Superb Gesamtkünstler

Jacob F. Schokking (b. 1956). Trained at the Academie voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent, Belgium. Has worked and lived in Denmark since 1981. With roots in the visual and the performing arts, Schokking has developed his own powerful, visual form of theatre that is, above all, characterized by the use of advanced electronic visual techniques.

Artistic Profile
Schokking is a representative of musical performance aesthetics. He defines place and action as a “non-place in a non-story”. Often, there is a gap between the actual and virtual existence of the actors, which emphasizes the poetic, visual play of the performances.
Schokking challenges the conventions of theatre and opera.  Live actors, video projections of them, and prefabricated video/graphics are part of his staging.
Integrated into the music, text and action, Schokking exploits to the hilt a genre’s possibilities for synchronicity and intensity. 
Nuit des Hommes (1996) was Holland House’s breakthrough piece, realizing the poetic visual and experimental style that later became its distinguishing feature.  The performance toured to Paris, Hamburg, London and Rotterdam during 2000-2002.
Holland House collaborates with a broad spectrum of public and private institutions in Denmark and abroad. 

Current Productions

Supply and Demand
(2006)
The piece explores the consequences of loosing ones equilibrium in life, that is to say when a person losses their personal history and their experience from the past. The lead characters Ruby and Joseph, have both been rejected by the employment sector and end up creating a strange relationship in their exclusion. Two wrecked personalities fumbling to gain a foothold on a slippery surface.

Neither
(2004)
An opera by Morton Feldman and Samuel Beckett who, each in their own unique and poetic universe, disregard the norms and conventions of opera.  The music is almost stationary, composed in nuanced surfaces of sound.  The staging emphasizes slowness.  Elements that transport the audience into a state of timelessness.
Language: primarily nonverbal

Review Extracts

”A soprano choreographed into an abstract visual world represents an existence underway.  If there is a statement in Schokking’s blend of abstract, black and white light graphics and live video, it is ‘change,’ a steady movement, ‘wavering back and forth and then turning away,’ as it is put in Morti Vizki’s translation, between ‘unmentionable homes’ that are never defined.”
Politiken (DK), Neither

”... the musical drama Neither contains a rare form of expression that opens up to memories of another more romantic music, such as Gustav Mahler’s, for example, and to a wealth of epistemological and metaphysical associations.”
Kristeligt Dagblad (DK), Neither

“The work is a perfect amalgamation of expression and message, of words, tones and staging concept that are inextricably integrated into a unity. … a scenic song cycle for two singers, string quartet, percussion and electronic sound, a lyrical tale in text, tones and image for just over an hour.”
Politiken (DK), Nuit des Hommes


International Tours
The company has previously toured to Paris, Hamburg, Rotterdam and London (2000-2002).