Things we do for members and partners.
September, the month of the Dutch Theatre Festival and the Fringe Festival full of old and new performances you must see. But a lot is also happening in the rest of the country at the start of the new theatre season. Five must-sees. Toneelgroep Maastricht, Eyes wide shut (theatre) 'The new Shakespeare' he has been called, I already called him 'devil's advocate'. Fact...
Recently, Lidy Blijdorp (* 1986) took over the cello of well-known cellist Anner Bijlsma (* 1934). It was his wish for the instrument to be played by her from now on. Via the Netherlands Music Instruments Fund (NMF), the instrument came to her. The maker of this cello is not known. However, it is certain that it originated from...
The summer period is a fine time for catch-up reading - books from recent times that you still wanted to read but didn't get around to before - but we also got a glimpse of a few upcoming titles. That made for a fine, varied crop this month. Eifel adventures Since The Detour, there hasn't been a new novel...
In these election times, it is just how you put it and calculate it. That 24 million extra for culture, which Pechtold triumphantly mentioned with the addition that 'the journey through the desert is over after 2016', has, for the time being, as much value as Rutte's illustrious 1,000 euros: first see, then believe. And since Pechtold gave no further explanation,...
When you go to a concert, you think about the music, the ensemble, the soloist and/or the conductor. Maybe you look up something about the composer but you never think about the programmer who made the concert possible. Astrid in 't Veld is someone who thinks about the range of concerts on offer years in advance in order to help you with...
Brexit has given an extra charge to many programmes at the Fringe. But what is British anyway, and where do you belong?
'At the time, under the influence of the populists, we perhaps went too far in our attack on art subsidies.' So declared Jeroen Hatenboer, VVD member and culture alderman of the municipality of Enschede, during the annual Paradiso debate at the end of the Uitmarkt 2016. In the context of the current cabinet's sorry campaign, quite an interesting footnote, and entirely appropriate in the upcoming...
In Dance Around The World, ex-dancers Jan Kooijman and Ish Ait Hamou travel the world. Because dance connects. That makes for television that is more fun than you think. The programme, now being trialled in 3Lab, is a kind of cross between Top Gear and Looking for God. Were you already bombarded to death with celebrities looking for religion...
First there was Arthur Schnitzler's book. Then Stanley Kubrick's film. And now the play. From 27 August, Toneelgroep Maastricht plays Eyes wide shut. After his wife confesses her sexual fantasies, a man searches feverishly for his own deepest hidden desires against the backdrop of carnival celebrations. "I always wanted to make psychologised drama once," says Servé Hermans, artistic director of...
What is a memory worth? A first kiss, for example: how much poorer are you if it is forgotten? In hard euros. Such questions Greg Nottrot likes to ask his audience, and we, his grateful listeners, gladly join in his money thought experiments. The man who, with Oscar Kocken, came up with the revolutionary concept of the live talk show Order of the Day, now makes,...
Retrospectively, I proclaim last Monday night, 15/8, as the opening of my cultural season. Viavia I ended up, in fine company, at the Crazy Goat. A music cafe that might as well have been in New York, Paris or Berlin. This is in The Hague: an ini-mini stage in a building where the money is not spent on chipped-up old school benches,...
10 days of Festival Boulevard. I threw myself into it. I saw 14 performances, saw a lot of corners of Den Bosch (and Tilburg) up close and experienced more different theatre than usual in six months. I also ate more chips than is good for me, drank more beer than usual and enjoyed eavesdropping on conversations of...
Tim Honnef is one of the few Dutch with a performance at the Fringe. How did he end up here?
The hero who does not know his own strength (Wildman); a mad scientist who goes too fast for everyone (Galileo); a dream empress who gives thanks for the fairy-tale wedding and steps out of her role (Sisi); guinea pigs who rebel against the popularity contest they are caught up in (Guinea pig!) and an ugly duckling who accepts the chaos, but doubts that the chaos...
Jetse Batelaan is one of the greatest theatre innovators of this still young century. His star rose in 2003, with a show in which five unique actors made reality theatre, and vice versa. Now, 13 years later, Batelaan has been the boss of one of the country's best youth theatre companies for some time, pushing the boundaries of that industry once again. And that...
It has been eagerly awaited for weeks: the Night of Poetry. For the thirty-fourth time next month, poets and audience gather around the stage for a night of verses and music. Regular presenter Piet Piryns, now fused with the event, looks back and ahead. He remembers it well, his first...
Let's talk about breasts (m/f). Or, if that's a bit too confrontational: the tendency of young up-and-coming acting talents to get naked on stage. And then do something with juice. Of fruit mostly, or just water, or oil and glitter. At Festival Boulevard yesterday, for the third time in a week, I had...
Being the best at your craft, and then not in one craft, but in three or so. That, too, is what makes an artist an artist. Ben Duke is a great artist. He is a gifted dancer, a phenomenal actor and a cum laude graduate in English literature. It is therefore logical that he wrote the greatest poem in British history, the...
At the end of this month, Toneelgroep Maastricht will present 'Eyes wide shut'. The play is an adaptation of Stanley Kubrick's film of the same name. The latter was in turn inspired by Arthur Schnitzler's 'Droomnovelle'. The book was published 90 years ago and caused quite a stir. Sexual charge Over the years, quite a few literary studies have been devoted to Dreamnovelle. But what has...
Friday afternoon, 5 August 2016. The weather is nice. In the intercity to Den Bosch, I read a book I couldn't finish on holiday. I can't manage it this time either: Den Bosch is always closer than you think. Again, the walk from the station to the Joseph Quarter takes less time than Google Maps indicated to me. That came...
The world is changing quite a bit and it's nice when artists do something with it. Festival Boulevard gives Lizzy Timmers the opportunity to make an attempt. That attempt, performed in a somewhat run-down cultural centre in a real Bossche power district, is quite something. Backurk is the name of this semi-documentary performance. Timmers has immersed herself in young, well-educated, well-integrated Turks who have come to the Netherlands to...
No, these sentences are not in Griet Op de Beeck's theatre monologue Mona, but nicely sum up the bestseller Come Here That I Kiss You (28 printings in just under two years). Op de Beeck adapted the first part into one of Festival Boulevard's most impressive performances. We do see nine-year-old Mona's sentence as a backdrop, complete...
Amazing how more than a thousand performers at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival are willing to try their hand at the most difficult genre: comedy
Project Cloud, the latest experiential artwork by Bossche city artist Lucas de Man, may need a disclaimer. Anyone entering the seven-storey work had better not do so in the company of a solid existential crisis. The visitor before me did, and still needed a very good talk with a psychological counsellor afterwards. Who...
Once upon a time there was this film, Ladri di Biciclette, Bicycle Thieves in Dutch. Italian director Vittorio de Sica established a totally new film movement with it in 1948: neo-realism. Amateur actors pretty much played their own lives at the bottom of the social ladder. Engaging, inspired, raw and confrontational, especially at the time. Little people, caught in the spiral of social...
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