Zee-Tuin-Jarman

Do you know the song ‘God is a DJ’ by Faithless? The recognizable synthesizers and rhythmic drums at the beginning, followed by the line: “This is my church, this is where I heal my hurts. For tonight, God is a DJ.” Maybe he's singing about Derek Jarman. D-J. Derek Jarman as a divine artist.

In the mid-1980s, shortly after his HIV diagnosis, Jarman buys a fishing hut with blackened planks and bright yellow frames. On a bare shingle beach, next to a nuclear power plant, he lets a garden bloom. An act of beauty and resistance.

More than forty years later, theatre maker Elvis de Launay finds a patron saint in Jarman. His diary Modern Nature becomes a bible. Gradually, he grows the belief that barren lands can be transformed into paradises.

In the show Zee-Tuin-Jarman, De Launay explores beginning and end, birth and death, loss and longing. In a Miss (for those who miss) she brings a garden of language to bloom, with washed-up words from, among others, The Waste Land, The Tempest and Paradise Lost. An ode to Jarman’s life and work.