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Earlier this year, business director Marjan van der Haar announced her departure from IFFR. It was announced yesterday that Clare Stewart will be her successor next week. Stewart has earned her spurs at numerous leading festivals, including the BFI London film festival and BFI Flare London, the British Film Institute's LGBTQIA festival; the Sheffield documentary festival...
Input from members: that's what drives this club. Just watch. Yesterday I wrote this piece: Jerome Bel is quite something. The man who identifies himself as a choreographer has banned himself from flying for sustainability reasons, which is why he could not come to Amsterdam from Paris to read his own autobiography. However noble the non-flying...
A TED Talk, but not 15 minutes as prescribed by that scattershot ideas organisation, but an hour and a half. In How To Live (After You Die), the monumental artist Lynette Walworth takes you through a story-with-light images about the temptations of sectarian faith, which, via the Amazon and the Outback, over Donald Trump and along the steppes of Mongolia, ends in the caves...
I can't resist mentioning it, because I think they were doing it for a reason, the dancers in the musical Wuthering Heights making really visible big rounds with their arms one time: this was a half-second reference to Kate Bush's world-changing 'windmill swings' in the music video to her legendary 1978 pop song. A subtle nod as in my...
What if 200 of the greatest thinkers and poets this planet has known in recent centuries were just one of us? An ordinary stranger on a bus, or your taxi driver, or a skater? Or a singing tiger in a supermarket? Julian Rosefeldt makes that thought audible, tactile and almost tangible in the mega-installation 'Euphoria' at the...
Laurie Anderson visited the Holland Festival for a third time and played to a sold-out Carré. With a five-piece Sexmob, a jazz combo from New York for the occasion, she performed well-known and lesser-known songs from her oeuvre spanning more than four decades. And every song felt like it was dear to her, with fresh, new arrangements of double bass and baritone ...
Well, Angela... this 'posthuman' play by German-British director Susanne Kennedy, now at the Holland Festival, aims to touch on many things: life & death, time & space, truth & fake. The play begins with a text running across the walls announcing that everything in this story is real, based on diaries and facts. Soon after, this statement becomes...
Christian cultural traditions, such as Catholicism, are in the doldrums. How do they get out? Whatever you call backgrounds in terms of gender, origin and beliefs, looking at them all positively helps, with compassion and humour; how beautiful and funny are all these different people and expressions! So I am now happy to write about two people who climbed the cultural ladder, and just...
Banners from the Women's Suffrage Association, Haarlem Division show that things have changed over the past century. But banners of London suffragettes demanding equal pay for men and women make it clear that it is far from enough. The opening night of Walzer, the new VR installation at Eye celebrates women's lives. Dolle Mina's, suffragettes, Aletta Jacobs, nameless women who...
I saw Sid Vicious perform with the Sex Pistols at the illustrious Eksit in Rotterdam in 1977, more than 45 years later my teenage daughter toured Vicious's story in International Toneel Amsterdam's performance Hamlet and Ophelia. She still has a life to go, I immersed myself in memories. A (too long) look back According to the annals...
Dancing, from super amateur to world-class professional, involves boundary crossing, abuse of power, physical assaults and sexual misconduct perpetuated by a stubborn culture of silence. The long-awaited investigation by Marjan Olfers, 'Shadow Dancing', into boundary crossing in the dance world, had even more shocking results than anyone feared beforehand. The figures are now well enough known: a majority of dancers have shown transgressive behaviour to...
News from the Culture Council: 'The four teams developed several building blocks, which they further concretised. In addition, the teams tested and enriched each other's ideas. At the end of the day, using visualisations, they presented their building blocks to members of the council.' This quote, titled 'Last meeting design teams new cultural system' is from the...
'People who consider themselves traditionally on the left don't want to criticise woke because they are afraid they are aiding and abetting the right, and they certainly don't want that. And yet they feel that there is something wrong, something that is not really left-wing about woke discourse. That's what I'm trying to untangle....
On 26 April 2023, Cilia van Dijk, independent animation producer and heavily involved in the revival of Dutch animation film from the late 1970s, passed away. In 1986, she was awarded the Oscar for Børge Ring's Anna & Bella, which she produced.
Some writers are at the forefront, others write their novels in the lee. Richard Osinga (51) belongs to the latter category. With each book, he gains in eloquence. Mint is the new shoot on the stem of his increasingly interesting oeuvre. At one point, Richard Osinga himself was a little too lazy. After his novel...
In his new, fifth novel, writer Stefan Popa (1989) returns to Romania, which previously served as the setting for his debut novel Vanished Borders. The novel's protagonist is a 'half-breed', just like the writer, but the other way round. While Popa, is a son of a Dutch mother and Romanian father, protagonist Alex Petrescu, on the contrary, has a Romanian mother and...
Writer and theatre-maker Nhung Dam (38) tried to be as Dutch as possible, but is increasingly embracing her Vietnamese roots. Because these are precisely what make her unique, she now realises, and offer a wealth of stories. Including for her second novel, Definition of Love. Two worlds Nhung Dam (38) more or less grew up in two worlds. Her cradle was in...
This weekend, Mariëtte Hamer came out with a strong recommendation for the hotline mores.online. The club where cross-border behaviour within the arts and media world can be reported had itself become discredited. For example, the chairman, as partner of the discredited Tom Egbers at NOS Sport, had not reacted skilfully to the fuss. It did not contribute to the trust...
"Another happy day. He listens to me ...Another very happy day, he speaks to me." Life reduced to its essence, with Winnie towering womanishly above the human molehill for her final episode. Antoinette Jelgersma, in Happy Days under Erik Whien, portrays a more monty version of Winnie, one of the toughest stage roles, with a monologue sitting still...
In mid-March, I went to see the Toneelmakerij's Hamlet, a performance specially made in and for Amsterdam-West. I had some questions about that performance, I wrote in the review, and we would discuss those questions in a podcast with Abdelkader Benali, the adaptor of the text, and Paul Knieriem, the director. An hour and a half before the recording...
We have a huge need for magic and a miracle in our time. Some people think you lose that when you grow up and/or have children, but nothing could be further from the truth, of course. And in case you had any doubts, I would wish that more theatre makers for adults would revisit the magic that you still had in your childhood...
When the difference between the performer during the performance and afterwards is at least a thick metre, you know you are dealing with a great artist. Australian dancer Olympia Kotopoulos is a great artist, because on stage she fills the space, while in real life she barely counts one and a half metres. Art is, literally, larger than life....
In his new novel, Italian bestselling author Niccolò Ammaniti (56) wittily holds up a mirror to modern man. His protagonist, the wife of the Italian prime minister, is afraid of being blackmailed with a sex video. "I don't know if I would have the same courage as her in such a situation," he says. Storytelling fun With novels like I Pick You Up, I Take You and I...
'Broos' opens as a kind of cruel game show, with lead actress Lottie Hellingman in the middle of the stage, sitting on a chair above which hangs a large, grey rock. "I took happiness for granted," she begins resignedly. Hellingman's words are by director Madeleine Matzer. She wrote them down for 'Broos' after hearing a mother of a 17-year-old daughter with Down syndrome say
I had to think for a while before I wrote something about the Hamlet performance that is now showing to an audience of mostly high school students in Amsterdam West. That was because I was sitting in the auditorium, on a legendarily uncomfortable stand in a fine fringe breeding ground, among a schoolchildren's audience that sat watching in full attention for almost two hours, while at...
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