Elmer - Festival Tour 2023

The Kick-Off is the launch of the academic year and the new cultural season in Deventer. This event is organised by the Burgerweeshuis, Saxion, and Aventus. After a few editions at different locations such as the Nieuwe Markt and the Burgerhaven, in 2023 we are back at the location of the 1st edition in 2015: Het Grote Kerkhof. 

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Elmer is a rapper, producer, and the alter-ego of actress and theater maker Merel Pauw. Merel graduated from the ArtEZ drama school in 2018, after which she co-founded the hip-hop theater collective DIEHELEDING. Within DIEHELEDING, Merel taught herself to produce, rap, and write, resulting in a desire to start a solo music career under the name Elmer.

With Elmer, Merel wants to combine her love for hip-hop with provocative rawness, disarming honesty, and the colorful visual world of comic books. Drawing inspiration from her love for Peaches, Mr. Oizo, and De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig, Elmer's music is a mix of electronic, funky beats, lyrics with a good dose of humor and self-mockery, and songs in which Elmer bravely voices her feelings, rapping about fear of commitment, panic attacks, and self-loathing.

Furthermore, in Elmer's opinion, there is a chronic shortage of female (and gender nonconforming) hip-hop artists in the Netherlands. How can the Netherlands, seemingly such a progressive country regarding diversity, be so behind? Elmer wants to bring about change, starting with the question: Is there a female hip-hop sound that's inherently different from the sound we know? As a woman in this male-dominated scene, you have the freedom to develop a unique sound and to care less about how hip-hop should sound. This thought ignites a fire in Merel, pushing her to tell her story through hip-hop.