(W)Edge

The idea for creating the piece (W)EDGE arose while Monique Duurvoort was working, in 2007, on the piece "Boost", her very first independent choreography, produced under the wing of production house Dansateliers in Rotterdam.

Every day that Monique went to the Dansateliers studio, she walked past Kruiskade, a well-known shopping street in Rotterdam. Here, as she had done before in certain neighbourhoods in Amsterdam, she observed the (for the most part) male figures who 'hung around' on corners and against the walls of this street all day. In some cases these were dealers, but generally they seemed to be mostly unemployed men, often of Antillean, Surinamese or other Afro-Caribbean backgrounds, known colloquially as "hangmannen" (in English roughly translated: "male hangabouts").

These so-called "male hangabouts" radiated something that was at once extremely macho, tough and aggressive, and desolate, vulnerable and fragile.
An image Monique recognised. Something she had encountered from a young age through her immediate environment, and which she thought about a great deal. This specific, perhaps stereotypical image of a Black male figure. The adopting of a confident, sometimes almost untouchable, proud demeanour. Something that, in Monique's experience, often seems to contradict the person's true self-image.

This inspired her to want to do something with the idea of presenting yourself as (completely) different from who you really are or how you really feel, focusing specifically on how this phenomenon manifests among a certain part of the men within Afro-Caribbean culture.
This context formed the basis for creating the central figure of the piece '(W)EDGE'.

Monique wanted to search for answers to the question of where the need to adopt this particular macho image, among a portion of Black men, comes from, and how the surrounding environment relates to such an image.