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Podcast: This is how to freshen up the opening of a poetry festival. Poetry International Rotterdam successfully deploys rejuvenation.

The lectern. The lectern. The paper holder, if possible with its own light, which, shining upwards, draws stern shadows of the reading glasses on the poet's face. It is the kind of necessary evil that every poetry or literature festival has to deal with. Only the powerpoint is missing to make it a boring seed onion conference. Poetry International Festival Rotterdam has in... 

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Hope for the Metropole Orchestra. Thanks to News Hour.

Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven will 'do something' for the Metropole Orchestra this autumn. She made this known in a letter to the House of Representatives today. Literally it says: 'I will include the solution to the Metropole Orchestra's problem in my consideration around the deployment of the 2019 coalition agreement funds tranche. My consideration in this regard is that in the coalition agreement,... 

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100 years of De Ploeg at the Groninger Museum: a visual treat

With its colourful exhibition Avant-garde in Groningen. De Ploeg 1918-1928, the Groninger Museum (unofficially) kicks off the year of De Ploeg. On 5 June 2018, it will be 100 years since a number of young Groningen artists set themselves apart from the established (art) order with their collective De Ploeg broke new ground. "Because there wasn't much to do in Groningen... 

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Why Italian women struggle with motherhood. Writer Silvia Avallone cuts taboos in new novel

She is young, beautiful and well-spoken. Writer Silvia Avallone, known for her bestseller Staal, does not shy away from sensitive themes in her compelling new novel Levenslichtde either, such as the economic crisis, infertility and unevenly divided parenthood. 'Claiming freedom for yourself is something terrifying for an Italian woman.' Rough edges Poverty, economic malaise, gender inequality...... 

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Gesualdo project at @hollandfestival by De Warme Winkel: 'We want to anoint and flog the ears' #HF18

Say 'Carlo Gesualdo' and you say 'heavenly music', and 'cruel disposition'. This Renaissance composer's name is inextricably linked to the gruesome double murder he committed on his wife and lover when he found them in flagrante delicto. Who else but The Warm Shop could make an appealing performance of this thought Tido Visser, artistic director of the Netherlands Chamber Choir. So. 

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Film concert featuring West Side Story, Bernstein's indictment of discrimination

Leonard Bernstein would have turned 100 this year. The AVROTROS Friday Concert puts his most popular piece, West Side Story, on the programme on Saturday (!) 26 May. The Radio Philharmonic Orchestra will play the electrifying music full of ecstatic melodies and vital dances live at the integral screening of the original 1961 film. The whole thing is conducted by the young American conductor 

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Untitled's Lenny Oosterwijk opens door for @poetry_en: 'I love accessible work that captivates an Albert Heijn cashier as much as a university professor.'

When you first see Lenny Oosterwijk, you don't think: ha, a gallery owner. Somehow, you expect a more posh look with that. But the man who founded Galerie Untitled in 2011 in Rotterdam Noord comes from a different background. He is a photographer and art director and worked for a time at the most stolen magazine.... 

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A Tale of a Tub: 'Poetry is a new way of looking at the world.' @poetry_en Rotterdam offers fascinating collaboration with visual artists

What lies on the ground, spread over a white sheet? Hard to determine. Shrapnel? Aircraft parts? Battered remains? Upon entering A Tale of a Tub, the impression is unsettling, and slightly overwhelming. A crime scene, but unclear who, what or where it is about. They appear to be plants, but magnified and cast in bronze. But that see... 

Read More "A Tale of a Tub: 'Poetry is a new way of looking at the world.' @poetry_en Rotterdam offers fascinating collaboration with visual artists

René Ten Bos tells on SPOT-Live why we play stage: 'On four legs we don't look it.'

'I recently spent a day working with municipal administrators. It was about bureaucracy. Well, if anything is about bureaucracy, it is the work of Samuel Beckett. So I also invited theatre people to illustrate what I was talking about with Becketian texts.' Philosopher René ten Bosch, currently Denker des Vaderlands, is one of the three curators of the... 

Read More "René Ten Bos tells on SPOT-Live why we play stage: 'On four legs we don't look it.'

German Anna Karenina in @hollandfestival as seventies disco show: 'We were sometimes worried whether we were going too far. But then we always had the music.'

Germans and humour. I have a bad experience with that. Will largely be because I don't get the finer nuances of the language, especially if it is meant for laughter. So it's not that the German sense of humour is wrong. In fact, sometimes something can just happen in German theatre that makes you laugh. I want... 

Read More "German Anna Karenina in @hollandfestival as seventies disco show: 'We were sometimes worried whether we were going too far. But then we always had the music.'

Composer Marijn Simons: 'Everything is about timing'

Although the press picks it up only sparsely, not only the NTRZaterdagMatinee pays much attention to Dutch composers. Indeed, they are also well represented in the AVROTROS Vrijdagconcert (formerly De Vrijdag van Vredenburg). In 2014, for instance, Joey Roukens wrote The building of the temple to mark the reopening of TivoliVredenburg. Two years later, the season opened with Atlantis by Robin... 

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Podcast: This year, Poetry International explores the role of nationalism in poetry.

Jan Baeke has been associated with Poetry International as a programmer for many years. In this podcast, I talk to him about the programme and the theme of this 49th edition: The Nation of Poetry. It's about nationalism, of course, but also about identity. And about what role poetry plays in that. And then, of course, it's not primarily about folk songs. We... 

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La clemenza di Tito: scorching performance by Teodor Currentzis & musicAeterna

Classical music matters again. - At least if we judge by the protests against the Stockhausen project and the fierce polemics about opera directors' interventions. Teodor Currentzis and Peter Sellars' La clemenza Di Tito, for instance, caused controversy even before its Dutch premiere. They deleted the interminable recitatives and added music from Mozart's Mass in... 

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Resolved(?): Ombudsman Allegiance admits carelessness.

This was the email from the editors of Trouw, dated 9 May 2018: "Mr A. Bakx has had the phone number and email address we now have from him under this name since 2014. We therefore assume that he is A. Bakx." Was supported by an email to Erwin Roebroeks, which mentioned a telephone conversation with... 

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Why Wierd Duk often does exactly what he fights himself.

Uproar. A widely recognised and by his own admission always attacked opinion maker with a slight preference for strong men in Russia and America has discovered that art is leftist and elitist. Indeed, Wierd Duk, Russia expert since he spent a few years running around Moscow for various media outlets, writes in the Telegraph that art is often left-wing kitsch[ref]N[ref][/ref]Wierd Duk has since revealed... 

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Everyone is welcome at Pitfest. 'Bands playing at our place should be especially hard, or dirty and grimy.'

The Drenthe village of Erica was rocked on the last weekend of April by the cosy noise festival Pitfest. And that attracted a motley mix of people. I walked around there for a day. A golf cart zooms across the roundabout of the 4-star resort in the outskirts of the Drenthe town of Erica. To the right of the tarmac are tightly mowed golf courses, to the left is a plot of land... 

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Daria Bukvić holds up a mirror to theatres and companies on SPOT Live: 'I don't shy away from new forms of marketing.'

'With my performances, I always try to make people feel that they are really going to miss a happening. 'The first performance with personal stories of four Moroccan-Dutch actresses in the big theatres of the Netherlands, the newest this, the most surprising that.' Daria Bukvić is one of the most exciting creators to enter the theatre world in recent years. She is not only... 

Read More "Daria Bukvić holds up a mirror to theatres and companies on SPOT Live: 'I don't shy away from new forms of marketing.'

'Saigon' director (@hollandfestival) seeks extreme emotions: 'I don't want any more distance between the story and the audience.'

'Never, never would I make a performance about my mother, or about myself. Jamais.' Caroline Guiela Nguyen, child of 'a marriage between a Vietnamese mother and a 'pied-noir' (Algerian colonial) is not into personal stories. The theatre-maker captured audiences' hearts at last year's Avignon Festival with the play Saigon. This moving, deeply human play... 

Read More "'Saigon' director (@hollandfestival) seeks extreme emotions: 'I don't want any more distance between the story and the audience.'

Merlijn Twaalfhoven on SPOT-Live: 'Outside the Randstad lies a huge source of inspiration'

'I have knocked on the door of the Congress of Performing Arts a few times in recent years on my own initiative, really from the idea that we can do a lot more as venues in the Netherlands. But yes, every time I was there, people got enthusiastic, but does it stick?' Composer Merlijn Twaalfhoven is happy that he now serves as 'curator' of SPOT Live, the new... 

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Who pays the artist? Lower House hears about shocking reality in the arts in roundtable discussion

Whether the artists performing on DWDD got paid for their performance. Esther Ouwehand of the PvdD did not know. She was not the only one, at the roundtable session on Wednesday 25 April on the labour market in the cultural sector. None of the MPs, fund managers, trade unionists present knew. So we asked on facebook and twitter how it was even done.... 

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A fertile repertoire landscape.

Performing arts policy greatly determines what can be seen and heard on Dutch stages. It underpins government funding of theatre and music. This policy pays a lot of attention to the quality of performances, but it hardly discusses the choice of pieces played, let alone what kind of repertoire landscape... 

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Annelies van Parys: 'No more beautiful symbol of love than a flower'

In 2014, Annelies van Parys (1975) composed her first opera, Private View, for Asko|Schönberg and Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart. It was awarded the FEDORA - Rolf Liebermann Prize for Opera shortly afterwards. The Stuttgart singers submissively asked her to compose a new piece for them. Songs of Love and War/An Archive of Love will premiere 20 May at Operadagen... 

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That's why Iris Hannema is the best travel writer in the Netherlands: 'Anyone who has not made a good fool of himself on a trip has not really been somewhere.'

'Iris Hannema writes like a guy,' I wrote a few years ago in a review of her The Bittersweet Paradise (2016). You wouldn't get away with that now. Actually, I meant to say: Iris Hannema writes solid, image-rich, independent ánd critical texts that you rarely come across in female as well as male travel journalists. Why that is, I will tell you later. Get lost' Typical... 

Read More "That's why Iris Hannema is the best travel writer in the Netherlands: 'Anyone who has not made a good fool of himself on a trip has not really been somewhere.'

Cellist Maya Fridman: 'The best thing about making music is communicating with my audience.'

Cellist Maya Fridman was born in Moscow in 1989, where she emerged as a child prodigy. Even while still studying at Schnittke College, she won first prize at the International Festival of Slavic Music. In 2010, she came to the Netherlands, where six years later she graduated Cum Laude from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. Fridman naturally places contemporary... 

Read More "Cellist Maya Fridman: 'The best thing about making music is communicating with my audience.'

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