Mees Vervuurt & Miranda Driessen

Mees Vervuurt creates poetic performances in which audiences gradually dissolve into a sensory world of sound, music, imagery, and movement. These elements merge into near-sacred experiences, where body, voice, and space become one. The boundary between spectator and environment fades, inviting surrender to the unknown. His work is highly site-specific: each location serves as a starting point and shapes the performance through its acoustics, history, and architecture. Vervuurt thus explores the relationship between humans and space, raising existential questions about presence, perception, and meaning within a resonant universe.

Miranda Driessen first performed at the Oranjewoud Festival in 2018 with her music theatre piece Koerikoeloem. For this project, she commissioned an installation of eight wind harps, each taller than a person, built by the Dresden-based sound artist Jan Heinke. These were arranged in a circle. The audience and musicians sat within this circle and were immersed throughout the performance in a continuous sound field of overtones.

Koerikoeloem was performed at various festivals between 2018 and 2020. Since then, the wind harps have become a recurring element in many of Driessen’s compositions. In 2020, for example, she initiated a project at StrandLAB Almere, where she spent a week experimenting with different tunings of the installation, creating new compositions each day for various musicians, who premiered them that same evening among the wind harps.

In 2023, she created a new 72-hour work for the Oranjewoud Festival: Sanctuary of Sound. In this piece, she structured time according to architectural proportions, changing the harmonies of the wind harps at carefully calculated moments. The work created an experience of timelessness and concluded on the final day of the festival in a serene, all-encompassing unison.

She is currently working on a new piece in which the eight wind harps will be arranged in a long, straight line, allowing the audience to experience the composition while walking. This work responds to the installation Pier + Horizon by Paul de Kort and will premiere on July 4 during the LandArt Festival in Flevoland.