Robert Beck, the protagonist of Benedict Wells' debut novel Becks last summer, hopes, as a near-forty-year-old, to make his dream come true after all: a career in music. Wells (34) knows what it is to go all out to pursue your dream. He turned a difficult childhood into literature, and he became damn successful at it. Over the past...
1On 6 September 2018, Chokri Ben Chika left his sense of humour behind in Belgium. He trekked to the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg with a filled jerry can and committed a criminal offence. He threatened a Rabo Hall filled to the brim with an indistinguishable fake weapon. He said he admired the anonymous Tunisian who, with his self-immolation ...
Sometimes there is a gap in the strolling crowd in Groningen's Noorderplantsoen. Often this is due to a local resident with muscle-dog, who continues to make his daily round despite the crowds. It is one of those funny things that give Noorderzon its very own character, as the most Groningen-like of all summer festivals in our country. There is...
Voted best VR experience in Venice, Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang's Chalkroom is now available to experience at Eye. A flying dream in a beautifully designed labyrinth of worlds constructed out of language and characters. Anderson herself is coming too.
Less supply of subsidised art is good for the country. Antoinette Laan, culture spokeswoman for the governing VVD party, has thought so for at least eight years. Back in 2011, then still as alderman in Rotterdam, she stated that she did not understand why art institutions were open on weekdays. After all: everyone was at work then and so couldn't come and have a look anyway. Listen here...
Good news from the cultural funds: 'diversity' is becoming a serious condition when deciding whether or not to get funding for your cultural thing. Of course, this will lead to discussion. To prevent people from falling back on the Jeroen Pauw argument (we want women on air, but there aren't enough good ones who want them too), the group suggests...
The Flemish waffle baker at the Willy Wonka Wafl Factory in the Burton Cafe has seen all the Tim Burton films, he says from between a sleek hipster beard. 'Especially since you had to prepare the menu,' I say. The menu at the - temporary - Burton Cafe in exhibition space C-min includes: Charlie Chocolate Wafl, Scissorhands Wafl, Oompa Loopa Wafl, Beetlejuice...
This edition, Theatre Festival Boulevard invited the audience to reflect on the two sides of identity: its immutability but especially its malleability. All this under the heading what you see is what you guess. If there is a performance to which this applies, it has to be Goat Song. A fascinating fifty-minute wordless performance by...
'Not a bad word about Lego or Knexx. But identity is the most exciting building kit.' So opens the preface to Theatre Festival Boulevard in Den Bosch. What you see is what you guess is the motto this time. It refers to the gap between how other people see you and how you yourself feel. Identity in its broadest form: from gender...
Usually when I speak to someone who calls themselves a playwright, they say they are 'only' a supplier of a 'half-product'. I never get that answer from a young actor, and certainly never from a director. It is they who make theatre out of the half-products supplied by writers. Actors and directors prefer to be addressed as 'theatre-makers'. Nothing wrong with that....
His short stories look deceptively simple, and every word is weighed as if on a gold scale. He therefore basically writes his very short stories from A to Z, without changing anything else. Portrait of writer A.L. Snijders. 'While my wife was dying, I unsuspectingly wrote a piece.' Elaborate You wouldn't expect it from...
Between the buildings, streaks of sunlight invade the endless streets. Yellow taxis accentuate the colourful, vibrant street scene that looks like candy canes. On either side, countless floors and windows rise skyward. On one of those floors on 42nd Street, the Dance Theatre of Harlem is rehearsing the final scenes of Balamouk, a new creation by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. Who also...
Speaking of bubbles. In the middle of Den Bosch, on the parade square, there are three mega-play blocks you can enter. They are mini theatres, brainchildren of designer Theun Mosk. In one of them, you come across a very large plastic bubble in which young, mostly naked, people move. The audience stands on either side of the bubble feeling uncomfortable. Partly because the naked young people...
It started three years ago. Guilherme Miotto, working as a dance maker in Tilburg, was asked by a good friend of his. Whether he wanted to come and have a look in Noord. There, in that rather notorious slum, there were some fantastic freestyle footballers running around. YouTube runs with them, and the best one, Nasser El Jackson, is even world champion. A ball wizard. That is.
About 18 years ago, while on holiday in the Auvergne region, my wife and I picked up a paraglider that had ended up rather unhappily in a meadow full of indignant cows. We were happy to do something. The paraglider looked grateful, although he was a little worried about the car in which we were going to take him back to...
We have sound from the opening. A speech, interviews with three of the four guides and lots of fine sound from a busy festival square in Den Bosch. Listen in, and above all, come and see for yourself. With your family, on an adventure or as a pearl diver. Or all at once. There is water for everyone, and air conditioning where needed.
With Toost, the Netherlands has gained a food truck festival that does not visit the capital cities but rather the smaller towns. This sometimes causes local friction, but almost always gratitude. And for a consumer who feels not stripped down but taken care of for a change. Halfway through our conversation, Toost Foodtruck Festival organiser Kris de Pee (30) is tapped on the shoulder by the...
Last Tuesday, 24 July, in a week when the whole of the Netherlands is voluntarily lying down for pampus or any other island, the Culture Index came out with an important piece. In 'Five questions about volunteering answered', the Culture Index does indeed answer five questions. The question, however, is how relevant these questions are to the state of professional culture in the Netherlands. And, more importantly, does...
If the weather holds up a bit, the upcoming edition of Theatre Festival Boulevard will be the most tropical in history. The smart ones among us, who opted for a staycation in West Balkonia this year, can indulge their cultural heart in Den Bosch. Not for nothing regularly called 'The Avignon of the Netherlands'. Theatre festival Boulevard is unpacking 2018 with a truly overwhelming...
It did not require a manifesto, nor a fist-thick art-critical treatise in which a learned committee arrives at an all-defining verdict. No, it was a slip of the tongue by an artist, this time defining a new art movement. Olaffur Eliasson, the architect/artist rapidly gaining popularity in the world of design and architecture in recent years, says it in a...
The hip-hop festival Woo Hah! nearly burst at the seams at its fourth edition last year. For its fifth edition, it diverted to the Beekse Bergen in Hilvarenbeek. We walked around there for a day. 'Make that circle bigger, make it bigger! Grooooter!' Speaking is Dutch chart topper Ronnie Flex. If you don't know him from his gigantic hits, then...
In her novel Club Mars, writer Rachel Kushner shows what the life of an inmate looks like inside the four walls. 'I like to include people in my life who have been made invisible in our society,' she says. No mercy Thousands of women are incarcerated in Chowchilla, the jail that was the model for Rachel Kushner's writing of Club Mars. Kushner's...
Manufacturing screws and collecting art is on the face of it like Max Verstappen to Leonardo da Vinci. German billionaire Prof. Dr. h.c. mult. Reinhold Würth, owner of Europe's largest fastener and assembly equipment company, has a total of 10 art museums in Europe and four art annexes in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, France and Spain. No art cathedrals...
What does Billy Wilder have to do with Mad Men and Breaking Bad? Or with a football team in a cave? Everything, it turns out. The filmmaker, who died in 2002, appears to be far, far more important to our visual culture than someone like Alfred Hitchcock. At least: it is beginning to look very much like that. Eye, the striking film theatre and museum in Amsterdam, is from now until...
Tightness. A feeling of oppression prevails when watching the new (mini)series from HBO's stable, Sharp Objects. The series launched this week, but I got to see a few episodes in advance. HBO's Sharp Objects is a film adaptation of the book of the same name by Gillian Flynn, author of, among others, the exciting Gone Girl. With Sharp Objects...
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