Tuimelaar (Falling over Backwards) 2021

Tuimelaar is a performance and a meditation on love in which video, poetry and installation challenge one another. In six separate chapters, visual artist Jules van Hulst and poet Tsead Bruinja experience what connects people. They share experiences of embracing and resisting love. This could concern love in a friendship or a romantic relationship or the love for something superior and elusive, mystical love.

If you took Tuimelaar to be an instrument, you could say he rolls. If you took Tuimelaar to be a behaviour, you could say he moves in sync. But what drives him? You could say Van Hulst’s hands or the words of Bruinja, but it’s not that. Love sets things in motion and places both men in the hands of a fate which they can only subject themselves to. The battle between resistance and acceptance shapes Tuimelaar and lends gravity to everything on stage.

The performace premiered in July 2021 in Zalen Schaaf in Leeuwarden (NL) during Explore the North Summer Sessions.

Production: Explore the North. Video and installation: Jules van Hulst. Poetry: Tsead Bruinja. Stage direction: Annelie David. Video technique: Wieger Steenhuis.

Foarloplich Lân (Provisional Country)

Projection mapping version from 2018 and cinema conversion from 2021.

A piece consisting out of video projected on the Oldehove in Leeuwarden made by Jules van Hulst, a poem by Tsead Bruinja (poet of the fatherland 2019-2021) and music and speech by Herman van Veen. An initiative by Lân fan Taal as part of the main program of Leeuwarden European Capital of Culture 2018. The full text can be read inTseads bundle that you can obtain by clicking here.

The re-edited and abridged cinema version premiered in 2021 on the Nederlands Poëzie Film Festival and has been selected for a couple of poetry film festivals since. It received the Epstein Special Mention Award by Festival Fotogenia in Mexico City in 2022 and was nominated by Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, also in 2022.