DeRonde/Deroo

Biography

DeRonde/Deroo is the collective of Tom de Ronde and Nick Deroo. We both studied at the Mime Academy in Amsterdam at the Amsterdam Hogeschool voor de Kunsten. There, we found each other in our shared love for cinematic theatre in which the viewer is immersed in a surreal, absurd world with its own rules.

What started with a small research, turned into an attempt to make something for the Amsterdam Fringe Festival 2021. After The Echo – a glittery ode to melancholy was created. We won the Fringe Award that year with our performance and since then we call ourselves a collective.

We distinguish ourselves by creating surreal worlds with our bodies and just a few attributes. Light and sound play a huge role in our performances. The whole atmosphere feels like movie scenes being edited together in front of your eyes. And together with all players (people, attributes, light, sound and bodies), you step into a dreamworld. Sometimes scary, sometimes funny.

We start working from philosophical themes like melancholy or liminality and try to make it tangible for the viewer. Our iconoclastic images and mesmerizing physicalities give a feeling to something when words are not enough.

Next to each performance, we enrich our universe with filmic teasers. Together with Joshua Walter, we create these short clips in which we show you in a small minute movie based on each different theme. They are a DeRonde/Deroo signature.

In residentie I don’t feel like being dead in the end

Two men. One empty space. Only a speedo between their skin and the air. They fight against each other and the walls, sweating profusely. For half an hour, they search for the brutal, the hard, the grotesque—so that they can finally find solace.

project details