Photography, Comedy, and Music
By Livia Wendland | Culture | June 1, 2024
Cover Illustration: Original Stukafest tote bags, March 14 2024. Carina Pepene.
Livia Wendland explores the artistic diversity of this year’s Stukafest Festival, interviewing three artists and introducing their installations.
The sun is setting, the night is young, and you’ve just parked your bike outside an unfamiliar student building. A handmade sign taped to the front door instructs you to take the elevator to the third floor. You go up, walk down the hallway, past the graffitied walls and over the scattered bowls of cat food, and enter a dorm room that has been transformed into a makeshift theater. You take your seat on a couch, a balcony chair, or maybe a kitchen counter. The show is about to begin.
This is Stukafest, the “student room” festival that stages intimate performances and exhibitions across several dorm rooms in various Dutch cities. The 17th edition of the festival occurred on March 14 2024, providing a platform for young artists to showcase a wide array of creative pursuits such as theater, comedy, music, photography, and more. Attendees were encouraged to participate in three rounds of performance, dashing across the city from one student hotspot to another. Three creatives from the 2024 Stukafest lineup — photographer Lisa Danilkovych, comedian Phoebe Perry, and musician Esther Koolstra — shared their festival experiences and the stories behind their work.
Effervescent Femininity with Photographer Lisa Danilkovych
A small photo exhibition is nestled between the aisles of the Boekmanstichting Library, carefully arranged against the orderly bookshelves. In one series of photos, a woman leans in to kiss her red-lipped lover, transferring the crimson fruit juice, contrasted against an otherwise monochrome palette, onto her own lip. She smiles at the camera, her mouth flecked with a smear of fresh cherries from the market. In another series, two women dressed in angelic white frolic through a softly lit meadow, their necks adorned with pearls and hair flowing with wind-swept ribbons. In her collection Mavka, multimedia artist Lisa Danilkovych invites viewers into an enigmatic world of fluid and fantastical femininity.
Lisa conceived the idea for Mavka during a photoshoot in Kyiv, where she photographed her friend in a botanical garden, juxtaposing the flowing white of her clothes with the earthy green of the plants. Since receiving her first film camera at age 16, Lisa has found inspiration in both nature and humanity. She moved from Ukraine to Canada for film studies, then to Amsterdam for media studies. She returned to Kyiv to work on Mavka, where she assembled an all-female crew with two assistants and two friends with backgrounds in dancing, as she wanted to capture the fluidity of their movements. The shoot was interrupted by an air raid, but the crew persisted. “We risked our lives,” Lisa says. “Everyone was so determined.”
Mavka is testament to Ukrainian resilience and folklore, which has always been a source of fascination for Lisa. Mavka are mythical female spirits believed to lure men to their deaths. They appear as beautiful young women from the front, but their backs reveal exposed spines and bare flesh. Lisa explains, “In this story, the women are the villains, victimizing men who have no choice [but] to pursue them. I wanted to explore the other side of these creatures. They are the victims; they drowned [as humans] and now cannot leave this world.” The photo series also portrays intimate friendship and queer love between women, as they dance and embrace each other amidst the tall grass.
Lisa describes herself as a “perfectionist” and admits it can be difficult to delegate tasks to other people. She likes to establish personal connections with collaborators and prioritizes working with people who respect her work’s integrity, as she has a no-photoshop policy on her subjects’ bodies. “When I’m working with someone who doesn’t feel photogenic, I try to find unique ways to notice certain details about their appearance,” Lisa says. She believes that compliments and reassurance foster a safe creative environment. Stukafest provided a similarly supportive atmosphere, wherein Lisa could display her work and sell photo cards, donating all proceeds to the Ukraine Women Fund.
Safe Spaces with Comedian Phoebe Perry
A jaunty, repetitive song plays over the speakers in a busy dorm living room. Comedian Phoebe Perry parts the crowd and stands in a cleared space at the room’s front, holding a hot-pink fake phone to her ear. The music — revealed to be a bland, soothing phone line loop — fades out as Phoebe laments the long phone queue. Having time to kill, she introduces herself to the audience and recounts various mispronunciations of her name, concluding that it’s best suited to a purebred poodle in De Pijp. Phoebe’s stand-up set tackles various topics, from the Dutch language to houseboat living to modern dating. She commands the audience’s attention with an attentive and enthusiastic stage presence, interspersed by crowd interactions and interludes on the pink phone. Listening to Phoebe feels like catching up with an old friend.
Hailing from Nebraska, U.S.A, Phoebe began her comedic journey in university. There she alternated between improv and comedy before moving to Chicago, the “capital city” of improv. Having now lived in Amsterdam for five years, she works as a comedian and creative producer. “It’s almost like being in high school again,” says Phoebe. “We all live in this small city, experiencing the same things. That’s why it’s so fun to do comedy here — the camaraderie of living in a culture different from your own.”
Learning a new language and moving to a new country provided Phoebe with fresh perspective and material. She also draws a great deal of inspiration from conversations with friends and family, as well as personal embarrassment. “I can tell more truth through fiction than through a diary,” Phoebe explains. “Sometimes, when I tell an absurd story that is slightly false, the emotions become more honest.”
Laughter is indeed the best medicine, and comedy is a powerful tool for managing shame or frustration. It requires vulnerability, and Phoebe is mindful of her own boundaries and those of her audience. She views the comedian-audience relationship as an exchange, saying, “It feels so frivolous and naughty. I can be with people, creating with them. Everyone’s moving in their own eccentric circles and you can bounce against them.”Phoebe’s approach to crowd work is driven by a desire to make people feel safe. Many people are hesitant to sit front-row at comedy shows, easy prey for the comedian’s sharp tongue. Phoebe, however, prefers to uplift with amusing assumptions and compliments, encouraging her audience to interact with her. She wants them to feel “smart, cool, and comfortable, instead of like an asshole for engaging.” During her performance at Stukafest, she admired the students’ intimacy, openness, and readiness to maintain eye contact. She likens the process of preparing for a set to dressing in her “Sunday best,” as if preparing to flirt with the audience or get ready for a dance. This is one show you’d want to sit front-row for.
Poetic Lyricism with Esther Koolstra
Overlooking the canals from the second story of the Boekmanstichting Library is an impromptu stage, covered in a myriad of instruments — guitars, drums, synths, ukuleles, and more. Here, the five-person multi-instrumental folk band EB & VLOED weaves a stirring soundscape with delicate strumming, nimble percussion, and heartfelt vocals. Their musical prowess shines as the drummer picks up a rainmaker and the synthesist plays a trumpet with one hand while the other glides across the keyboard. However, it’s not just technical skill that sets this band apart — their emotionally rich composition, poetic lyricism, and spontaneous creative flourishes elevate their performances to new heights, gently lifting their audience along for the ride.
EB & VLOED consists of sisters Esther and Myrthe Koolstra as vocalists and guitarists, Antonio Moreno Glazkov on synth and trumpet, Merle Havas on bass, and Bela Braack on percussion. The band was formed by Esther during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, when she set music to a friend’s poetry book, which inspired half of their current songs. Born and raised in Amsterdam, Esther started her music journey in a family band and often records strings for other musicians. She enjoys the intimacy and spontaneity of live performance: “My favorite aspect is the connection it creates,” Esther says. “It’s a connection between me and my emotions when songwriting, between all of us in the band, between us and the audience — maybe even between strangers in the audience. It creates lines and community.”
Reflecting on the three-round structure of Stukafest, Esther enjoyed that it allowed them to try different things during each performance. The band embraces improvisation, trusting each other to follow subtle cues to a harmonious conclusion. Much like a painter adding endless details to their artwork, Esther believes a song is never truly finished. She says, “Slip-ups are also a beautiful part of performance. That’s real music, with mistakes.”
Esther’s songwriting process is equally intuitive. Drawing inspiration from poetry, emotions, and conversations with friends, she keeps a diary of her daily musings. “Sentences already have a rhythm,” Esther explains. “You hear where it goes, what it feels like, and when you follow your instinct, the melody comes intuitively.” The band also experiments with unconventional uses of instruments, including the human throat. Once, they used rhythmic, synchronized breathing to mimic the sound of the wind. These quieter moments create contrast and crescendos in their compositions. “They [the audience] get transported, because it’s really atmospheric,” Esther says. EB & VLOED, a band that ebbs and flows both sonically and emotionally, is aptly named.
Livia Wendland is a university student in Amsterdam. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of The Amsterdammer.
