N’Yam Bai –to eat rice- (performance on location, summer 2004)

On the island of Terschelling, in an open field, hidden in the woods, we builded a Cambodian spirit house.

The audience sits on rush-mats and listens to a tale about a woman in a re-education camp, about her interrogator, about her little daughter who wanders through the countryside where she meets a cook who doesn’t want to cook rice anymore. The tale is constructed with documentary material: confessions and eye witness reports from the years ’75-‘’78 when the murderous Khmer Rouge regime was in power in Cambodia.

N’Yam Bai (to eat rice) was a mixture of truth and lies, fiction and reality. a combination of music, shadowplay and narrative skill. In 2005 N’Yam Bai was performed in the harbour of Rotterdam where the spirit house was erected alonside the river Maas.