"Our laywer had a terrible cough and a few times already he had said that it was nothing to be afraid of, that it was juist thirty years of smoking, twenty years of heavy smoking, ten years of attempts to quit, to no avail. He said: 'Do you know that dancers smoke a lot? It makes them thin. Some of my clients are dancers.'"

For more than three decades, photographer Deen van Meer traveled across Europe and the United States to document theater and musical productions. A selection of these photographs has now been collected in ‘We are such stuff’, accompanied by the short story ‘The other swimmers’, written by Arnon Grunberg. It’s a story about a sister, swimming pools, lawyers and what keeps people going, not to say, what keeps mankind alive.