Public sharing Bau AIR with Annica Muller & Kees Roorda

In the work of theatre maker Annica Muller (Netherlands, 1991), the search for meaning takes center stage. She draws on her personal involvement and weaves often unheard stories of others with her own perspectives. This results in new, shared narratives that transcend the boundaries between fiction and documentary theatre, as well as between maker and audience.

Her work is both challenging and disarming: with humor and perspective, Muller breaks taboos and opens conversations on complex and charged topics. Spirituality and banality go hand in hand in her performances, highlighting the beauty, complexity, and ugliness of life. Her works are more than theatre; by expressing herself in a highly personal way, Muller invites everyone to awareness, enchantment, change, and connection, directly addressing her audience.

Muller draws inspiration from everything around her, from high art to gleaming kitsch, weaving it into a unique theatrical language. She takes her audience along in her ongoing theatrical research, which combines various disciplines—from performance and mime to text-based theatre and immersive experience. In doing so, she creates a profound experience that both surprises and moves.

Among her works are: This is Fucking Chaos (2023, in the 2025 festival edition), Performance; The Rave (2023), Peep Performance (2021), and Yogi Anni (2021), with which she was nominated for the BNG Theatre Prize and won the Amsterdam Fringe Award.

She founded the foundation Permanent Impermanence.

👉 annicamuller.nl

Kees Roorda (Netherlands, 1967) is an intuitive theatre maker and writer who radically fuses form and content. His work is socially engaged, genre-defying, with a sharp ear for language and a deep empathy for a wide range of characters. His first production with theatre group Hollandia, Tomorrowland, rooted in encounters with young Moroccan coffee shop visitors, drew attention and led to an invitation to DasArts (now DasTheater), a master’s program in theatre.

He later founded the interdisciplinary theatre collective The Glasshouse, where he collaborated with Catherine Henegan at the intersection of text, image, and movement. Their performances toured Dutch and international theatres with great success. In the same period, he adapted his play Een Witte Ballade into a film script together with filmmaker Stefano Odoardi. The film was awarded Best Picture at the Tiburon International Film Festival in 2007. That same year, Roorda was nominated for the BNG Prize for Young Theatre Makers for Hamlet & Gertrude.

After leaving The Glasshouse, Roorda focused on writing new plays. In 2017, Een jongen als Rishi by Firma MES was selected for the Dutch Theatre Festival and awarded Best Production of the Year. The work also resonated internationally: in 2021, the text was shortlisted for the German Youth Theatre National Prize. In 2022, A Kid Like Rishi was directed by Erwin Maas at the Origin Theatre in New York and chosen by The New York Times critics as a “Critics’ Pick.”

Alongside his writing practice, Roorda teaches at the Writing for Performance program at Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU). He is co-founder of the Toneelschrijfhuis and supports young theatre talent as coach, dramaturg, and script doctor.

👉 keesroorda.nl

Crave (working title)

In Crave, theatre maker Annica Muller and writer/theatre maker Kees Roorda explore how to shape the theme of addiction in a theatrical and personal way. They want to move beyond the idea that the audience is merely a spectator; instead, they invite them to become involved —not through coercion, but through connection. Their search centers on the possibility of creating a ritual that makes room for vulnerability, recognition, and exchange.

Addiction touches us all. Both Annica and Kees are personally familiar with addictive tendencies and have each, in their own way, fought their struggles. They have also witnessed friends succumb to addiction, or — sometimes miraculously — recover from it.

A key moment came when Kees attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting to support a close friend. What struck him was not only what was said, but the form itself: the time, the structure, and above all, the attention given to each person to speak about their struggles. Often, these were not even directly about the substance itself, but about the underlying pain.

Annica has twice been to a rehabilitation clinic but still relapsed; the Narcotics Anonymous meetings invited her to break through her shame, to dare to be vulnerable, and opened the door to empathy.

These insights form the heart of Crave: addiction is rarely just physical but rooted in psychological wounds. Kees and Annica believe that precisely in sharing vulnerability lies the potential for connection—and from that, understanding and empathy can grow. They see vulnerability not as weakness, but as a source of strength.

A Gambian proverb captures their aim succinctly:
“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you change the environment, not the flower.”

Annica and Kees will begin their residency at Meneer de Wit and continue at Bau, where they will present their research to audiences and invited guests.