Sytske van Koeveringe

Biography

Writer Sytske van Koeveringe’s (1988) characters seldom act; they are observers who prefer to disappear, to be subsumed into another. What starts out concrete collapses and softens, until the boundary between imagination and reality has become completely fluid. Van Koeveringe portrays people who seem to be allergic to the world. The drama itself does not occupy the foreground, but rather the gruelling pace of everyday life. 
 
Van Koeveringe graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Beeld en Taal [Image and Language]) in 2014. She started writing for the stage with the De Tekstsmederij laboratory. Here, she met director Marijn Graven, affiliated to Frascati Producties. She wrote her first performance text (Beton en Water) at Frascati Producties (with ITA) in the spring of 2018; this was followed in the autumn of 2018 by Een ziekelijk tekort, a deeply empathetic, absurdist study of the phenomenon of sleeplessness. Both texts were staged as part of Fraslab, directed by Marijn Graven. Van Koeveringe is currently working on a second version of Een ziekelijk tekort. She is also working on an adaptation of August Strindberg’s To Damascus. A staging of this text directed by Marijn Graven will première in Frascati in October 2019.
 
Alongside performance texts, Van Koeveringe has written texts that have been published in the NRC newspaper and magazines Vrij Nederland, Das Magazin and Oogst. She also took part in the Dutch Foundation for Literature’s inaugural Slow Writing Lab. Her first novel Het is maandag vandaag was published by De Bezige Bij in 2017 and she is currently working on her second book, for which she was allocated a starter’s grant by the Dutch Foundation for Literature.
 
Frascati Producties has set up a cooperation for young writers, in cooperation with ITA. During the 2018-2019 season, Frascati are taking the following under their wing: Esther Duysker, Sytske van Koeveringe, Randa Peters and Tjeerd Posthuma. Michaël Bijnens and Jibbe Willems are working with ITA. A joint masterclass by an internationally renowned playwright is organised at least once a year. To date, several public lectures have been held in Frascati, and work by the authors participating in this process will be presented to the public during Holland Festival 2019.