Ad Grooten & De Grote Broers with Ellen Lacht

In this intimate performance, brothers Ad and Coen Grooten tell the story of their mother Ellen through songs and personal anecdotes. The subjects are sometimes heavy - war, the Japanese internment camps, the old Dutch East Indies - yet the tone is light, just as Ellen herself was: indestructibly optimistic.

The idea for this project - book, album and theatre tour - came about when Ad opened boxes of old letters from his mother. Those letters led him to the Dutch East Indies, to the Japanese camps and to sunny Curaçao, where Ellen started a family with Tom Grooten. But they also raised questions: what really drove her? How did she stay so positive after everything she had been through?

On stage, Ad Grooten (multi-instrumentalist, composer and writer), Coen Grooten (rapper and percussionist) and Jeroen Habraken (producer, keyboardist and bassist) search for answers together. Dutch-language folk songs on acoustic instruments and keyboards alternate with live percussion, beats and rap, while music and story continually interweave.