Gerard Kranendonk, and the others

Gerard Kranendonk, a free-jazz programmer who had helped found the Rotterdam Jazzbunker in 1976, was the man who initiated the music venue at Rochussenstraat 169¹. He died in June 1996², a little over two years after the venue's formal opening³.

The opening, and the month before it

Dodorama was putting on concerts at Rochussenstraat 169 by mid-January 1994. A Trouw review published on 14 January reports that the Rouppe Group had played there on Wednesday evening, 12 January⁴.

The paper called the place the new modern-music stage at Rochussenstraat 169⁵. Yet the venue keeps a date a month later as its own opening: 13 February 1994, when Peter van Bergen, Huib Emmer, Victor Snijtsheuvel and Jacques Palinckx played⁶. A notice from the time announces the musicians and names no organiser. In the crop we hold, the first three names are complete and Palinckx's surname is cut off after its first letters.

Those four played the opening⁷. Kranendonk's role as initiator comes from separate, later sources⁸. Over the next nine years the venue put on a long run of concerts, through the Eddie Prévost Project, billed as the last concert at Rochussenstraat 169, on 8 March 2003⁹. That programme has a register of its own, rebuilt in good part from the venue's own websites, as they were archived.

The shop that was also the stage

By day the room was a record shop. Its racks and bins were built on wheels, and before a concert they were rolled aside to make a concert hall on the scale of a living room, while a tall book unit was turned round to serve as a projection screen¹⁰. The only description of the inside from the time comes from 1995. Reviewing a concert that October, Jaqueline Oskamp called the place een oud, rommelig winkelpandje, an old, cluttered little shop, where the CD bins, exotic instruments and racks of alternative magazines had been pushed aside to knock together a small concert room¹¹. In January 2002 WORM probably had eight staff in subsidised jobs, and Mariëtte Groot's shop was probably kept administratively separate from the concert podium¹².

The two names each had an emblem. Dodorama took the extinct dodo, and a life-size dodo statue stood at the door. The later name, WORM, came up spontaneously as the organisation took shape around the turn of the century. Groot supplied the solemn expansion, Werk Overleg Rotterdamse Media, as a tongue-in-cheek backronym, a joke and not what the name meant¹³.

The programmer

From 1995 the music was programmed by Lukas Simonis, and he kept the job through the WORM years until 2007¹⁴. WORM dates the founding of its Sound Studios at Rochussenstraat 169 to 2001, by Simonis and Henk Bakker¹⁵. In Simonis's own account, though, the studio grew out of an earlier plan for a music workshop, which two Dodorama people, Gerard van Dongen and Simonis himself, had probably first drawn up for the Centrum voor Actuele Muziek, a project that never went ahead¹⁶. How fully the studio was working there that early is not settled: a report from the time still places the music workshop in its planning phase.

The board, the merger, and the others

In 2000 Dodorama merged with a film workshop and the film outfit Popifilm to form WORM¹⁷. The road there was longer. From about 1995 Dodorama had probably taken part in a Rotterdamse Kunststichting plan for a Centrum voor Actuele Muziek, whose board often met at Rochussenstraat 169¹⁸. Around 1999 it chose to become WORM instead, which, as Simonis tells it, effectively killed the plan¹⁹.

The sources give each person a different role. Kranendonk initiated Dodorama²⁰, Simonis programmed its music from 1995²¹, and Groot probably owned the separately administered shop in 2002²². The board can be placed at the building on one point. Its first chair was probably Jeroen Chabot of the Willem de Kooning Academie, recruited by Doorn, Groot and Hans Beekmans, and on the same account the board met at Rochussenstraat 169, including on 11 September 2001, which Chabot recalled in WORM's own oral history as één van de vreemdste vergaderingen die ik ooit heb mogen leiden, one of the strangest meetings he had ever had the privilege of chairing²³. Chabot remembered hearing about the attacks in New York on his car radio as he drove there. The board decided dat in NYC was van geen belang en natuurlijk gingen we door: that what was happening in New York was of no importance, and of course we carried on²⁴.

What the record corrects

That departure was probably an eviction and not a move: WORM was put out of the Rochussenstraat squat in 2003 and marked the end with a Schluss Party that November²⁵. It then spent a year most likely homeless and on the move before settling on the old VOC terrain in Delfshaven²⁶.

Kranendonk did not live to see those decades. He died in June 1996, two years into the venue he had started²⁷; the month is the one his memorial gives. Guus Janssen's 1996 piano piece Blauwbrug commemorates his death²⁸.

The catalogue also labels the work In memoriam Gerard Kranendonk and dates its copyright to 1996. It is a source from outside WORM's own history, and it calls him in so many words the venue's programmer and initiator²⁹.