Harlekino - Katrien van Beurden

For 25 years, Katrien van Beurden raced the world creating theater with a suitcase full of commedia masks. Until she suddenly has to lie still. Having just become a mother, with cancer in her breast, she listens to the monotonous beeping of the MRI and wonders: “How do you actually do that, lie still?”

There, a kaleidoscopic journey unfolds past all the purebred survivors—the harlequins—she met, back to Kaatje. The eight-year-old girl who, singing loudly, stuffs her deceased little brother's coffin full of toys. In a house drowning in grief and anger, she discovers early on that play and imagination are her truest allies.

Harlekino is a wild, comical, and poetic solo. A performance bursting with energy and raw emotion. Katrien balances reality and imagination. With her masks and specially composed music by Remy van Kesteren, she creates a cinematic storm of stories.

She slips into the skin of Harlekino, the iconic trickster, whose mind is her years of fascination and driving force. He teaches us that hope is not something to believe, but something to do. Harlekino is an ode to life and death, to our brilliantly successful and hopelessly failed attempts to survive.