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Indien je een mens bent, laat dit veld leeg:.

Daniel Bertina

/// Freelance cultural journalist, critic, writer and dramatist. Omnivore with a love of art, culture & media in all unfathomable gradations between obscure underground and wildly commercial mainstream. Also works for Het Parool and VPRO. And trains Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

'It felt a bit like the first time sex: way too direct, rushed, overactive and largely based on insecurity': Ivo Dimchev in battle with Franz West's wearable art

by Daniel Bertina
15 April 20128 July 2016
4 min read
SPECIALS

"What the fuck should I do with this?" was choreographer and performance artist Ivo Dimchev's (1976) first thought when confronted with the artworks of Austrian artist Franz West. After Dimchev's solo performance Some Faves (2010) in Vienna, West, a multi-awarded creator of bizarre sculptures and objects, sought contact with the choreographer. He asked him to make an improvised video based on his...

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'Sometimes the desire not to be seen turns into an excess of exhibitionism.' - Yasmeen Godder on The Toxic Exotic Disappearance Act

by Daniel Bertina
11 April 201230 March 2022
5 min read
ACTUAL, For members only

She has been busy. Highly pregnant, Yasmeen Godder (Jerusalem, 1973) worked on her first choreography for Batsheva Dance Company. In a month, she stomped out her new performance The Toxic Exotic Disappearance Act under the wings of Batsheva, and in between gave birth to a healthy daughter. scenefoto For the third time, Israeli choreographer Yasmeen Godder is presenting her...

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From insane Moroccan drum 'n bass to alienating dream sounds: Dakka al Marrakchia, Zoumana Diarra & Basile Maneka #WU12

by Daniel Bertina
22 January 20128 July 2016
2 min read
Writers Unlimited

It is incredible what an energy the men of Manar can generate. These six - dressed in djellabas - percussionists play Dekka al Marrakchia: an insanely rousing form of traditional Moroccan drum 'n bass party music and religious Gnawa. After a solemn, almost ritualistic beginning - in which the band comes jogging onto the stage of the Theater aan het Spui in a goose-step, accompanied by the menacing sounds of two huge horns - the drums erupt and the dance floor is full of swinging visitors.

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Edney Silvestre doesn't see the problem, in the Lust & Colour debate. 'In Brazil we're all mixed anyway' #WU12

by Daniel Bertina
21 January 201229 March 2022
2 min read
For members only, SPECIALS, Writers Unlimited

Robert Vuijsje reads aloud (click here!)

"It's raw. The language is very powerful" - calls Brazilian writer Edney Silvestre the passage read by his Dutch colleague Robert Vuijsje. It reminds him of when he was a teenager, reading Henry Miller. "By comparison, this is a bit of a children's story," he says.

The tone is set. In the chaotic Lust & Colour debate, Wim Brands asked three authors about the confluence of horniness and skin

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Column: State of Indulgence by Patrick van der Hijden, opening debate Burger King & Citizenship

by Daniel Bertina
21 January 201229 March 2022
12 min read
ACTUAL, For members only

In the debate Burger King & Citizenship, Patrick van der Hijden, David van Reybrouck, Chris Keulemans and Samuel Vriezen give their views on the state of the citizen. Audiences may, but need not, participate. Below is the column State of Indulgence, recited by Patrick van der Hijden - as a kick-off to the debate.

"Our life was invented in the eighteenth century.

Members of the upper classes - the elite - had their own homes, often with gardens. They sent their children to school, which started...

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Hearing sober prophet of doom John Gray speak is always a relief #WU12

by Daniel Bertina
21 January 201226 October 2018
3 min read
For members only, SPECIALS, Writers Unlimited

In the late 1980s, John N. Gray (South Shields, 1948) was an adviser to Margaret Thatcher - Gray: "I was just a small mote of dust in her administration" - now he is a fierce critic of all things neoconservative. On Writers Unlimited, publicist Bas Heijne felt him out.

Gray is a political philosopher, former lecturer at the prestigious London School of Economics, iconoclast, taoist, prophet of doom and author of magisterially sharp, but at flea...

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In How to be a dictator in Africa, writers Helon Habila and Dinaw Mengestu are remarkably positive about the future of their continent, despite the reservations of David van Reybrouck and moderator Andrew Makkinga.

by Daniel Bertina
20 January 201230 March 2022
3 min read
ACTUAL, For members only

about dctatorsDinaw Mengestu shares his surname with the first name of one of Ethiopia's former dictators. "For now, I am a writer, but aspire to a career as a dictator," he says. Dictators do not arise in a vacuum, Mengestu argues. "We as citizens create our leaders," he says. In his recited story, citizens hand over all their dreams. They shift all their responsibility towards those in power....

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La Fin Du Western is screaming, stomping and spitting tirade against the absurd power struggle in Ivory Coast #dekeuze

by Daniel Bertina
1 October 20118 July 2016
4 min read
ACTUAL

"I love westerns," says one of the African players. "Because you always know how they end. Clearly. With only one winner." On the playing floor are four smoothly twirling, stomping dancing, trained performers from the Ivory Coast. They are a stark contrast to their co-stars: two lumbering, yoghurt-pale and uncoordinated German actors. The Africans speak French, the Germans mostly English. The...

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"Talkshow" by artist Miet Warlop and film scholar Hilde D'haeyere is an overly noncommittal slapstick collage #dekeuze

by Daniel Bertina
28 September 20118 July 2016
3 min read
ACTUAL

She bends over. A huge wooden shot thunders over film scientist Hilde D'haeyere around and smashes against the playing floor. She stays alive through a recess in the wood. Unperturbed, she springs up and continues reading from her essay: a scholarly treatise on function of slapstick in the silent films of Charlie Chapin and Buster Keaton, as well as in the work of visual artist cum theatre maker Miet Warlop.

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Ingmar Bergman becomes opera at Grachtenfestival

by Daniel Bertina
27 July 201130 March 2022
4 min read
ACTUAL, For members only

Amsterdam, 1999. Studying Theatre Science, first-year theatre analysis class. I sit with notepad and pen clutched in fingers, making indecipherable notes. Halfway through the lecture, Sjaron Minailo (Tel Aviv, 1979) saunters in, dressed in a huge fur coat, with big Gucci sunglasses and dreadlocks. With a sigh, he plops into the back lecture bench, hears three sentences of the disrupted lecturer's speech

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#HF11: With The School for Scandal, Deborah Warner gives a gleeful kick to an arch-conservative theatre tradition. The British are not amused.

by Daniel Bertina
2 June 201113 February 2019
6 min read
Holland Festival, SPECIALS

The School for Scandal_8 © Neil Libbert — Photo: Neil Libbert

That was a bit of a grind for British theatre critics. The celebrated director Deborah Warner (1959) recently pulled Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal out of the closet. A play from 1777, and an untouchable part of the British theatre canon. Building on the style of her earlier production Mother Courage (2009) Warner also indicated The School for Scandal - goddamn - a quirky, contemporary twist.

"With many video, light, music and noise - like a rock concert, " grins Warner in the office of the Barbican Theatre In London. "Mother Courage had an incredibly populist, exciting atmosphere. I love that arrogant theatricality immensely, and I wanted to continue that style in The School for Scandal. For me, the big challenge was to explore the Brechtian theatre style of Weimar - which I got through Mother Courage had discovered again - to collide with an eighteenth-century theatre text."

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Via Intolleranza II is an irresistibly witty theatrical chaos about the construction of an opera village.

by Daniel Bertina
27 May 201130 March 2022
5 min read
For members only, SPECIALS

photo: Aino Laberenz

Künstler Christoph Schlingensief - all-rounder, provocateur, director, artist of life - who died of lung cancer last year, will receive an extensive tribute at the Holland Festival: the opening performance Mea Culpa, a programme of seven feature films, and Schlingensief's swan song Via Intolleranza II.

Sick to death, Christoph Schlingensief conceived the wild plan to work in Bur...

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Eugénie Rebetez shows the alienating contrast of a woman who wants to be more and is also at peace with who she is

by Daniel Bertina
23 April 201130 March 2022
3 min read
ACTUAL, For members only

Eugénie Rebetez in 'Gina'. Photo: Augustin Rebetez.

Her full thighs clatter together. She shakes her bare arms, grinning at the trembling skin on her upper arms. She stomps furiously across the Theatre Kikker's playing floor, while her hefty body - dressed in a small, nondiscreet black dress - emphatically bounces happily on all sides. You just have to dare. In h...

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Yasmeen Godder lets contrast between frightened individual and roaring group animal linger too much in dancers' minds

by Daniel Bertina
20 April 201129 March 2022
3 min read
ACTUAL, For members only

Dancers by Yasmeen Godder - photo Itzik Giuli

She is on her knees. Shaking and trembling, she jerks backwards. With clawed fingers that seem to grasp at the void. Like a frightened cat. Shuffling, the dancer moves backwards in a semicircle on the white stage floor of Theatre Frog. One by one, the five others step onto the empty open stage, while the first dancer anxiously faces the audience ...

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Welcome to the Culture Press archive! As a member, you have access to all, over 4,000 posts we have made since our inception in 2009!

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