Het nieuwstedelijk // Catching Holden Caulfield

Adriaan Van Aken read The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) in every life phase he went through. That Dat Salingers famous coming-of-age novel is 'good entertainment' and 'pop culture avant la lettre', Adriaan had known for longer than today. But since he is a father of three teenage children, he also discovered the underlying layer of the story, the layer of pain and sorrow that J.D. Salinger subtly placed in his 16-year-old protagonist Holden Caulfield. Adriaan traveled to New York City to redo Holden's three-day wandering trip through the grid of Midtown Manhattan. He spent time at all the iconic places that Holden visits in the story (from Penn Station to Radio City Music Hall), made sound recordings and audio notes there, and thus created the storytelling situation for his new performance and podcast series Catching Holden Caulfield. While he diligently searches for traces of Holden in NYC, Adriaan reconstructs a number of confusing but poignant events from his own teenage years, which rub quite closely against what Holden experiences in The Catcher in the Rye. A death during a physical education class, a case of self-harm in the math class. Or that story of that boy who breaks into the school at night to spray a poem on a wall... Adriaan shares the stage, besides with two musicians, with his oldest son Staf, a 'Holden within reach'. Together they get to work with drawings, text projections, audio fragments, and a lot of small objects in what all in all is an audio performance, but one with a well-developed visual side.