Caption under picture:
Jaap den Hertog has written the script( with Lasse Åkerlund), made the puppets and acts himself in Sand between your toes. Besides, he has had great influence in the creation of a fantastic curiosity cabinet.

Small scale - great theatre

THEATRE
Teater Fusentast:
Sand between your toes
by Jaap den Hertog and Lasse Åkerlund

Hetty was born right after the gunshot in Sarajewo and she died just before sept. 11, 2001.
Her story is being related by two performers, Bjørn Myrholdt and Jaap den Hertog, acting together roundabout Hetty's curiosity-cabinet: a joyously fancyfull cabinet full of inventions, puppets, trinkets and a furnace to burn jews in.

Conjuring reality
Theatre is illusion. Here, the actors continuously shatter the illusion by directly addressing the audience and conveying that this is not real; it is just a story. And then the strange thing happens that the destruction of this illusion only makes the illusion stronger, because we know that even if the theatre piece is not reality, its story is.
"Each person you meet may be a familymember or a friend". That was the philosophy that Hetty made her own after having lost her family in the gasschambers of nazism. In our meeting with the incomprehensible we understand that the largest questions can have the smallest anwers. One nazism, six million jews. What makes life worth living? Sand between your toes does. Hetty was newlywed when the nazis arrived. After the war she raised a new family together with another survivor, a man who escaped by jumping off the train to the gasschambers. He also took care of his sisters child, which she threw over to him from the train. The sister herself dared not jump.

Only a jew
Jaap den Hertog has taken this story from his own family in the Netherlands. Jaap, a jew himself, travelled in his time to Lebanon as medical doctor for the norwegian Palestine-committee.
This I'm thinking of, as I sit in the Jewish Museum of Trondheim and watch the performance together with young and old members of the Jewish Community. They applaud for a long time, they smile and they dry their tears.
There is a survivor of Hitler's concentration camps amongst the spectators. Afterwards I feel a strong urge to embrace him, but don't do it, maybe because we people from Nord-Møre county are not in the habit of doing such a thing.
I don't know. But I know I have experienced a theatre that affects the theatre of life. Imagine that.

Loose precision
'Sand between your toes' is for everyone from 10 years up. The piece is produced at the Puppetry Theatre in Nordland. The script is written by Jaap den Hertog and Lasse Åkerlund. The latter also is the production's stage-director, while the former has made the puppets. The stage-design and props are by Gunnar Fretheim, Inka-Lill made the illustrations, Solveig Fugelsøy has made the costumes, Martin Waagø has done the carpenting and Jan Erik Skarby is responsible for the lighting and the technique. The result could make Nils Arne Eggen (The nationally renowned trainer of the champions league-Rosenborg Soccer Club- transl.) exult about cooperation.
Bjørn Myrholdt is excellent in all his changing roles; rationally aggressive in an SS-uniform, childishly splashing about in a bathingsuit. Jaap den Hertog keeps the strings tightly organized, litterally as well as metaphorically speaking, and drives the story onward. They both have close encounters of the third degree with the audience. This demands an interaction that is both tight and loose at the same time: precise, but not stiff. Their way of solving this reveals many years of experience with bow and arrow.
Teater Fusentast has its address in Trondheim, but travels the whole country (and abroad) with their theatrical pieces. They play at theatres and schools and community centers and wherever, allways with a burning engagement. Earlier this year Fusentast had their opening night of "Mirad - a boy from Bosnia", about how a 13-year-old experiences war at home and asylum in a foreign country.

Svein Sæter