A radical reimagining of Nijinsky’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, told from the perspective of the nymph rather than the faun. Seven dancers and a recomposed Debussy score by Jonathan Bonny explore power, identity, and perception. At Theater Rotterdam I ran the show as FOH engineer on an Allen & Heath SQ5, and mixed the performance to a standing ovation.
The production has a strict, industrial character: monochrome, deliberate, and unflinching. Bonny’s score fits that world perfectly. Clicks, pops, and static are woven into the composition and spread through surround speakers around the audience. When those glitches move through the space, they don’t just support the choreography; they define the room itself. The d&b system in Rotterdam handled it beautifully, with clarity across the full spectrum and an almost flat EQ. No fight with the acoustics, just a clean translation of that precise sonic design.
This show required close collaboration with lighting designer Niels Frik. Some cues were MIDI-linked, but many had to be triggered by feel. You sense in the room when a dancer lingers a fraction longer or pushes forward, and the timing shifts with it. For those moments we have our own language. Sometimes Niels leads and taps me on the shoulder. Sometimes it’s the other way around. You can’t script that. It comes from trust, from repetition, from knowing how the other person thinks.
On intuition I had brought my Zoom H5 field recorder and set it up at FOH. Marinus Groothof, Dunja’s creative partner and business manager, was recording video that night. When I spoke to him afterward, he hadn’t considered capturing the main feed. I offered him my recordings: both the room ambience — audience entry, applause — and the main mix, recorded simultaneously on the twin ADCs. He was genuinely happy. For a live video recording, that audience presence makes all the difference. It anchors the performance in time, turning it from documentation into experience.
After the final blackout the applause came instantly, long and growing until the audience rose to their feet. Across the tech positions Niels and I caught each other’s eye. Those taps on the shoulder had landed exactly right.