Mark your calendar! The Rooms Performance Festival returns on the last weekend of January 2025.
Expect vibrant theater, edgy dance, a culinary performance, kinetic textiles, intimate activism, and much more. Your day pass grants access to a full day with six performances.
Line-up:
Sofie Kramer
Ahmed El Gendy
Amparo González Sola
Tabor Idema
Samah Hijawi
Jasmine Karimova & Johannes Offerhaus
Partners:
Marres, Via Zuid, de Brakke Grond, Dansateliers, FASHIONCLASH and MU
As a Rooms visitor, you’ll also get an exclusive first preview of the exhibition Vultures & Fireflies, opening this spring. At the end of 2024, Mexican artist Alejandro Galván will begin a painted chronicle of Mexico throughout the house Marres, portraying the perspective of Nezahualcóyotl: one of the largest working class suburbs in the Valley of Mexico.
Date: 25 & 26 January 2025
Time: 12:30-17:30, doors open at 12:00
Location: Marres, Maastricht
Music / Composer: Vanessa Lann, 9×13 Orange Drummer Beat!, performed by: NeoFanfare 9×13
cover photo: © Sanne Peper
Keep an eye on this website and our socials for any Rooms updates. Follow @marres_maastricht
The Rooms program is the same on both Saturday and Sunday. A day pass gives you access to a full day with five performances. Marres Kitchen will be open until 6PM, serving drinks and delicious food.
Admission for ages 12 and up
Our festival is specially designed for an older audience, and the performances are not suitable for children under 12. Young people aged 12 to 18 are very welcome and enjoy free admission.
Timetable
Sofie Kramer
Monolith
In this ecstatic pole dance performance, the pole becomes a sacred object, a gateway to another world where ancient wisdom lies hidden. The static steel object is brought to life and imbued with ritualistic qualities, playing with the clichés of pole dancing and the audience’s expectations. A futu-feminist journey that raises questions about our connection to technology and explores the relationship between control and intuition.
Sofie Kramer (1990, the Netherlands) is a theater maker, performer, writer, and pole dancer. She interned at Orkater, attended dance workshops with Nicole Beutler and Peeping Tom, and collaborated with choreographers such as Guilherme Miotto and Jens van Daele. Starting this year, she is supported by ViaZuid and Podium Bloos.
Concept, direction, choreography and performance: Sofie Kramer
Concept, composition, instrument design: Mári Mákó
Costume: Batuhan Demir
Audio operator and technical consultancy: Francesco DiMaggio
Dramaturgy: Joske Koning
Supported by: Via Zuid, Cultuurfonds, Amarte, United Cowboys
Ahmed El Gendy
i feel you like the moon feels the earth
Over the course of the project Zero Encounters, Ahmed spent a full 24 hours in silence with six different strangers. Allowing each stranger to lead the day as Ahmed quietly accompanied them, their relationship evolved through proximity and time rather than verbal exchange. i feel you like the moon feels the earth captures this intimate journey from memory – of simply being together, holding space as one.
Ahmed El Gendy (1987, Cairo) (they/he) is an Egyptian-Dutch artist who explores themes of agency, togetherness, and entanglement. Their work, which spans video, text, and performance, has previously been presented at Mediterranea Biennale (Italy) and at Festifreak International Festival for Independent Cinema (Argentina).
Performance: Ahmed El Gendy, Clotilde Cappelletti, Estéfano Romani
Advisor: Miguel A. Melgares
Amparo González Sola
Distances
Delving into the complexities of empathy and shared experience, Distances questions how we can resonate with the others’ experience—even when separated by great literal and figurative distances. Through choreography, the performance shapes the space between the performers and spectators, revealing the hidden burdens each carries. By focusing on gestures, the work invites us to reconsider the dynamics of gaze, distance, and closeness as we reflect on what it means to bear witness.
Amparo González Sola’s (1984, Argentina) (she/her) work spans dance, choreography, and participative projects, and is distinctly influenced by feminist activism and her experience of migration. Her earlier works include The conspiracy of forms(2023) and If every rock is a hole (2022), presented at the SPRING Performing Arts Festival, and the participative projectExploring Reciprocity (2019-2023). Starting 2025, she will be associate artist with Dansateliers.
Distances is part of the work While taking shape, which will premiere in May 2025 at SPRING Performing Arts Festival.
Concept: Amparo González Sola
Performers and choreography: Rita Bifulco, Alina Ruiz Folini, Amparo González Sola
Sound design: Nahuel Cano
Production: Dansateliers
Coproduction: SPRING Performing Arts Festival, Dansateliers, Frascati Producties
Supported by: BAU AIR, Greenhouse, Rooms Performance Festival, workspacebrussels (BE), Tanzhaus Zürich (CH), CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva (PT)
Tabor Idema
Backspace
in collaboration with Diane Mahin
Tabor has lived with a 42-degree curvature of the spine since they were fourteen, which resulted from a period of intense tension accumulating in their body. In Backspace, they explore the ways one can endure trauma, as well as digging into the past hoping to heal the present. What happens when space is given to past tensions? What hidden pain surfaces? The body listens and remains open to everything it has carried for so long.
Tabor Idema (1999, Netherlands) (they/them) creates personal, provocative performances in an honest search for openness. Their simple yet sharp visual language adapts to the architecture of the spaces in which they perform. Locations become collaborators with whom they create poetic slapstick.
Sound design: Diane Mahin
Samah Hijawi
The Moon in Your Mouth
As we witness the violent erasure of some of the world’s oldest cultures, Samah asks: beyond human loss, what communities of plants and other beings are also disappearing? What traditions of kinship are being erased, and what stories from the past might still be retold for the future?
Samah Hijawi is a multimedia artist who is currently exploring ancient and contemporary food cosmologies. Drawing on her research in ancient cosmologies and farming practices, she explores what we can learn from the past to shape a future rich with interconnected relationships. Samah invites us to eat olives and embody Saturn in a single bite, following the shifting faces of the Gods above and below.
Production: Kunstenwerkplaats
Partners: Kunstenfestivaldesarts, C-Takt, KAAP, Kaaitheater, Monty and VierNulVier
Supported by De Vlaamse Gemeenschap
Jasmine Karimova &
Johannes Offerhaus
AIR 1 – 135 m3 of sound
AIR 1 is a performative installation piece by Jasmine Karimova and Johannes Offerhaus. In this duo’s debut collaboration, their respective mediums are fused into one. The work investigates the literal finitude of air. Air that is shared and exchanged between the audience, performers, space and the organ. A performance where the audience’s desire to listen, experience, and engage will ultimately lead them to make a conscious, impactful decision…
Jasmine Karimova (1998) is a Tajik-Australian composer and performer based in the Netherlands, pursuing a master’s in composition at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. As an organist, her work explores the duality of power and fragility, blending voice and instrument. She has opened the International Organ Symposium in Amsterdam for three consecutive years. Karimova performed at venues like Muziekgebouw and Moscow’s Olympic Stadium, and collaborated with ensembles such as the Nederlands Kamerorkest. Recent interdisciplinary projects include the short film FIFU, children’s piece Mia en de Leeuw, and multimedia creation The Whale.
ZELT is a design studio founded by Johannes Offerhaus (1993, Nederland). The studio conceptualizes, designs and builds constructs kinetic textile spaces and structures that unfold into pavilions, tents and architectural form. Their creations encompass intimate spaces within everyday life as well as scenography for performances and film. ZELT has also collaborated extensively in the performing arts, designing sets and costumes for productions such as Papillon (Philharmonie Luxembourg) and dance film La Nostra Terra. Offerhaus began his career in fashion, focusing on kinetic couture pieces before transitioning into larger kinetic installations. His autonomous work earned him the Frans Molenaar Couture Award and a Dutch Design Award.
Press
For press requests, imagery and interview requests, please contact communicatie@marres.org
Partners
Partners Rooms 2025:
Marres, House for Contemporary Culture
Dansateliers
De Brakke Grond
Via Zuid
FASHIONCLASH
MU
With the courtesy of Gieskes-Strijbis Fonds
Marres receives structural support from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the Province of Limburg and the Municipality of Maastricht.
