Catching Holden Caulfield

Adriaan Van Aken read The Catcher in the Rye in every life phase he went through. That Dat Salingers's 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 sadness that J.D. Salinger subtly incorporated into his 16-year-old protagonist Holden Caulfield. Adriaan traveled to New York City to redo Holden's three-day wandering through the grid of Midtown Manhattan. He spent time in 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 Holden Caulfield vangen. While he is diligently searching 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 PE class, a case of self-harm in the math class. Or that story about that boy who breaks into the school at night to spray a poem on a wall... Adriaan shares the stage, apart from 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. On Thursday 25/03, an introduction will take place in Studio 2. This will start at 19.15h. Studio 2 is on the first floor of c o r s o.