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About Marthje Nieuwenhuijs,
percussionist & dancer.Having had an intense private classical piano education untill in her teenage years, coming to live in Amsterdam in 1999 Marthje wanted to know more about the world outside classical piano playing. She just got back from a long trip through far away Oceania and had seen new cultures, people and ways of living. Her attraction to other cultures as well as music made Marthje decide to study ethnomusicolgy at the University of Amsterdam. At the same time she started taking latin-dance lessons. And so she came in touch with brazilian culture for the first time.
In 2003, the year she started her master thesis in ethnomusicolgy, Marthje traveled to metropole São Paulo in Brazil to make a profound study about urban samba culture. As well as taking up college at UNESP São Paulo university, she was extending her dancing skills taking lessons in various brazilian dances (what she didn’t expect was that she would be learning some acrobatics too: in samba pagode dance she was being flipped over and thrown in the air). Besides this, Marthje was lucky to find great teachers to introduce her to percussion instruments and cavaquinho. This way, in a short time, she indulged in urban samba practical as well theoretical.Marthje remembers well the day she had her first pandeiro lesson. Carlos Staçi, music teacher at her university, and she had made an appointment. With her newly bought pandeiro, she was shown basic techniques and rhythms for this samba instrument. Carlos Staçi is an amazing musician AND teacher, and during his lesson Marthje realized how much magic the simple pandeiro instrument coul create. This was the moment in her life that Marthje felt she wanted to be a musician. She had forgotten what the sensation of making music was – it had been years ago that she sincerely had made music on her piano.
So she took up this stocked away energy, continued her lessons with maestro Staçi, took more percussion lessons with Ari Colares, tortured her fingers with cavaquinho playing and joined a street "bloco afro" that played during Carnaval. Back in the Netherlands Marthje continued playing the instruments she got to know, and started taking up some new ones, like conga. But it wasn’t untill 2005 that Marthje had the courage to take the next step: studying percussion at the jazz department of the Conservatory of Amsterdam. Although she finished her thesis at university with devotion and could start a career in ethnomusicology, Marthje decided that making music was what she wanted to do instead of researching it!Back in the time at university Marthje was asked to join the Claudio Gomez Dance Company. This was an international group of professional dancers led by dancer/ choreographer Claudio Gomez. Marthje had taken lessons at Gomez’s brazilian dance school for some years and was hounored to be a member of his Dance Company. How much she enjoyed being on stage dancing, giving her everything! The show this Dance Company did was usually short and powerfull, and Marthje loved hypnotizing her audience with it. Slowly, Marthje realized that performing was what made her most happy of all things in the world.When Marthje got back from São Paulo she was offered to start teaching brazilian dances herself at Claudio Gomez’s school. She did this for some years, and although she enjoyed it greatly and learned a lot from it, most of all it taught her how performing and teaching are totally different things. And what she wanted more and more was….. performing! So, not surprisingly, soon Marthje decided to stop teaching and focus on performing instead. Through the conservatory she got involved in a big lot of different bands and projects as a percussionist.
In 2007 Marthje has chosen to, rather than follow a conservatory programme, set up her own study plan. Music teachers like Nippi Noya, Thierry Zipper, Caito Marcondes and Matthias Haffner, and dancer Juliana Braga are taking her further and further up the way of music and dance.Currently Marthje plays in Batucando, a brazilian percussion group. In the band Silva Toca brazilian music dominates, but there’s heaps of funk in it as well. Furthermore, Marthje is very excited about her participation as a dancer/percussionist in Women On Wood, a collective of dancers and percussionists that has an energetic and varied show.
As for the future…. more and more projects to come!
