A few thousand years from now, archaeologists will find a bizarre concrete sculpture in sediment layers at the bottom of the future European Sea. Round, organic shapes, a square box with ready-made chambers, pipes, and a relief in the soil. Totally different from the concrete boxes they found before. Unknowingly, they will rediscover the mystery of the Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie. The...
The first weekend of October saw the Netherlands Dance Days (NDD) take place in Maastricht. As Ruben Brugman reported, important prizes for the dance world are awarded there. But the Dance Days seem mainly intended to promote Dutch dance, more than being a critical evaluation or artistic boost. At the Dance Days, no pithy speech on the State of Dance as...
On 7 October, the first try-out of Calliope Tsoupaki's opera Mariken in de tuin der Lusten will go on at Theater aan de Schie in Schiedam. Sunday 11 October is the world premiere at the Koninklijke Schouwburg in The Hague. At the invitation of Opera2Day, Tsoupaki immersed herself in Mariken van Nieumeghen, heroine of the miracle play of the same name that took place exactly five hundred years ago in...
Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games... Would young people still be interested in history? Writer Anke Manschot believes so. On the eve of Children's Book Week, which starts today, her exciting and gripping historical book The Leap of Normandy, the world's first children's novel about D-Day, was published. Five questions for the author. Historical juvenile novel During a holiday in Normandy,...
From confrontational brutalism to the flowing lines of Frank Gehry and from timeless London to the Paris of Eric Rohmer. Some of the selections from the Architecture film festival that starts on 8 October in Rotterdam. We take a dive into the programme in advance. In its existence, the AFFR has managed to hold its own against other thematic...
In a full University Theatre on Tuesday 6 October, Pierre Audi gave a master class for young singers, dramaturgs and directors. Three scenes had been prepared by the students and were then expertly filleted by Audi. "Sorella, que dici?.... Prenderò quel brunettino", from Mozart's Così fan tutte began as a scene of two punk girls gripped by consumerism. The director and trainee dramatists...
Not many directors have become very iconic very young. Chantal Akerman was, both for experimental film and feminist. She broke through in 1975 with Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film that is as disruptive as it is understated. It is her most important work, and also her most radical. The protagonist leads an existence of...
Those who go to a dance performance want to enjoy beautiful movements, expression, movement composition and a fine stage setting, wrapped in music or a soundscape. But there is something, which is always overlooked: the sound of dance itself. Dancer and choreographer Eline van Ark discovered that this forgotten aspect holds great richness and subtle expressiveness. The sound...
During the Seven Bridges Festival, from 29 September to 4 October, you could enjoy chamber music concerts in beautiful historic buildings in Amsterdam. One concert, on 1 October, we highlight. Compositions by Haydn and Beethoven resounded in Museum Geelvinck Hinlopen. This included a straining Haydn sonata on pianoforte grand piano and sparkling 'Volksliederen' by Van Beethoven by the expressive soprano Katharine...
Opera2Day, Mariken in de tuin der lusten (opera) The young The Hague company Opera2Day produces one splendid performance after another. But at the same time it does not rest on all its laurels, opting for adventure by presenting an entirely new opera together with the Nationale Toneel. At the centre is Mariken van Nieumeghen, the girl "who lived with the devil for seven years", the music is by Calliope Tsoupaki and...
During a festive dinner at Theater aan het Vrijthof in Maastricht, 'Zwanen' were awarded to dancer Jorge Nozal of NDT 1, Ann Van den Broek for The Black Piece and to Roel Voorintholt (Gouden Zwaan), artistic director of Introdans. The annual highlights festival De Nederlandse Dansdagen hosted this successful 'Swan Dinner': posh sponsors and stakeholders ate side by side with messy dance artists. This is how it should be...
Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong time. Wouldn't it be wonderful to live in the period when modern art was born? Then I correct myself: no, there were many problems and uncertainties back then too. But the new exhibition Colour Unleashed at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag makes me hesitate again. Because the exhibited...
Golden Calfs awarded at Gala of Dutch Film. What are the new talents this year.
The man with the firm jaws and vacant, upward-looking eyes is not particularly attractive. His face does appear on all the posters around town. However, it is something other than this robust stone head against the black background that triggers you, on the poster of the exhibition at the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. That is the tilted O of the...
Bodies are dragged away to loud applause and cheers: a more symbolic beginning Nederlands Dans Theater could not have imagined. With Start Again, the international ballet company highlights an exile until 2019 at the harbour in Scheveningen. A tricky location, because remote. But also a dynamic place. A Dutch choreographer would surely invent a choreography there with ferries, cutters and lifeboats. NDT, however, chooses the...
THE Symphony Orchestra does not have a balanced budget for 2016. Without additional money from the province, it can no longer perform its core task, nor can it fulfil all the commitments it made earlier. That is the gist of the letter CDA deputy commissioner Hester Maij sent to Provincial Council, ahead of its meeting on 7 October. The subject of the letter: "progress business plan/redemption subsidy HET Symfonieorkest"....
Among the dozens of film festivals in this country, there is one that forms a small island of tranquillity and contemplation. The Buddhist Film Festival Europe, now in its 10th year, is a multi-day festival with, about and by Buddhists, or Buddhist-inspired. Now that everyone is all mindful, we go back to the source with festival director
Many theatre practitioners secretly beg for the introduction of corporal punishment for schoolchildren with CKV. After all, schoolchildren with CKV are bent on ruining the lives of actors. They are assisted in this by disinterested teachers, who on their nights off are more concerned to please their pupils than the providers of culture. As a compromise, ...
It was initially spoken as a column commissioned by the Netherlands Chamber Choir (April 2015- premiere at Theatre De Harmonie Leeuwarden). Trip to Scandinavia is a variation on that in three parts. Now with animation. Also watch episode 1.
Movies that Matter will not only see you at the festival in March. The film event, organised by Amnesty International, will also tour several film houses in the Netherlands this autumn. It kicks off in October with the screening of Hubert Sauper's documentary We come as friends. In his earlier film Darwin's nightmare, this award-winning Austrian showed...
In 1989, the Holland Festival placed composers from the Soviet Union at the centre. The music of Galina Ustvolskaya and Sofia Gubaidoelina hit like a bomb. The ladies proved to be here to stay, although they move at two extremes of our perception of sound. Ustvolskaya pounds her message into our eardrums with monomaniacal drive, Gubaidoelina intoxicates us with mysterious rustling and whispering sounds. For me,...
Stop rehearsing, Yorick van Wageningen advises Dutch makers at the National Film Conference. It doesn't always have to be intelligible, either.
While in the Netherlands hate blog GeenStijl swayed the votes of 400,000 concerned Dutch people to its own anti-European tune, Flanders came up with something new: the citizens' cabinet. A thousand ordinary Flemings spent three months working online and offline on recommendations for culture minister Sven Gatz's cultural policy. In the end, a group of one hundred and fifty citizens was chosen to come up with a text. These were submitted yesterday to the...
Early this year, it still looked like the monumental and striking Main Post Office on Utrecht's Neude would stay closed for good. There was even talk of a sale to a private individual who would build luxury flats in it, thus permanently obscuring the hall of the people, where many a Utrechter once cashed her cash cheques...
It is only a few months until Sinterklaas, so you would expect the Dutch people's rhyming muscles to be on edge again by now. But nothing could be further from the truth. During the Drongo Festival, an event on multilingualism in the Utrecht Jaarbeurs, MC Akwasi demonstrated this flawlessly. With his Dutch-language raps, he fits well into the current wave of...
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