May 24, 2025

Ira Brand's new performance RUNNER — co-produced by Frascati Productions, SPRING festival, CAMPO, and Battersea Arts Centre — premiered on May 23 at the SPRING Festival in Utrecht, the Netherlands. In the wake of the experience, this review takes an unorthodox form: it’s an audio recording. A full transcript is available below.

It’s 20:17, a few minutes before the doors open, and I’m seated at the foyer - surrounded by a lovely crowd - when I open the program flyer. I’m gonna go through the descriptions of the various performances, talks, and installations. And there I’ll spot RUNNER, the one I’m about to attend. I’m reading the description again, this time in Dutch - I’m trying to get better at it - then I read the English translation to double-check.

“The audience follows Ira Brand as she runs outside, searching for a place, knowledge, or perhaps herself.” 

I open my notes and write down: 

How am I going to hold space for Ira’s search for herself? How can I bear this burden myself?

The doors are now open and the crowd is slowly walking in. So am I. 

Have the seats of Theater Kikker always felt so tight? Doesn’t matter…

The lights go down and they won’t be on until later. Ira is ten kilometres away from us. We are at the theater and Ira is in the streets of Utrecht. She is evenly microphoned; we can hear her breath and footsteps as she runs toward us. We can hear her say ‘sorry’ to passengers she passes, or almost bumps into. We are in darkness and she puts us in perspective by giving us insight into what she observes around her. Our visual input is negligible; our hearing is heightened. 

Brand invokes an expressive mode she often resorts to: intense physicality. She is running and running and running, just as Ira does. She exhausts her body, puts herself under investigation, lets go of control, and surrenders to her bodily condition - to the fall, the pain, the absence of motivation, the vanity, the darkness, the flatness. 

The truth of this surrender - its questioning, hesitation, and doubt - is basically the truth of the human experience. It reflects the eternal search for courage to be, inevitably paired with the ambivalence and self-questioning that haunt the effort to do 'the right thing.' In a world that keeps on spinning, in a society that couldn’t be more Western, Brand defies the system that calls her to tick the boxes - and simply is. 

RUNNER felt like a reclamation of her artistic identity and human voice.

RUNNER is not meant to serve our standards. Nor is it there to ravish us. It is a genuine testimony of one’s exhaustion and the accompanying confusion. It’s the need to feel drained and depleted, to approach and touch the core of fatigue, as well as to confront the solitude of the painful days that follow. It’s running as an honest way of living, of staying alive - and, at the same time, a questioning of running as an ‘adequate’ piece of art that will draw people to a theater venue.

RUNNER exists on the meta level as well as in raw presence. It’s the self-questioning of worth, paired with the admission: this is all I have. It’s an interrogation of one’s thinking mechanisms and a surrender to them. 

It’s a recognition that, out there, some people may acknowledge your effort, make your day with a smiling face, give your routine a little spark, while at the same time you stumble into pain, and loss, and death. 

This paradox is today’s paradox. It’s the very world we live in. But that’s what we have. And it’s all the life we have. And somehow, that’s actually nice.

RUNNER was my first performance at the 2025 SPRING festival. It was on a Friday evening, at its world premiere. On that cloudy and humid day - preceded by a long period of high temperatures and sunshine in the Netherlands - I turned my focus inward. 

For eighty minutes, my eyes were asked to calm down - with minimal stimulation, a rarity nowadays - and my body had to follow a runner who was searching for something. I bore witness to a very visceral representation of somebody’s tiredness, fatigue, exhaustion. 

I was reminded of my own tiredness, fatigue, exhaustion - the kind you feel in your body, language, brain, psyche - and yet which has become an unspoken constant in life. 

RUNNER has very little text, and it’s subtle. Its visuals are just as subtle. Yet, there was such fullness in the unspoken, such familiarity and resonance in the unseen.

A big thank you to Ira Brand and the SPRING festival, for reminding us of how deeply, collectively tired we are.