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The Springdance Festival in Utrecht is coming to an end. Today, the last performances take place. Three reviewers from the Cultureel Persbureau look back on the festival, in an interview with Jeroen Stout. Reviewer Fransien van der Putt does get spring fever from Springdance, she says in the interview: 'This festival exceeded my expectations.' Daniël Bertina (also a critic) also found it a particularly...
With their name, the five Japanese of contact Gonzo refer to the gonzo journalism by the late Hunter S. Thompson. Raw, harsh and subjective. Thomspon also showed how he worked in his pieces. Contact Gonzo warms up during the performance, taking snapshots of each other with disposable cameras and passing the water bottle. Gonzo-style: what you see is what you get.
Contact Gonzo adheres to simple rules. For example gravity: jumping and coming down. Or attracting and repelling: pushing, pulling, like a rugby scrum. In doing so, they touch on minimal art that adhered to a set of parameters; one thinks of Sol LeWitt.
Terts Brinkhoff , founder of De Parade, has a set of sheds on the frayed edge of Weesp in which all the travelling festival's tents are stored, when not rented out. In April, the management (now Ray van Santen and Nicole van Vessum) gathers all the artists from the upcoming summer tour there for an introduction. Press time, of course. And with the weather like...
We gathered the cream of Dutch dance journalism for these ten days of dance innovation. Fransien van de Putt, well known in Belgium and the Netherlands, Maarten Baanders, well known in the wide surroundings of Leiden and Daniël Bertina, well known in the wide surroundings of Het Parool were ij the opening of Springdance and were actually happy with what they got to see. ...
Jens van Daele concludes his series of choreographies on the seven deadly sins with the performance Brides for Peace. The piece is based on the art performance Brides on Tour by Italian artists Pippa Bacca and Silvia Moro. Hitchhiking and dressed in wedding dresses, with a text 'Peace' on their chests, they travelled from Milan to Jerusalem in 2008. The journey went...
We could say something derogatory about Belgians and arithmetic, but we won't. Firstly, because the Belgians have disbanded themselves and, secondly, because there is nothing wrong with the Flemings' ability to calculate. At least, those Flemings who have calculated at the Flemish Theatre Institute how the subsidy money for the arts is spent. In Flanders. And it turns out that.
Reports of the collapsing music industry have been rife. Apparently, as a musician, you no longer survive on the basis of record sales (alone). In niche genres, however, it is easy to survive. So proves the band Current 93, which performed in Stadtgarten, Cologne, last week. Playing live a lot and selling merchandise seems to be the golden rule for...
Amsterdam-based company Dood Paard itself translated Shakespeare's 'Othello' and waves goodbye to the bard with 'Bye Bye'. The quirky collective performs a one-and-a-half-hour topical comedy of manners and soul mirror, in which pointing at 'The Other' is central. Shakespeare's plays are quite often performed quite reverently. . Moreover, the adored 'bard' from Stratford-upon-Avon has bestowed on the English language countless expressions that have come to...
Of course we are being horribly abused. By the coughing chain-smoker with his trench coat in that Hague car park. Is there a bigger plan behind it. Which again we know nothing about, but which will become clear on 23 May. So be it. Until then, we can do nothing but slavishly write down what the coughing oracle coughs at us. Well: We already knew that...
Trouble with your voice? You don't talk about that. Because competition is so high in the music industry, there is a taboo on showing weaknesses. While the consequences would be much smaller if attention was given to it sooner. Time for the Muziek Centrum Nederland to ask the question at its music café on 3 March where...
Bettina Masuch (1964) has been artistic director of Springdance since 2008 and presents its third festival programme this year. We asked the woman behind this leading festival for innovative dance about this season's highlights. One of the performances she describes already makes us very curious: the Japanese street fighters of Contact Gonzo. Could just happen that somewhere between 14 and...
Art costs money. The current Rutte administration has hammered that into it: it's expensive, no one but a small club of insiders goes there, and either way those are leftists or pseudo-leftists who can easily pay for it themselves. So much for the government's opinion. The opinion of the art world can be guessed: it is...
The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra currently has an unprecedented luxury: it is releasing CDs on two labels at the same time. How is that possible? The orchestra signed under its own name with BIS Records, the label with which the eccentric owner Von Bahr releases one extraordinary recording after another, while chief conductor Yannick Néze-Séguin is old-fashionedly under contract as maestro with EMI....
This message has since been confirmed by the Halbe Zijlstra on 14 March. We thank our source for being accurate. We once again visited our trench-coat-clad coughing chain-smoker in his Hague car park. Because there had been no news from The Hague for another week, and with the elections so close to the door, that's always...
It looked like a party. Coffee and flan, a Maastricht song, brass band music and a speech by Prince Carnival. Optimism surrounded the launch of the website nadeschreeuwnudestem.nl on 21 February. Surely the cry for culture in November was mainly a voice of dissent. Now there is a chance to take forward-looking action. 'Mobilise everyone you know to join the March 2...
Sometimes this is not about hard news, subsidy stress or downplaying for a while, but about other matters of art. Director and writer Erik Snel sent us the following sigh, now made topical again by
We had done the necessary research work ourselves, and then it turned out that something had also been sent to the House of Representatives, which contained many more figures. We asked for those figures and were shocked. After 2012, when the current arts plan expires and after a year of inaction and wait and see for the whole sector a...
The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra is rated differently by conductors. Either you can get along with it and then it's a party, or it never becomes anything and then it stays at the occasional conducting session. Moreover, the musicians' enormous responsiveness is feared.
OK. A pilot. When Jeroen Stout lost his Wednesday film fork in Radio Kunststof on Radio 1 in December 2010, we made him an offer he could easily refuse: to do something like that with us. But that we would then look for a way that suits The Dodo. After all, audio online may be the...
The International Film Festival Rotterdam celebrates its fortieth edition with a fitting XL programme. That Roman numeral XL not only indicates respectable age. It also says something about size: this fortieth also bursts with the intiguing programme, with screenings at no less than forty locations throughout the inner city of Rotterdam. Inside the festival walls is...
Now in terms of tax money, they already spend hardly anything on the arts, in America. But many think even that is too much. Earlier, we reported on Facebook and Twitter about Republican America's call to abolish subsidies altogether. Meanwhile, the president of the National American Arts Fund NAE (National Endowment of the Arts) has taken a bat...
If you work at a municipality or province and/or know the exact measures your government organisation will take in the coming years in the field of culture, we would like to have those figures. It may be anonymous, of course, if you don't want your exact cuts or investments to be out on the street, and it saves us a lot of wob...
Imeanwhile, the website has been updated, but since this post prompted that update, we are leaving it up.
Always good to support a new initiative. That's why we also welcomed the constructive plan from
Jeffrey Meulman, director of The Dutch Theatre Festival TF, reacted to Rutte's statements in Buitenhof, which also seen on this site his. He then received a letter back
Fransz Litszt, born in 1811, explored every nook and cranny of the piano in his work, trying to incorporate every conceivable technique. As this contemporary of Carl Czerny, Niccolo Paganini and Richard Wagner was born 200 years ago this year, so there is a Liszt year. The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra bit the bullet of that on Friday 28 January,...
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