With a tear, but certainly also with a smile, the audience chose last year's production ABORTUSVERHALEN as the winner of the Delft Fringe Festival. And so theatre maker and teacher Mystha Mandersloot received the Golden Rabbit and is now the 23-year-old figurehead of our festival. While ABORTUSVERHALEN was all about the woman's perspective, this year the Amsterdam-based performer is making a new creation around the theme of abortion, but from the male perspective. And yes, once again emotion and humour go hand in hand in the process. "I think that for many men, humour is precisely a way of 'coping' with the situation," she says.
Her three actors were not there. "After eight performances, they were pretty jaded," she says. And so last year, Mystha went to the closing drinks of the Delft Fringe Festival on her own. Actually mainly out of collegiality, and so without any expectations. "But suddenly I was standing there with the Golden Rabbit in my hands. All by myself". Less than a year later, she is still perplexed. "It really felt so unbelievable to win the Audience Award. ABORTUSVERHALEN was my graduation performance (from the HKU Theatre course - ed.) and it was very exciting to go straight into a festival with it. Also given the subject matter, of course. You do wonder: what will people do with it?"
To her relief, however, the whole experience turned out to be "one big warm bath. "The city, the volunteers, the audience, the fact that you don't play behind a fourth wall, so to speak, but really connect with people; it all felt like a party. I also didn't expect people to be so sympathetic and touched. Of course, you hope they will react with empathy, but I found it very special that the performance would resonate like this. People recognised themselves in the stories or had a sister or friend who had had an abortion, but had never really talked about it among themselves. And there were also young people who openly asked, 'How does that actually work, such an abortion?'"
"Why are we all sitting by ourselves being lonely when we are so much alike?"
Personal necessity
Three years ago, Mystha underwent an abortion. "The period after that was a lonely, by no means pleasant time for me. I didn't know anyone who was going through the same thing. I felt stupid and was also afraid of people's reactions." ABORTUSVERHALEN, she says, therefore made them first of all out of "personal necessity". But also to break a taboo. "Every year, some 30,000 abortions are performed on average in the Netherlands. Who are all those women this happens to? And why do we talk about it so little? Why - also for very different reasons - do we all sit lonely by ourselves, when we are so much alike? With my production, I wanted not only to make the phenomenon of abortion more visible and discussable, but also to highlight the totally different emotions involved, because, as I now know, everyone deals with it differently. Some experience it as a gift, others see it purely as a medical procedure and others end up in deep mourning.
In hindsight, I myself drew relief and strength from the whole experience. Relief because it is possible in the Netherlands at all, having an abortion, and strength because in the end I had enough people around me who supported me and my boyfriend and I even came closer together because of it. That support, that feeling of that mutual connection, I wished that to others too."
"Am I allowed to think anything about this?"
An even much higher threshold
It was certainly not easy to find the three actors for ABORTUSVERHALEN - Jana Ierschot, Suzan van der Poel and Sandy Seifert. "I wanted three experts by experience, but they also had to be able to act and be willing to tell their stories openly in front of an audience." Laughs: "But I was also lucky: I met one of them in Berlin. She spoke to me, said she had heard I was working on this production and asked if she could join." Anyway, that first search was "peanuts" compared to the search for actors for her new show, Verhalen van Verwekkers. "Here the threshold was obviously much higher still. Many guys and men I approached were like, 'Am I even in a position to talk about this? Am I - even though I haven't had an abortion myself - allowed to have an opinion on this?"
The need to make yet another production on the theme of abortion revealed itself, says Mystha, even during rehearsals for ABORTUSVERHALEN. "We tried to touch on all themes in that first production, and so we also had to relate to the partner's experience. But telling their story, we obviously couldn't do that. Their voice, we realised, is SO underexposed. What is it like when you too are experiencing something very radical, but in a way you are also outside it, because you are not physically experiencing it? How do you deal with the fact that, in many cases, a choice is made for you? Will you ever become a father again? Will you remain childless? How do you have the conversation about all this, and how do you position yourself in this?"
Oppression and powerlessness
She also started - with actors Bob Donkers, Ard Kok and Remijn Weijdema - 'ping-ponging stories and experiences back and forth' for Verhalen van Verwekkers."But with the big difference that now, of course, I was not an experiencer. So I did a lot of research, read a lot - although I literally only managed to find one book on abortion written from the male perspective - and talked a lot with other experiencers. Also extensively with my own partner."
And yes, there were certainly striking differences during rehearsals. "When I was working with the women, we were very concerned with: what do you call it? A foetus, an embryo, a bundle of cells? While the men talked much more about a child or baby. There are also differences in terms of emotions, of course. The basic emotions and feelings of mourning do correspond, but men showed much more feelings of oppression, powerlessness, having no control. In doing so, they were also much more concerned with the future, asking themselves questions like, 'Would I have been a good father?'"
"Women talk about a foetus, an embryo, a bundle of cells, men talk about a child"
But there is certainly a similarity too: "There is definitely humour in this new performance too. I don't want to speak for all men who experience an abortion, but I think for many of them humour is actually also a way of 'coping' with the situation. I did find it amusing, that typical male humour, and it also caused friction in me, it chafed and for me as a maker, that is of course always interesting."
Dynamic montage performance
The result - Verhalen van Verwekkers has already had several try-outs at the Café Theatre Festival in Utrecht prior to its premiere at the Delft Fringe Festival - Mystha again describes this time as "a dynamic montage performance". "This time the ingredients include: a bass guitar, a waiting room, an awkward conversation with your partner in the car, a DNA test, a disco party and a storm of condoms. But also with sincere questions to the audience: how can we all be more conscious of the fact that this voice - of the man whose partner has an abortion - is also there and may, nay should, be heard? How do we make more room for male emotion? And how do we deal with the issue of fertility at all in our society? Why are only women constantly concerned with when they are fertile or not, and why, apart from the condom, are almost all contraceptives meant for women?"
"I found it amusing, that typical male humour, and it gave friction in me, for a creator that is always interesting."
Surprise
"But", Mystha emphasises, "Verhalen van Verwekkers will definitely not be a kind of 'lecture'. I mainly want to make you feel things, and if, as a viewer, you get something completely different from the performance, that's totally fine too. I am making this production partly for experts by experience - men and women - and for all those involved, including abortion doctors and nurses, but certainly also for anyone who is open to being taken into something he, she or they have not experienced themselves." Whether this will again lead to a "rollercoaster of laughter and crying", Mystha is unwilling to say at this stage. "I am mainly out to surprise people! With ABORTUSVERHALEN, I did that by putting on a show that was much less intense and serious than many people probably thought beforehand. So with this new production, I hope to surprise audiences again in another, new way."
Want to know more about Mystha Mandersloot's performance? Come to the Open Studio on Saturday, April 20. On May 28 Verhalen van Verwekkers will go in premiere at the festivalopening in Theater de Veste.
Photo: Mystha Mandersloot. Photographer: Sjoerd Derine.
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