Our Work
Projects
On this page you can find all of the larger projects I have co-created or have been involved with as a performer. For a full video of any of these performances please contact me.
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WACHT
Performances:
21 & 22 jan 2023
31 maart & 1 april 2023
ZIMIHIC Wittevrouwen Utrecht
Concept and artistic direction: Liza Slootman en Storm Vogel
Choreography and outside eye: Otto Calmeijer Meijburg
Text: Storm Vogel and the performers
Production: Klara Beetz
Photography: Rox Klijn & Melanie Lemahieu
Poster design: Dexter Boldewijn
WACHT is performed by 17 trans and genderqueer young people ages 10 to 19.
WACHT is a performance about waiting. Waiting for others to be yourself, waiting for different times. Waiting to grow and become bigger. Waiting to grow up, waiting for what comes next, when you are an adult. When you get to decide for yourself. Waiting for permission. Who waits and who decides who waits? Who has the power to make you wait? Is waiting always necessary? And what do you do while you wait?
WACHT is a performance about the urge to shorten the waiting time. About the life that grows while waiting, to begin what comes when the waiting is over.
In partnership with ZIMIHIC Utrecht.
Funded by VSB Fonds
Starnight: inclusive Disco series
Artistic direction: Otto Calmeijer Meijburg, Marius Lambertz, Filu (Hannah) Sampé
The inclusive disco project ‘Starnight’ brings together queer party culture, disabled communities, and performance interventions. It originated from a joint desire to introduce the queer party scene of our own free time, to the disabled communities and scenes, that we have gotten to know through personal ties and our work with STARLAB.
This disco series was a beautiful experiment (and starting point!) of mering different people of all ages, abilities, and gender expressions.
Location: KU Köln: Raum für Queere Dominanz
Funded by Neustart Kultur Fonds Darstellende Künste, Fonds Soziokultur, Profil Soziokultur
De Staat van de Mol
Part 1
Performed during the Land Art Festival 2022
Concept & Performance: Otto Calmeijer Meijburg
Concept & Installation: Studio Berkveldt
A site specific research as part of Flevolab ‘New Makers’ track. This lab connects artists from different disciplines and proposes an artistic research in the Dutch province ‘Flevoland’.
Flevoland, once the Zuiderzee but now an Aardzee. The mole came with the sand used to build the dikes and conquered the province at three kilometers per year. A very important animal for biodiversity but unwanted by many. Otto Calmeijer Meijburg and Studio Berkveldt examine the province through the eyes of this extraordinary animal, exposing the underground structures of the new land. In a site-specific investigation facilitated by the Flevolab New Makers trajectory, the two artists will experiment with installation, projection and sound, asking the audience to engage their own bodies and all their senses.
Funded and facilitated by Flevolab
The Hex Pistols
Performances:
January 2022 Zeitmaul Theater Bochum
Favoriten Festival 2022 Theater im Depot Dortmund
December 2022 Theater im Depot Dortmund
Artistic direction: Laura Pföhler & Jolanda Uhlig
Performance: Otto Calmeijer Meijburg, Yasmin Fahbod, Maren Becker
Photographs by Jolanda Uhlig & Heiwa Wong
A STERNA PAU Production
Three witches in a punk band. This piece moves between concert and theatre, exploring DIY music making and tracing the history of witchcraft back to our lineages, our stories, and our fights. The performers share their self written music and move between places of biography and fiction in order to end up where they are today: on this stage, performing in front of you.
Funded by NRW Landesbüro Freie Darstellende Künste, Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, Kulturbüro, Stadt Dortmund, Stadt Bochum
Dangerous Bodies
A research residency as part of the Full Spin Physical Theatre Festival 2021.
Is the body dangerous? Where does danger live inside your body? And how to access it through movement?
A conversation between dance and writing with author and performer Storm Vogel, musician and disability rights activist Mira Thompson, ex-pastor Synco Meyburg, and myself.
This video is partly in German.
Im Rampenlicht
Performances:
September 2021 Kulturbunker Köln Mülheim
March 2022 Cheers for Fears Festival tanzhaus nrw
April 2022 Theater am Schlachthof Neuss
Artistic direction: Otto Calmeijer Meijburg & Filu (Hannah) Sampé
With: Johanna von Schönenfeld, Marius Lambertz, Marieke Werner, Jonas Sampé
Poster design: Hildegard Oehler
Photography: Silviu Guiman
A STARLAB production
Who does the stage belong to? Why do so many dream of fame? What would I say or do if I was suddenly on a large stage? Would I have something to say? Why is it sometimes so difficult to show yourself, and how do we want to be seen by others? Why are we always performing for others and when do we take a break?
And what role does music play in all this?
In 'Im Rampenlicht' four performers ask themselves these and many other questions. While singing, improvising spoken word performances, dancing, acting and playing instruments they explore the spaces between dream and reality. They take the stage, just for tonight.
Funded by Neustart Kultur Fonds Darstellende Künste #Take Action, Wiederaufnahme Förderung Fonds Darstellende Künste
Het Concert
Performances:
12/13, 19/20, 25/26/27 June 2021
Produced and performed at the inclusive Theater Babel Rotterdam
Choreography: Otto Calmeijer Meijburg
With: Belinda Thijssen, Corne Bouwmeester, Johan Boekhout, Mitchel Kartowikromo, Remo Schouten, Simone den Haan, Sofie de Klerk
Photography: Judith Boesen
An intimate concert after a long period of physical distance. A playful exploration of collective music making and dance. The audience is invited in through sound, and brought closer to the performers by the projections on the wall. The smallest movements become amplified, every expression made visible. An attempt at breaching the distances, both physical and otherwise.
FOLX
Part of West Off 2020, no live showings due to Covid19
Concept and performance: Otto Calmeijer Meijburg, Igor Meneses, Paula Pau
Dramaturgy: Hannah Sampé
Music: Igor Meneses aka ANDRAS_2020
Photography: Ygor Bahia
In this work, we invite our grandmothers and grandfather onto the stage, both in spirit and on Skype, to take on the role of storytellers during this evening. As children of the coloniser and the colonised, we are searching to find traces of ourselves, of our queerness, in our histories in Malaysia, Brasil, Indonesia and the Netherlands. Where and how shall we start, to find (or create) our stories in either folklore, ritual, proverb or song? By creating a web of dance, music, video interventions, storytelling and listening we move through time together with the audience, leaving no one behind.
Funded by West Off theaternetzwerk Rheinland, co-production with Studiobühne Köln
Phaedra
Graduation piece, produced at Folkwang University of Arts 2020. No live showings due to Covid19.
Concept and Performance: Jojo Büttler & Otto Calmeijer Meijburg
Music and outside eye: Igor Meneses a.k.a. ANDRAS_2020
Photography and design: Stephanie Ballantine
“In shame, the subject’s movement back into itself is simultaneously a turning away from itself. In shame, the subject may have nowhere to turn.”
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion 2004
Two bodies, one microphone, and a great deal of witnesses. Nowhere to turn to. Or so it seems.
In this physical comedy two performers challenge their shame in absurd and unexpected ways. Their bodies, their masks, their desires take them places they could have never dreamed of. Moving between states of shameless exposure and of helplessness, this piece explores the immense power that shame can hold over us. An ode to Phaedra, who died of shame, an ode to anyone who has ever felt ashamed for the ‘wrong reasons’.
Not Fabulous
Performances:
May 2018 Folkwang UdK Essen
June 2018 Villa Concha Queer Performance Night Cologne
July 2018 Beyond Binary festival Atelier Automatique Bochum
May 2019 Ladyfest Maastricht
Concept and choreography: Otto Calmeijer Meijburg
Co-created and performed by: Igor Meneses, Paula Pau, Lucas Lopes Pereira
Music: Igor Meneses aka ANDRAS_2020
Photography: Klaus Borkens
"I wear the boy they gave me no more" Lucas Lopes
Femininity as performed and embodied by male assigned individuals is often celebrated and adored in a show context. They are deemed powerful and beautiful and fabulous, as long as they are on stage. But what about the moments before and after the show? What can consciously chosen and performed femininity look like, what shape can it take when the goal is not to entertain? (it is and is not). In this piece the three performers physically explore questions and notions of community, shame, desire and isolation, and invite the audience to take part in this journey.
