Otemba – Daring Women

Composition: Misato Mochizuki (J) works across three continents and has composed around 60 works that combine Western and Japanese traditions in a wholly distinctive way.

Libretto: Janine Brogt (NL) is a playwright, dramaturge, librettist, and translator for theatre, opera, and dance. Her diverse oeuvre often centres on exceptional women.

Ensemble: New European Ensemble (EU), founded in 2009, frequently combines music with film, dance, theatre, and visual arts. The ensemble seeks to harness the communicative power of music to tell stories that challenge, inspire, and deepen our understanding of human experience and our environment.

Artistic Direction & Staging: Jan van den Berg (NL) is a filmmaker and theatre-maker working at the intersection of science and the performing arts. He is the founder and artistic director of Theater Adhoc.

Cast:

Cornelia van Nijenroode: Ryoko Aoki (J) holds a unique position as a Noh singer in what has traditionally been an all-male art form. She is above all a pioneer and source of inspiration for a new artistic form that combines utai — traditional Noh chanting — with contemporary music.

Kirana Diah: Bernadeta Astari (ID/NL) is a vocal artist with an expressive voice. During her studies she won the Dutch Classical Talent Award and the Princess Christina Competition. In 2012 she graduated cum laude from the Utrecht Conservatory.

Lighting: Gé Wegman was co-founder and resident lighting designer of the Veem Theater, the production house for mime and movement theatre. As an independent lighting designer, he collaborates with a wide range of Dutch directors, companies, and production studios.

Costumes: Lisa Konno is a distinctive interdisciplinary artist and designer from Amsterdam. In 2018 she won the Dutch Design Award.

This production is a project of Theater Adhoc in co-production with the New European Ensemble and the Holland Festival. It was made possible with the support of the Marinus Plantema Foundation, Fonds Podiumkunsten, Stichting Ammodo, Isaac Alfred Ailion Foundation, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, Stichting Berg & van Dalen, and Rabo ClubSupport, with an introduction by Janine Brogt.

14 november 2025 | TivoliVredenburg, Utrecht

The Holland Festival presents the world premiere of Otemba – Daring Women, the music theatre production by composer Misato Mochizuki, librettist Janine Brogt, and director Jan van den Berg, starring soloists Ryoko Aoki and Bernadeta Astari. The piece is based on the painting Portrait of Pieter Cnoll, Cornelia van Nijenrode, their daughters and two enslaved servants (Batavia, 1665) by Jacob Coeman, which hangs in the Rijksmuseum. Otemba – Daring Women sheds light on the colonial history of the Netherlands as well as the international character of the city of Amsterdam, presenting multiple, sometimes divergent perspectives from both the characters and the international creators. Mochizuki (Tokyo, 1969) weaves into her music elements from various Japanese and Western musical traditions.

‘Otemba’ is not only the title of the production but also one of more than 160 words that Japanese has borrowed from Dutch. It means ‘untamable’ and is specifically used to describe independent (rebellious) girls and women who refuse to submit and go their own way.

Otemba – Daring Women is inspired by the remarkable life story of the woman depicted in the painting: Cornelia van Nijenroode. She was the daughter of the Japanese woman Surishira and Cornelis van Nijenroode, a Dutch merchant in Hirado, the first Dutch East India Company trading post in Japan. At the age of 23, Cornelia married Pieter Cnoll, a wealthy senior merchant from Batavia. Four years after Pieter Cnoll’s death, Cornelia remarried — this time to Joan Bitter, a disastrous decision, as Bitter was primarily interested in Cornelia’s fortune. The marriage quickly and irreparably deteriorated. In an extraordinary move for the time, Cornelia filed for divorce. She pursued her case all the way to the Supreme Court, in the first Dutch divorce case in which a woman claimed legal authority over her own assets.

Remarkably, the painting also depicts the future Indonesian freedom fighter Untung Surapati. Since 1975 — thirty years after the proclamation of the Republic of Indonesia — the Republic has honoured him as a national hero.

In Otemba – Daring Women, Cornelia van Nijenroode steps out of her frame and out of her own era, entering the 21st century and another continent. There she meets Kirana Diah, the Indonesian restorer working on the painting. Initially, Kirana is primarily interested in the work because of Untung Surapati. But then Cornelia challenges her to a nocturnal conversation about female untamability, their views of themselves and each other, decolonisation, and self-determination. How do you look at each other’s cultural reality across the centuries? It becomes a magical moment in the restoration process — a one-time, night-time encounter that transcends the boundaries of time and space; between painting and reality, between past and present, between East and West.

The meeting sparks a confrontation between the characters and their life stories, which differ radically yet also reveal surprising similarities. A scanning robot is also present, an artificial intelligence intended to be a neutral data analyst, yet it, too, turns out to have a voice of its own.

The production premiered during the 78th Holland Festival on 19 June 2025 at the Muziekgebouw and will go on a national tour at a later stage.