Film Academy's 2019 batch graduates from a course where change is in the air
The 2019 batch of the Film Academy shows graduation work. What do students think of the changes needed at the academy?
Culture Council advisory committee chairman steps down: 'Nobody checks state museums anymore'
Wim Hupperetz, director of Amsterdam's Allard Pierson, has resigned his position as chairman of the museums and heritage advisory committee to the Council for Culture. In protest, he says, against the irresponsible way in which the minister is now implementing the Culture Council's advice. 'If this continues, we will soon be giving millions of euros to a few...
Colonisation is not a relationship. But we still need to establish that relationship, this Holland Festival showed.
Post-colonial criticism and reflection ran like a thread through this year's Holland Festival programme. Not only William Kentrigde and Faustin Linyekula, the associate artists with whom the festival's programmers collaborated, their work addresses the devastating effects of centuries of Western European trade and commerce. In reframing political and social history and reclaiming...
'When you bring back the songs, you bring back the people, you bring back everything'. Why Amsterdam Roots should be proud of coming Jeremy Dutcher.
28-year-old Jeremy Dutcher is a sensation. With his reinterpretation of native songs by Canadian Indians, he won the Canadian equivalent of the Grammy last year; names like Arcade Fire, Feist and Kaytranada preceded him. Amsterdam Roots Festival is now bringing award-winning Canadian musician Jeremy Dutcher to the Netherlands for a performance at the Bimhuis on 10 July 2019. When...
With a cohesive team, you win the World Cup. How the Holland Festival gagged all the cynics this year.
The 2019 Holland Festival was the best in decades. At least in the 25 years I have consciously witnessed it, I cannot recall a national festival that coupled so much impact with so much prestige. Whether visitor targets were met or not will be of no concern to me in this regard. It is, as Volkskrant colleague Hein Janssen once remarked,...
Colin Benders plays Concertgebouw flat on closing night of memorable Holland Festival 2019
Stereo is primitive. Cinema operators have known that for a while, and so has anyone with a 7:1 set to go with their TV. Two speakers, no matter how good and big or small, remain two speakers. Now, of course, we also only have two ears, but they can place 360-degree sound thanks to some clever ribbing and our own smart brains. So sound should be...
Why Conny Janssen Danst will win this year. Dance award nominees Swans 2019 announced.
The nominations for the 2019 Swans have been announced. Here is my annual prediction of who will win one. Spoiler alert. This year, it will be a cautious prediction. Even though in past years I wasn't far wrong (sometimes completely right) in guessing the winners, now when it comes to the dancers, you have to choose from superlatives: 'let them be on a...
Pity the Poles! Intense suicidal sadness in stage adaptation of Kafka's 'Trial'.
You must be a Pole. That, as the Dutch premiere of 'Process' at the Holland Festival showed, is no laughing matter. This performance, an adaptation of Franz Kafka's famous novel of the same name, conveys that feeling very poignantly. Five hours long, interrupted only by two half-hour intermissions, during which a mackerel sandwich can be eaten. Or a bowl of mixed nuts. Observant...
Homage to Robert Mapplethorpe: slideshow with moderate music #HF19
A black man sits on the edge of the stage of Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg, pardon ITA. He observes us with intense gaze as we walk into the auditorium. - As the incarnate subtitle of the performance Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe. Behind a gauze screen are the instruments of Asko|Schönberg, which, together with Roomful of Teeth, signs for...
Art is totally useless, and politicians need to make that clearer. (Why Mark Rutte should go out more often)
This afternoon, there will be a hearing in the Lower House on Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven's guiding principles note. That memorandum which everyone now realises is a fig leaf from her own pocket. Speakers have prepared their finest speeches, and some of it will surely go viral within the various cultural social media bubbles afterwards. I was getting a little despondent...
Tryptich by Bryce Dessner is just a little too perfect to really hit home
The Americans have a word for it: production value. By this you can indicate that a performance is technically perfect. The sound is right, the stage setting is excellent, the costumes are all right, the lighting brilliant and the actors, singers and musicians: top notch. Even the extras are at their best. So a show with high production value can rely on little...
'Meat sandwich' still most popular at food festivals Festival Atlas sees festivalisation declining
The peak of the festivalisation of the Netherlands seems to be behind us. The number of festivals has declined by over 10% in two years. This is according to research by the Hogeschool van Amsterdam into the festival landscape in the Netherlands. Responsible lecturer Harry van Vliet (Crossmedia): "The decline in the number of music festivals was already visible in 2017, but the decline is the...
ITA's Cherry Garden delivers neat play in theatrical no man's land
It must have started with a big plan in Simon McBurney's head. The Brit, a master of mathematically precise text theatre full of technical gadgets, saw the amazing floor of the Rabozaal of Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg and his brain started working. Something about a backcloth covering the full width of the hall, something about a doll's house, something about...
Phenomenal ballet needs no message for Holland Festival 2019
With all the socially critical, exotic and personal life art at the Holland Festival, Van Manen, Forsythe, Arqués is actually an outlier, a statement without a message. Dance has enough on its own, expresses itself full-length. And how. Work of overwhelming quality. How much better can it get? At most by giving it a message anyway. There is room there. The rest is complete....
'Congo' is another highlight of one of the most meaningful Holland Festivals in years.
'I think they understood.' Faustin Linyekula says it, very quietly, a little apologetically almost, to his fellow actor at the end of the performance Congo. A slightly relieved laugh can be heard in the main auditorium of Frascati, where Princess Beatrix is also seated. Shortly before, Daddy Moanda Kamono had erupted in an increasingly desperate tirade against our shared past....
From now on, mandatory for every theatre talk: a blank sheet of paper.
If a Nobel Prize for brilliant innovative festival ideas is established, the first may be awarded to whoever came up with the solution to 'the festival conversation' yesterday. You know, that ever-necessary conversation with the important guest or guests. At a table. On chairs. On television, such a setting is already problematic, live in a theatre usually lethal. A currently anonymous...
The most important animation festival takes place in Annecy - and the Netherlands participates
I described here earlier that Dutch animation film is on the rise. And as I look around the animation festival in Annecy, France, this week, it seems nice to see how our animation filmmakers and producers are presenting themselves here. Especially since Annecy is considered the most important event worldwide in this sector. 'The Cannes of animation' I hear...
Four reasons to go to Pelléas et Mélisande #HF19
The Holland Festival, with its ample offerings, is sometimes its own competitor. For instance, I missed Turan Dokht and the premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande because I was at aus LICHT. To attend a performance of Debussy's only opera, I had to pass up Abd Al Malik's concert. - Cultural choice stress, frustrating on the one hand but a blessing on the other. Was it...
More French-language rap please.
French is made for rap. Forget all that American-English mincing, listen to the rhythmic drone that good French-language rap offers. One of the possible benefits of a self-absorbed US and a post-Brexit Europe is that we might start hearing that beautiful language of our southern southern neighbours a bit more often. 'Speak French to me, darling!' Macron will be delighted. Wednesday...
New arts plan cabinet-Rutte III: 25 million less arts supply. (But more happy artists)
How harrowing the payment of artists, musicians and theatre actors, screenwriters and all those other 'creators' is, became clear again in recent weeks. In newspaper Trouw, a musician - finally - came out of the closet of poor working conditions. Against the prevailing mores, she revealed how much she earned. What transpired: top national institutions like the Concertgebouw allow musicians to perform for free, orchestral musicians...
Does blood have to flow then? (How much art you can make about art not hurting)
Why do we actually want to see blood so much? That's what I wondered during the performance Roughhouse. This American-German piece is showing in the Holland Festival (Wednesday 12 June still) and in it there is no blood. That's also what it's about. That blood no longer flows anywhere, in the media, in art. That everyone always gets up again, that...
Why, as a total layman, I did three days AUS LIGHT. And came out as a different person.
Music critics were unabatedly enthusiastic. And even opera lovers came, saw and were pleased. Of course, there was the chorus of monuments, led by a Flemish antiquity, who liked Maria Calllas better seventy years ago, but its members are only the necessary minority needed for something as unprecedented as AUS LICHT, the Magnum opus of the 72nd Holland Festival. Beforehand, it seemed...
Until the laughter dies down. Crashpark stages the downfall of the world as a beautiful landscape full of partygoers
Crash Park - La vie d'une île (2018) by French director Philippe Quesne performs 19th-century values in their 21st-century elaboration. The elitist explorer has become a modal tourist, moving in well-organised groups to every corner of the world in search of ultimate experiences, provided they don't get in the way of a return ticket western...
Angélica Liddell's screams are particularly interesting in The Scarlet Letter
The much nudity and sex in Angelica Liddel's adaptation of Hawthorne's famous novel are a bit old-fashioned. The Spanish language is the real attraction. In his review of Angélica Liddell's play 'The Scarlet Letter' on this website, Wijbrand Schaap calls the scene with a naked black man "a painful low point". According to Schaap, the man is treated by Lidell as...
And Stockhausen saw that it was good - aus LICHT in Holland Festival #HF19
'Then he could split into three and was a singer, dancer and trumpet player,' says a girl on the screen prior to Michael's Jugend. She is one of the little children who tell at the beginning of each day what aus LICHT is about. A good find by Pierre Audi and his artistic team, because the universe that Karlheinz Stockhausen gives us...
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