Lecture-performance meets punk song in this intimate musical tribute to the artist’s joyfully cluttered home.
Meis Vranken
Location: Perdu
- GENRE: Documentary theatre, Multimedia performance, Music theatre
- THEME: Changing the Norm, Connection, IdentiWho?
- LANGUAGE: Dutch
- ACCESSIBILITY: Assistance dogs welcome, Genderneutral toilets, Toilet for wheelchair users, Wheelchair accessible
info
Taking the murmuring mundaneness of home as a research topic, artist Meis Vranken creates a momentous and musical spectacle in her first theater piece, Flat News: an intimate yet giddy tribute to her cluttered flat and the historic concrete block it’shoused in. This hybrid lecture-performance brims with art-pop melodies, poetic everydayness, vivid guitar riffs, and sincere philosophising about how we think and speak home into being.
The boring and the overlooked are brought into sharp focus through Vranken’s charming songwriting and childlike curiosity when she – as a punk anthropologist – guides viewers into her interior world of fantastical living objects, peculiar visitors, and, above all else, resilient humanity. She ruminates on the meaning of home from within her own tiny apartment: sometimes wistfully, sometimes aggressively, Vranken speaks and sings of belonging and longing, of rest and mess, of mourning and mornings, and of two ancient presences in our lives: tea and bread.
Biography
Meis Vranken is a concoctor of worlds which she sings into being and urges into life. Since graduating from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2021, this Amsterdam-born visual artist, filmmaker, writer, and musician has been developing her multidisciplinary practice in a constant state of creative cross-pollination. Considering her fabled performances as part of punk group Yodel Queen and the charming lo-fi grit of her debut film The Morning (2024), it’s clear that a buoyant do-it-yourself energy pulses through Vranken’s output. The personal, the philosophical, and the humorous bicker for the spotlight in her work; what she makes borrows from all these aspects while creatively transcending above them.
From psychedelic ceramic garden gnomes to pop songs from cluttered homes, her work spans film, installation, music, poetry, prose, and, now with Flat News, the stage – her debut theater work which channels the beauty of the raw, the clumsy, and the homely. Vranken’s infectious charisma and joyful artistic spirit are made beautifully apparent in Flat News, an intimate tribute to her own apartment. The musical lecture-performance is a call for connection: a plea for living in a home as the ultimate exercise in connection—to a place, to neighbours, and to community.