The Tatiana Aarons Experience
photos: Rob Stevens, Linda Lemmen, Dru Blair
Sunday June 14, 2009. Lisbon, Portugal.
Tatiana Aarons, a psychology student at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, meets the young actor Tom Struyf whoʼs traveling alone. What first seems an extraordinary conversation takes a strange twist and appears to go according to an ingenious scenario.
One year later, Tom tries to reconstruct the facts and to answer the question: who is this woman and more importantly, who is she not? He decides to return to Lisbon and leaves on Sunday, June 27, 2010, in search of Tatiana, not knowing if he’ll find her or what he’ll do when he does.
The Tatiana Aarons Experience is a travelogue based on (non-)true facts.
‘A spicy, very nice theater experienceʼ
‘A promising, nice discovery, Tom Struyf and his slippy, smart but accessible theater universe.ʼ
Els Van Steenberghe, Knack‘Struyf is a born storyteller. Without fuss he tells the audience his story, casually, with an exciting and amazing timing.ʼ
‘A perfectly constructed performance.ʼ
Alinde Hoeksema, theaterjournaal.nl
The Tatiana Aarons Experience was praised by the jury of the Theatre Festival 2011 in Flanders and selected for Circuit X, a project that aims to encourage promising young dramatists.
The Tatiana Aarons Experience premiered on August 26, 2010, at the O.T. Theater (Rotterdam, NL), and played for almost a hundred times from 2010 to 2022, in Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and South-Africa.