Adriaan Van aken
Holden Caulfield Vangen
(eigenlijk gewoon naar huis willen)

Adriaan Van Aken read The Catcher in the Rye during every stage of his life. He has known for a long time that Salinger’s famous coming-of-age novel is "great entertainment" and "pop culture avant la lettre." But since becoming a father to three teenagers, he also discovered the story’s undercurrent—the layer of pain and grief that J.D. Salinger subtly embedded within his 16-year-old protagonist, Holden Caulfield.

Adriaan traveled to New York City to retrace Holden’s three-day wanderings through the grid of Midtown Manhattan. He spent time at all the iconic spots Holden visits in the story (from Penn Station to Radio City Music Hall), capturing audio recordings and voice notes along the way. In doing so, he built the narrative foundation for his new performance and podcast series, Catching Holden Caulfield.

While diligently searching for traces of Holden in NYC, Adriaan reconstructs a few confusing yet poignant events from his own teenage years—moments that hit remarkably close to Holden’s experiences in The Catcher in the Rye. A death during gym class, an incident of self-harm in math class. Or that story about the boy who broke into the school at night to spray-paint a poem on a wall...

Adriaan shares the stage not only with two musicians but also with his oldest son, Staf—a "Holden within arm's reach." Together, they work with drawings, text projections, audio clips, and an array of small objects to create what is fundamentally an audio performance, but one with a highly developed visual side.