Marking 100 years of De Stijl with four edible musical paintings, performed in Leiden and New York.
For the 100-year anniversary of De Stijl, Vervool created Mondrian Special: ChocoJazz Meets De Stijl, a performance inspired by Mondrian, primary colors, and the emotional meaning of abstraction. The show was presented in two editions in 2017: first in Leiden, the Netherlands, and later in New York. The evening was built around four edible musical paintings: yellow, red, blue, and black and white. Each color became its own chapter, with a short art-historical introduction, a live musical composition, and an edible canvas created in front of the audience. This project became an important step in the development of Vervool’s method. It was where we began to understand how a concept could move between the senses: from color to emotion, from emotion to music, from music to movement, and from movement to taste. Ted Steinebach translated each color into flavor, texture, and visual composition: yellow through yuzu, passion fruit, gold, and advocaat; red through strawberries, rose, hibiscus, red pepper, and dark chocolate; blue through berries, Bombay Sapphire, chocolate mint, and silver; and black and white through smoked pastry cream, coffee, dark chocolate, lemon, silver, and white glaze. Vivienne Aerts composed and performed the musical world with voice, synthesizer, and ensemble. The result was a Vervool experience in which De Stijl was not treated as something static or distant, but as a living dialogue between color, sound, flavor, art history, and emotion.