday night at the festival, together with the festival artists.
Photography by: Rob Pieters & Petra van der Molen
ARTIST
Nyk de Vries
Writer, musician, and performer Nyk de Vries moves fluidly between worlds: city and countryside, high and low culture, faith and doubt and perhaps most strikingly, between music and literature.
At Crossing Border he presents songs from his first solo album Hoeveel woorden (How Many Words). He will also perform excerpts from his latest novel De Baptisten (The Baptists), which NRC praised as “a delightful novel. (…) His protagonist Marten recalls the young Nick Cave, or Brecht in Baal, artists of the same storming intensity.”
De Vries began as a singer but has since established himself as a literary performer par excellence. With his suspenseful delivery, he draws audiences deep into his personal stories. Raised in a small village of farmers and laborers, he now lives with his family in gentrified Amsterdam East. In his work he seeks to bring together the contradictions that shape him.
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De Baptisten
Photography by: Maaike Ronhaar
BAND
Droom Dit
Sex, violence, love, and the everyday. These are the themes Droom Dit brings to life in Dutch-language poetic lyrics, carried by raw electronic beats, dreamy guitar lines, and razor-sharp synths. The sound captures the slow fading of deep love, the deadliness of loneliness, and the violent urge for peace of mind.
Drawing inspiration from acts like Spinvis, Radiohead, King Krule, Joy Division, and Wende, as well as from Dutch literature, including the work of Cees Nooteboom. Droom Dit is steadily shaping a distinctive voice in contemporary Dutch pop.
The project began with Eindhoven-born singer-songwriter Sam de Laat. After years of performing on Brabant’s pop stages with an English-language alt-rock band, Sam moved to Enschede to study songwriting at the conservatory and to focus on Dutch-language material.
Now performing as a full band, with a repertoire of bare, autobiographical songs, Droom Dit brings raw energy to the stage. Their shows invite the audience to lose themselves as completely as the band does in performance. The message is simple: dance, shout, sing, and dream along with Droom Dit.
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