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Op woensdag 21 juni worden de Zilveren Griffels, Zilveren Penselen en Paletten en de Vlag en Wimpels uitgereikt – de opmaat voor de de uitreiking van Het Gouden Penseel en Het Gulden Palet in september en de Gouden Griffel in oktober. Interview met de Gouden Griffel-winnares van vorig jaar, Anna Woltz, over schrijven, volwassen worden en de Griffels natuurlijk. Door Tijmen…
Later, when I grow up... Lawyer Susan van 't Hullenaar (1970) always dreamed of becoming a writer. As her 12.5-year work anniversary approached, she realised: I have to take the plunge now, otherwise it won't happen. She quit her job, became her own boss as a copywriter and picked up her pen - well, the computer. 'I gave...
Flexing is a street dance style from Brooklyn, New York. Thirteen men, three women strong is the formation that has caused a furore in America in various guises (HyperActive, MainEventt, Ringmasters), from the local talent show Flex in Brooklyn to America's Best Dance Crew. Now the crew, led by pioneer Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray, is on a world tour with a show, which they will perform with the...
On Anton de Komplein, it is less cosy than on the roof of Parking 58 in Brussels, where I saw danse de nuit earlier. Above South-East, the moon is hidden behind a thick haze, the square feels big and empty so without the market. The performance by choreographer Boris Charmatz/Musée de la Danse, also today and tomorrow,...
Rito de Primavera, on show at the Holland Festival early this week, is a group choreography for fifty young dancers. Choreographer José Vidal has loosely based himself on Sacre du printemps, Stravinsky and Nijinsky's 1913 piece for the Ballet Russes. Fragments of Stravinsky's music have been turned into 4-quarter beetz by DJ Jim Hast, while Vidal has minimised the ritual aspect of the sacrifice, essential to the many versions made throughout the 20th century (besides Nijinsky's primal version, Massine, Béjart and Bausch, among others).
What remains is an overwhelming visual experience of a gigantic mass of dancers looming out of the darkness. The coordination of the group, at times dancing wildly through each other, at other times circling the stage in long procession, is impressive. It produces a fascinating, eye-opening aesthetic, but the group dance in no way challenges the audience. You could call it a pile of kitsch, or opium for the people. Either way, it is a form of spectacle that I consider unworthy of the Holland Festival.
The performance begins like a school trip. Near the box office, spectators are prepared in groups for what is to come. They are kindly requested to take off their shoes upon entering the theatre, and then walk barefoot, hand in hand with fellow spectators, through the dark. Regularly, someone calls loudly for silence, as the performance has already started. There is also something uncomfortable about the nervous manner in which the audience, which is supposed to line up in rows after the instructions, is marched away to the performance space two buildings away.
The initiation of the visitors continues in the Purification Hall, when they pass through the pitch darkness hand in hand with the cool sand at their feet. It provides one of the few ambiguous moments during Rito de Primavera. Where is this going? What fairy tale are we being led into here? From which tourist boat have we fallen off, to now attend the rituals of which people again?
At first, the total experience that so many contemporary theme parks are looking for really takes shape. For half an hour, I stare at a stage in the dark. I see and feel a lot of people there, I think naked because sometimes there is a clever flash of soft light, but the dominant darkness prevents me from getting a grip on it. Ethereal singing composed by Andrés Abarzúa - a single chord sounds gurgling from many throats - accompanies the entrance of all the other spectators for half an hour.
The bleachers surround the playing surface. It is only the red and white bicycle lights of the guides of the many groups of spectators that give you some orientation in the space. It has something of Tintin in Takatukaland. An audience paying to be at a miraculous, never-before-seen, spring nymphing ritual.
The artificiality of the setting gives a certain tension. In the darkness, as a spectator, you can imagine all sorts of things about what is to come. But at some point, the bicycle lights go out, a sign that all spectators are seated, and the dancers all put on trousers. The light increases and the first beetz cum stravinsky supplants the singing. When, after the uncertain introitus, the actual spectacle begins, its logic becomes all too clear. A perfectly organised group choreography takes over.
In what follows, nothing is left to chance. And that is no luxury with so many dancers in semi-darkness, especially as half of them are also new to the work, because from the Modern Theatre Dance Department of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. The group makes pulsating movements, dialogues with a neighbour, runs in groups, starts singing again, postures and occasionally lifts a single person in the air.
But just as the darkness gets used, so does the group. They are all very young people, fairly relaxed dancing together. The uninhibited attitude with which the complicated group choreographies are performed is touching. A naive kind of surrender or faith speaks from it.
But gradually the effects, of the group choreography, of the light that creates the photographic vistas, the repetitive singing and beetz get boring. The repetition of moves is effect-laden, rhetorical, self-affirming. Nowhere a moment of debacle, of faltering. No one who has a question, can't keep up, is mistaken
A Quattro Mani’s pop-uprecente Afke Bohle ging de uitdaging aan om met haar oudste zoon een boek te lezen. Na het eerste deel in De Groene Hand-serie van Susan van ’t Hullenaar volgt al snel het tweede. En wat schetst haar verbazing: nu duurt het wachten op deel drie eigenlijk te lang… Mijn jongste zoon is dol op boeken, maar…
Boris Charmatz has been a guest at many editions of the Holland Festival with impressive, provocative, socially engaged, finely composed and conceptually strong dance performances: Aatt enen tionon and Con forts fleuve (both in 2001); 50 years of dance (2010), Enfant (2011) and Manger (2015). His latest choreography, danse de nuit, premiered in Geneva last September. During the Holland Festival...
'Everyone has an Apple. Everyone has a Corneille. Nobody has a Van Merwijk. So the question is whether Van Merwijk is any good. Nobody knows that. Then the challenge is for a few great people to buy a Van Merwijk. After that, everyone wants to have a Van Merwijk. When that happens, I'll go back to making other work, because I want...
One of the highlights of the year is always the presentation of 'the figures' by the Association of Theatre and Concert Hall Directors (VSCD). As it happens, these are unabatedly positive. For years. And so for years it has been a challenge to find out why those positive figures are so difficult to reconcile with the picture of reality. That not at all...
The novel Her Name was Sarah (nine million copies sold) made Tatiana de Rosnay world-famous. In Paris, she even wears a wig when she does not want to be recognised. That she struggled with anorexia she kept secret for years. [bol_product_links block_id=”bol_592be29ab4765_selected-products” products=”9200000075700087,1001004010207707,9200000077515228,9200000011255053″ name="a4m" sub_id="de rosnay" link_color="003399″ subtitle_color="000000″ pricetype_color="000000″ price_color="CC3300″ deliverytime_color="009900″ background_color="FFFFFF" border_color="D2D2D2″ width="549″ cols="2″ show_bol_logo="0″ show_price="1″ show_rating="1″ show_deliverytime="1″ link_target="1″ image_size="1″ admin_preview="1″] Eight life questions...
In de opdracht die kunstenares Elisa Pesapane kreeg van het Rijksmuseum van Oudheden kwamen haar passies samen: tekenen, de oudheid, onderzoek en portret. Vanaf vandaag zijn er in het RMO twaalf tekeningen te zien over ‘le solitaire des ruines’: de militair ingenieur Jean Emile Humbert, op zoek naar de stad Carthago. Portret De Italiaans-Nederlandse kunstenares Elisa Pesapane (1977) is onder meer…
The 57th Venice Biennale brings the world together and the art world to Venice. This year, the biennial art event is bigger than ever. Here you will find out what is 'trending' in contemporary art. Everyone thinks something of this event and we live in a time when everything and everyone is held up against the yardstick: 'Have you been there?....
Bark Skins Annie Proulx We had to gather some courage to start Annie Proulx's Bark Skins. After all, the book is 800 pages long, so you have to make some time for it. But this novel is well worth that. As a reader, you are unceremoniously planted in the wild forest of North America, still called New France in the late seventeenth century....
See, the Belgians do that well. When a new literary festival comes along, it immediately lasts more than a whole week instead of two days. Today marks the start of the first edition of the International Literature Festival BRU-TAAL. Five reasons to travel to 'the Venice of the North' in the coming days: Bruges. 9 days, 2 weekends, almost 59 writers,...
He finds himself lazy and under-ambitious, and struggles with acceptance - of himself, of others, of the world. Because his grandparents had experienced the Holocaust, there was a taboo on being unhappy in his youth. Eight life questions to Jewish-American writer Jonathan Safran Foer. 'Between what I could do and actually do, there is a big gap.' 1....
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) is often accused of driving audiences out of the hall with his drive for innovation. After all, his twelve-tone system swept away the foundations of tonality, which had offered listeners a safe haven for centuries. Deprived of its foothold, it would have turned its back on contemporary music forever. Nonsense, because not only did Schoenberg write fantastic works, but also...
Earlier this year, Mircea Cărtărescu, Romania's greatest writer, was a guest at the Winternachten festival. Writer Mira Feticu, who was born and grew up in Romania and even received lectures from Cărtărescu as a student, interviewed her former compatriot and professor for A Quattro Mani. A beautiful conversation about their homeland, truth, literature and poetry. 'My books are...
Babylon Yasmina Reza Met haar roman Babylon won Yasmina Reza de prix Renaudot, na de prix Goncourt de belangrijkste literaire prijs van Frankrijk. Hoofdpersoon is de 62-jarige Elisabeth Jauze. Elisabeth is octrooirechercheur bij het Instituut Pasteur en leidt een bedaard leven met haar echtgenoot Pierre. In tegenstelling tot haar zus Jeanne, die sinds scheiding in seksuele avonturen verzeild raakt die…
Adultery, lustful sex and desperately dating forty-somethings - these are the spicy ingredients of caSINO, Frieda Mulisch's debut novel. On their quest for true love, her protagonists Polly and Sam scour dating app caSINO, a kind of Tinder. We talk to her about her book, literary aspirations and, of course, her father Harry Mulisch. 'If Tinder had been around fifty years ago,...
We kennen hem van prachtige romans als Naar de overkant van de nacht en De laatste ontsnapping, maar Jan van Mersbergen heeft meer noten op zijn zang. Verraste hij onlangs met De ruiter, geschreven vanuit het perspectief van een oud paard, nu is er Dagboek uit de rivier. Geen roman, maar zijn eerste thriller, die hij uitbrengt onder het pseudoniem Frederik Baas.…
Je kunt wel dromen van een betere wereld, maar waarom zou je niet zelf in actie komen? Journaliste Rachel van de Pol (33) besloot een jaar lang elke dag een goede daad te verrichten, van het vragen van een doggybag in een restaurant tot het lappen van de ramen van de buren of het uitdelen van ijsjes aan bouwvakkers op…
While Jan Martens' latest work, The Common People (2016), was at Amsterdam's Stadschouwburg last weekend, Utrecht's Theater Kikker is showing two older hits this week: Sweat Baby Sweat (2011) and The dog days are over (2014). Sweat and Dogdays are blockbusters and have already toured the world. At Kikker, they can now be seen as part of a...
Has your relationship just hit the rocks or is it in dire straits? Congratulations! According to author and spiritual teacher Jan Geurtz, a major love crisis is the chance to be freed from all the patterns that torment you. He describes why this is so in his new book About Love and Letting Go. Even if you have been in it for years...
He was belatedly gripped by poetry, but how: for Flemish poet and street musician Geert Viaene (1963), poetry has now become a condition of life. 'A chord has been struck that still can't stop vibrating.' From this late bloomer, who published on digital forum Het Gezeefde Gedicht (The Sifted Poem), the debut collection Eistijden was recently published. Viaene understands the art of being outspoken in...
Van hun thrillerserie rondom rechercheur Joona Linna werden wereldwijd al miljoenen exemplaren verkocht. Ook in Nederland zijn de crime novels van het Zweedse echtpaar Ahndoril, beter bekend als Lars Kepler, heel erg populair. Hun lezers zijn niet de enigen die er nachtmerries van krijgen, vertellen Alexander en Alexandra Ahndoril. ‘Na ons eerste boek moesten we verhuizen.’ Op het tafeltje, tussen…
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