¹³Dodorama

On 13 February 1994 the corner that had sold furniture for most of a century opened again as a stage, with Peter van Bergen, Huib Emmer, Victor Snijtsheuvel and Jacques Palinckx playing the opening concert¹. Worm.org and Wikipedia would later fix that day as the beginning, yet it marked a milestone rather than a first night. A month earlier the room was already putting on music: on Wednesday 12 January 1994 the Rotterdam Rouppe Group played Kurtag and Kagel there, and two days later Trouw reviewed the evening as the new modern-music podium on the Rochussenstraat².

Dodorama is often credited to the organisers who ran it later³. The man who started it was Gerard Kranendonk, a free-jazz programmer who in 1976 had helped found the Rotterdam Jazzbunker. He initiated Dodorama at Rochussenstraat 169 and died in June 1996⁴. The deep dive on Gerard Kranendonk tells his part, and the venue's own performance register follows who played, night by night.

Only one writer of the time described the inside. Reviewing a concert series for De Groene Amsterdammer on 18 October 1995, Jacqueline Oskamp called it een oud, rommelig winkelpandje, an old, cluttered little shop¹. Its bins of CDs, exotic instruments and racks of alternative magazines were pushed aside to knock together a small concert room². The informal air reminded her of the New York habit of putting on concerts in galleries.

That pushing aside is the most telling fact of the venue years. The record shop and the concert podium were one and the same room. The racks and bins were built on wheels, and before every gig they were rolled out of the way to turn the shop into a concert hall the size of a large living room³. Even a tall unit of books and magazines stood on castors like everything else, and turned round it became a projection screen⁴.

What the wheeled-out room staged, gig by gig, fills the performance register.

From October 1995 the programme is documented in detail. On the Sunday before the Groene review the quartet The Voice Is the Matter played: Jodi Gilbert on voice, Ernst Glerum on double bass, Michael Moore on reeds and Alexej Levin on piano and accordion¹. Guy Klucevsek followed on 20 October, De drie koningen on 22 October and Arthur Sauer op donderharp on 29 October². In a single evening The Voice Is the Matter went from a Fleetwood Mac number and a Macedonian song to Poulenc, to jazz by Glerum, and to Misha Mengelberg's Zo zacht als boter³.

The names grew larger while the room stayed the same size. By one account, attributed to the critic Kevin Whitehead and reproduced on a participant's page, Derek Bailey played Dodorama in April 1998, with William Parker among the bassists that night⁴. On 14 June 1998 the shop held a John Tchicai Festival for the saxophonist, which the Rotterdams Jaarboekje entered in its chronicle of the year⁵. The Amsterdam group The Ex played the corner four times⁶. Twice it was still Dodorama, on 18 April 1997 and 28 November 1999; twice it had become WORM, on 26 May 2001 and 7 February 2003, the last time with Konono No.1⁷.

For every performer the corner is known to have hosted, with a date and a source for each, see the register of acts.

Some of what happened in the room was recorded, and the recordings need the same care as the photographs. A recording a label itself credits to the venue dates from 13 October 1996: the printed booklet of Vershki Da Koreshki's Real Life Of Plants lists one track as recorded live at Dodorama, Rotterdam¹.

Two later traces are weaker. A 2020 upload describes Samba, from Senegal, and Peter Graute performing Love Poem at Dodorama on 28 December 1997, filmed by Thea Linschoten; the claim comes from the uploader, not a label, so it probably holds but is not proven². Seven more uploads, said to be recorded live at the venue on 5 November 2000, stand on the same footing: their date matches a Noise Fragment performance in Dodorama's own autumn-2000 season preview, but the preview's location line is unclear, so the link is probable rather than proven³. The discography separates the releases that name the venue from those that only claim it, with the same discipline the false-positive method brings to everything else about this address.

The shop mattered beyond the concert calendar. In both 1996 and 1997 the literary magazine Passionate listed Dodorama, Rochussenstraat 169, among its verkooppunten, its sales points, so the corner sold the magazine as well as playing music^1 2. From 1995 Lukas Simonis programmed the music, a role he kept into the WORM years³.

Years before WORM existed, Dodorama was already arguing that Rotterdam's new-music world was too scattered to survive in pieces. The same October 1995 review reports the venue campaigning with several other Rotterdam organisations for a Centrum voor Actuele Muziek in the former Thalia cinema, because of een te grote versnippering van geld en energie, too great a fragmentation of money and energy⁴. The week before, with the city council about to decide, a gala in Nighttown had staged the idea as colliding ice floes made of stacked points of white polystyrene⁵. The reviewer signed off Glad ijs, thin ice⁶.

The centre never came. In a probable reconstruction the plan ran on through the later 1990s under the Rotterdamse Kunststichting, whose board often met at Rochussenstraat 169, until around 1999 Dodorama chose to become something of its own instead⁷. What it became, and the short, strange word it took as a name, belong to the next chapter, where the WORM web archive gathers the venue's surviving web pages.