A bigger story

In the new production by Bureau Vergezicht & Romana Vrede, two topics come together that don’t seem to naturally belong together: the climate crisis and our colonial past. And that stirs things up. Because if you want to learn about the climate crisis, you don’t go to a slavery museum. But what if it’s actually a bigger story? The exploitation of people, animals, land, and air is as old as humanity itself, but colonialism scaled up that exploitation—and that scale is what we now call the climate crisis. So we’ve replaced the word, but not the system—it’s still very much alive. We treat the Earth like a supermarket, animals have fewer rights than cruise ships, and Mars is the new colonial project of tech bros.

Following the award-winning productions * De zaak Shell*, *Beste Mensen*, and *Een stukje naar de mensen toe*, Bureau Vergezicht and Romana Vrede set out to answer the question: How do you stay grounded in dark times? To do so, they look not only t vooruit, but also to the time when everything still seemed possible. For Romana, that was in the 1980s—to the music of Bob Marley and the Eurythmics, on Sunday afternoons on the couch. Drawing on her personal memories and ’80s classics, she takes you on a journey into a larger story—about how we shaped the earth, and how it ultimately shaped us.

A Bigger Story is funny, imaginative, and rich in language. It’s a declaration of love to the world and a quest to find out how to stay connected to it.

Romana Vrede in A Bigger Story: “Do you remember back in the day? You’d go on a day trip—to the cheese market in Alkmaar, for example. And my mom would always say: ‘If you lose me, go back to the moment you last saw me.’ And I think that’s what we’re all doing collectively, with our longing for the past. Searching back to the moment when we weren’t lost yet.”

What the press is saying about Bureau Vergezicht and Romana Vrede
“A magical gift.” (★★★★ NRC on *A Step Toward the People*)
“As beautiful as it is sad.” (★★★★ NRC on *Beste Mensen*)
“A major, weighty subject made accessible.” (★★★★★ de Volkskrant on De zaak Shell)
“Romana Vrede knows how to touch and move readers” (★★★★★ NRC on *Tijd zal ons leren*)