REFLUXUS III: Egg-citing – a performance on eggs and ladders

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“Do you ever find yourself thinking – what do eggs and ladders have in common? Well, we’ve been haunted by this question for the past multiple years. Is there more beyond the double consonant? Can you eat ladders? Should you climb eggs? As the obsession became a reason of being, this musician’s ensemble found itself feverishly creating a performance that aims to find answers to the aforementioned doubts. Everything shy of scientific reason will be applied. Expect the most of the most organized chaos. The concept of “nothing” might gain a whole new meaning. The method is pure deniability and madness.

(Any similarity with reality is pure coincidence.)

Egg-citing was our least pre-structure performance to date and therefore what we ended up calling an exercise on artistic freedom. The main goal with it  was to embrace randomness across every element, from the music to the physical actions. While certain events were agreed upon in advance, no one in the ensemble knew who would take them on, or when. The performance became, therefore, a game of action and reaction, of catching each other off guard, of trying to surprise each other on stage. It was a truly egg-celent, egg-hilarating and egg-centric experience (That CAN be repeated! Don’t egg-sitate to hire us!)

picture credits: Wouter-Vellekoop

REFLUXUS II

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“I am a room with no walls, my chairs face the same way. I rumble when I’m awake, and carry strangers who never stay. Where is Sketch351 going to play?”

REFLUXUS II, also known as, The Wheels on the Bus,  was a performance designed to take place during a bus journey from the Haags Hoog to the Nieuwe Kerk (Den Haag). The duration of the piece is not fixed so it’s shaped entirely by traffic

This performance had the special participation of Ruud, the bus driver, as well as a surprise raffle mid-trip that left one lucky audience member walking away with an amazing unforgettable prize. 

October 2025

NOTE: this was our first performance with Gonçalo Martins who gained the audition to fill in the position as Sketch351’s percussionist, by performing a 5-min long drum roll during this trip

REFLUXUS I

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REFLUXUS I was a 30-minute pop-up performance at the Foyer of Theater aan het Spui that served as Sketch351’s introduction to Dag in de Branding’s audience. Rather than a straightforward presentation, we turned it into a near-satirical commentary on the way ensembles are typically asked to package and pitch themselves to programmers and presenters. As we were just a young and upcoming ensemble, we were not yet theater stage ready so we were asked to perform as dinner time entertainment. 

The performance drew on the spirit and vocabulary of Fluxus, recreating events such as Ken Friedman’s The Webster’s Dictionary, White Tooth Workshop, and Marching Band, alongside original Fluxus-inspired works of our own.

REFLUXUS I was also the final performance of percussionist Ricardo Oliveira with Sketch351. Even though he went on pursuing a better life he will always hold a special place in our hearts.

NOTE: as we were not yet confident enough in our work we did not hire anyone to capture the performance; our dear millennial friends, however, kindly took some footage with their phones

CODAX | for ensemble with soprano – Carlos Lopes, 2024

Veronique De Raedemaeker – violin
Maria Portela Larisch – soprano
Paulo Fernandes and Carlos Correia – baroque trumpet

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Teresa Costa – flute
Daniel Martins – trombone
Alice Andreani – cello
Inês Lopes – piano
Gonçalo Martins – percussion

Carlos Lopes on Codax:

Codax is a puzzle. It examines absence, distance, and the ever-persistent movement of sea waves, linked together through 13th century Galician-Portuguese poetry and using lighting, stage movement and acoustic spatialization. It is a performative piece for soprano and ensemble structured as a big sound arch, paying tribute to the monolithic qualities of spectral music, particularly in Gérard Grisey and Kaija Saariaho’s work.

Six music modules are uninterruptedly played, from empty to whole and back to emptiness – a solo violin starts the performance; a soprano moves carefully in the hall and guides us through the piece; two baroque trumpets play ancient fanfares off-stage; an ensemble slowly emerges and finally fills the room; as soon as the stage is full, the process slowly reverses until only the soprano remains.

Martim Codax was a 13th century troubadour from Galicia, famed for his 7 cantigas d’amigo (“friend songs”), the only known example of the genre where the original melody survived. *

As a genre of medieval lyric poetry, what makes the cantiga d’amigo special is its focus on the world of female-voiced communication. Women artistic representation was barely existent in the middle ages (and often forbidden), so minstrels challenged the norm by writing about love and longing from the perspective of a woman.

The subversive charm of Codax’s songs and their beautiful simplicity compelled me to use them. Water is the theme that bonds all texts and music together, the wavering grace of the original melodies hinting at wave-like movement. The yearning in the poems, however, addresses absence and uncertainty – a conflict between the ominous darkness undermining the subject’s hope and the bright shimmering sea that she faces daily, wishing for the return of her lover.