V E R A D E G R O O T
VERA DE GROOT
Vera de Groot (1970) was sent to a protestant elementary school in Delft for discipline and structure. Her Greek Orthodox background made her a misfit, but it was here that she developed a fondness for dramatic stories, especially from the Old Testament because of their immense cruelty. She feared her teachers for their religious fanaticism but she loved their storytelling, especially when it was unintentionally grotesque and filled with bloody details. After her education at the gymnasium and the University of Amsterdam for theatre sciences, Vera went to the Academy of Drama in Eindhoven to become an actress. She found complex characters who put much effort in hiding their frustrations the most rewarding to play. However, the tendency of drama teachers and directors to think that acting should be merely ‘realistic’ and ‘transparent’(the reason Vera’s acting was often labelled as being ‘too dramatic’), urged Vera to create a theatrical universe where exaggeration and the surreal are crucial. From this viewpoint she wrote and performed Lord come and see, a monologue about a girl that can’t unite her image of God with the one given at school.
In Greece she engaged in making staged pictures of the dolls she found in her grandma’s closet and in the house of neighbours. Touched by an ancient mural of Greek goddess Persephone in the archaeological museum of Vergina, Vera decided to stage her pictures from the perspective of this goddess. After her son was born, Vera wrote episodes for children television and went to the script school in Amsterdam to become a film and television scriptwriter. Considering that in theatre she was responsible for every aspect of her play, she didn’t find the limited freedom of scriptwriters very inviting. To earn a living, she started working at the Police Academy as a role-play actress to help students improve their social skills with surviving relatives and victims/aggressors of vice and domestic violence.
With Valley of Desolation, a monologue Vera wrote and performed about the impact of suicide on surviving relatives, she returned to the theatre. By using her trouble with writing on Valley of Desolation as a starting point for Persephone’s Party of Spring, her first picture novel, Vera included herself as a character in the story: being off screen as the photographer, the story seems to evolve around Persephone, goddess of spring and the underworld, who immediately wants to be best friends with Vera, because she is a mortal with feelings and wrinkles. According to Persephone, Gods have no clue what love, decay or feelings are, because nothing is at stake when your life never ends. Vera, on the other hand, sees Persephone mainly as an amusing but silly woman-child who can only play the victim, in relation to her father Zeus, her mother Demeter and her husband Hades. Nonetheless, when Vera compares herself to Persephone, thinking 'she hasn’t freed herself from her family like I did', the story takes an unforeseen turn, in which Persephone accompanies Vera throughout her personal downfall.
Staging dolls helped Vera look more compassionately at herself and others. Letting the dolls occasionally revolt against their marionette status (and director) is a technique Vera applies when she feels she’s being too rigid.
The writings that accompany the series of photographs in Persephone’s Party of Spring and A Day at the Park with Ikra are vital in experiencing the story fully. In Meet Erica, Heinrich and Belinda some photographs are titled in German: Vera is fascinated by the specific eloquence of each language.
Through a lack of convincing male dolls Vera is forced to portray the male characters by female dolls.
If you want to learn more about the mythological background of Persephone, please click here.
Following her graduation at the Academy of Drama, Vera moved to Amsterdam and started writing and performing plays with Martijn Donders. They toured with Eve of Retirement (Thomas Bernhard), Fred and Rita (a dance between life and death placed in a German Expressionistic setting),The great Journey of Tailor John (a play for children about death)and The Ceausescu’s Revisited (about the Romanian dictatorship couple Nicolai and Elena Ceausescu).
