In the child’s game variously known as ‘chinese whispers’, the first player whispers a sentence to the next player. Each player successively whispers what that player believes he or she heard to the next. The last player announces the statement to the entire group. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly, and often amusingly, from the one uttered by the first.

The pentaptych Chinese Whispers came to being in the same manner, through a whispering game between different disciplines. The starting point always were the compositions. Next a lighting designer would start working on the piece in his discipline and so would the designer and director, eventually arriving at the musicians for whom playing the music became a theatrical experience.

Chinese Whispers took place in Felix Meritis Amsterdam, GASlab Eindhoven, Theater aan het Vrijthof Maastricht and on the Stubnitz NDSM-Werf, Amsterdam.