Members of Culture Press co-own our cooperative for a small monthly or annual fee, and may also contribute content to the site when appropriate. For members with an institutional membership, we offer the possibility of posting their press releases unabridged. Also want to become a member? You can. Please visit this page
At the request of the Holland Festival, Jamie McDermott of The Irrepressibles created a new programme: Human Music Box. The ten-member British band will start its world tour in Amsterdam. The premiere on Friday 17 June at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ became a subdued, musical evening that was especially visually appealing. In the middle of the Grote Zaal was a large, rotating...
"Alifib" by British progrocker Robert Wyatt (b. 1945) is a song that gets under the skin. Wyatt's near-breaking voice sounds so genuinely sad that it takes your breath away. It seems an impossible task to perform "Alifib" convincingly without the master himself. Yet the French Orchestre National de Jazz gets it right. Where Wyatt in the original...
That the Off Broadway musical Fela! was a success, we could actually expect. For The Dodo, we therefore did not send anyone there either: there are already enough newspapers and other bloggers eager to have a front-row seat to the New York audience favourite. You can read that they had a good time elsewhere on this site, via the blogstream
Papageno showed off without his feathers last night. Indeed, the entire direction of Une flûte enchantée was an unadorned pleasure. Sober. Integral. You can't get a Dutch audience wilder than with such an approach. Compliments, then, to Peter Brook. At the Muziekgebouw aan het IJ was the Dutch premiere of Brook's adaptation of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte. The production turned...
Two boys beat a guitar with a baseball bat, which was hanging on a rope in the air. Moments before, they also battered the instrument in a strange game of tug-of-war, during which the guitar regularly hit the ground. Both times, shrill, nasty sounds fill the room. The games are played with a deadly serious face, so they seem to be telling something to the visitors. But what actually? That question keeps spinning through your head with almost every theatrical moment in The Long Count. The project by twin brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner of indie rock band The National sounds rather exciting. For instance, the announcement calls it a multimedia concert, with a song cycle that is supposed to focus on the time before our world began. The musicians created it with video artist Matthew Ritchie and used the Popol Vuh, a historical-mythological text by a Mayan people from Guatemala about those early days, as inspiration. In the show, they aim to make connections between Mayan myth and their own lives.
In the Netherlands, the view of opera is mainly guided by concert practice. As such, the Dutch approach to this genre differs considerably from what is common in the rest of Euroa. This is evident from the fact that over the past century, investments have been made in concert halls that are among the best in the world: the Amsterdam...
This week the Holland Festival erupts and we are there. We are producing a Dodo Festival Day newspaper with a sizeable team of professional journalists, as we did before for Springdance and The International Choice of the Rotterdam Schouwburg, for example. We follow the festival closely to bring news as it happens. We go to see performances where others...
When even André Rieu gets involved, the asparagus is done. In Maastricht, but also in The Hague. Because André Rieu, that's Limburg, that's popular culture, that's, according to the ministry, the country's most important export product and if it says you have to keep your hands off the Limburg Symphony Orchestra, then you keep your hands...
There is no such thing as the perfect human being. We are all crooks. Or is there a way to get it right? Ilay den Boer and the actors of De Utrechtse Spelen / De Warme Winkel each explore in their own way at the 26th edition of Festival aan de Werf. Wasn't my grandfather just an asshole? That...
Case in point: more people are against cuts than the ministry would have us believe. On page 32 of the now heavily controversial brochure 'Cultuur in Beeld', the ministry writes: "In the CDE, carried out at the end of 2010, citizens were asked to indicate from 17 policy fields whether they think the central government should spend (a lot) less or (a lot) more money on...
The opening images are apt: Joop van den Ende among men in togas, behind a real Pedel (the man with the bells), apathetic. And rightly so, of course. Because the once head man of cultural-entrepreneurial Holland, who started out in a party goods shop, achieved academic status without ever studying. For the man who always felt somewhat disadvantaged by the cultural and intellectual...
Of course, you were all lining up for that legendary Richard III by Orkater with music by Tom Waits. Or you had locked yourself in for Oostpool's small-room gem 'Till the fat lady sings', or you just didn't want to miss an episode of O O Cherso and The Voice of Holland. Anyway: now you know what you...
Russian conductor Valeri Gergjev was back in Rotterdam for a while, for one concert. He conducted his own orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), in de Doelen. The famous orchestra played repertoire that we in our country know inside out: Gustav Mahler's 1st symphony and Dmitri Shostakovich's 1st piano concerto. A now historic combination: because the Netherlands has become fused...
There is an interesting 'drone' underneath, and that may strike someone as menacing. In any case, the video at the end of this article has more meaning than many culture lovers might think. The fact is that the sweeping cuts made by the UK government through their 'Arts Council' have met with hardly any protests in retrospect, while the disproportionality in the cut...
[View the story "Theatre sector versus Council for Culture" on Storify]
It's easy to cycle past it as a Utrechter, the Basis voor Actuele Kunst (BAK) in Lange Nieuwstraat, but internationally few can ignore it. BAK is big. Under the leadership of artistic director Maria Hlavajova, who is as ineffable as she is sympathetic, the centre has become a leading centre in the world of contemporary art. A few years ago,...
Although the announcement of 'sonic tapestry: Shoes, part V' by Tomoko Mukaiyama can be read as a variant of Sex and the City on classical music, Sarah Jessica Parker would forever look at her Manolo Blahniks differently after seeing Mukaiyama's performance. This very special piano recital was Saturday 7 May at LP2 (Room 2 of the Rotterdam...
About a decade ago, on the main stage of Rotterdam's De Doelen concert hall, there stood a frail and still searching young woman, a singer-songwriter in a language other than English. Sometimes in Portuguese but mostly in the criollo of the Cape Verde islands, this Sara Tavares presented, with minimal accompaniment, her CD 'Mi ma bô' that would later give her international...
It was predictable. Now that the Culture Council has given the secretary of state a go-ahead for massive and very deep cuts in dance, the first press releases are appearing with the outraged reactions. The National Ballet and Nederlands Dans Theater are aggrieved: 'How
We at culture press did not use the word cheese slicer, so it is not about us, but still. Today, the Council for Culture is reacting rather furiously to the many negative reactions to its advice issued last week. Of course, it is also kind of unfortunate that the Council has to issue an opinion that it itself does not support at all, and then the...
Admittedly, our method of reviewing (see our contributions on Springdance and De Internationale Keuze) is new to the Netherlands, but in the States a few were already doing it. For example, the two yummy guys Andrew and Andrew are doing well with their iPhones, doing the same as the Dodo with the Kodak Zi8 (no shares, though we would love to be sponsored...
Our overview of Twitter responses to the Council for Culture's advice, released on 29 April. [View the story "Twitter reacts to Council for Culture advice" on Storify]
Once again, we are using a new web service. Just to see how it works. Feel free to let us know (in the comments) if you find us too geeky. We'll do something about it. [View the story "Springdance 2011" on Storify]
On Wednesday 27 April 2011, we reported on the annual symposium of the Royal Association of Booksellers. Interesting bi9jeen meeting, we can say, but of course not every speaker was as brilliant as Eppo van Nispen tot Sevenaar, the director of the Collective Propaganda of the Dutch Book Foundation, whom from now on we will call the John and Jesus of the storytelling industry...
Springdance Utrecht has ended. Boris Charmatz gave the last performance of the Utrecht dance festival last night with "Levée des conflits". Critics Fransien van der Putt and Daniël Bertina already show their opinions in the film below. They also have a conversation with Boris Charmatz. Read more about this performance.
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français