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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...
Sometimes a festival only really begins after the halls have emptied. Red threads become visible, themes buzz after, research continues, archives are unlocked. What struck me about the nineteenth, somewhat smaller edition of Cinedans is that there was a lot of work on the vulnerability of the body. Not surprising after a pandemic, during a war and with an even more...
'Carmina Burana is the first project in Ukraine where I had a free hand to really turn it into something completely different. I didn't have to adapt an existing production, but could create a whole new performance from scratch.' Gerard Mosterd (1964) has a long career behind him as a dancer and choreographer. Now he is also a producer of...
With Kaboom!, Movies that matter, the Pink Film Days and Cinedans all four at the same time, it will be hard to choose next weekend. Cinedans, dance on screen, is a festival very dear to my heart, which is where I will be found next weekend. Cinema is, after all, movement, in montage, découpage, action, mise en place. And slowly the realisation that dance and film are a...
'We have had the Top Income Standardisation Act since 2013. That means that in the semi-public sector, the highest in an organisation are not allowed to earn above a certain standard. There are conductors who earn as much in the evening as the entire orchestra costs. That, of course, is bizarre. Then I always wonder how it is that they can escape the dance.' This...
Every year, the most important collectors, the museums with the greatest buying power, the best art dealers and the people with plenty of disposable income head to Maastricht to look at and (dis)buy art at art fair TEFAF. The champagne flows, designer bags dangle from every shoulder, and over a tart imported from Paris, or an oyster, a decision is made whether to buy a...
Just before the end of the performance, one of the musicians steps forward, whereupon a colleague tells him: he is dying soon, metastatic bladder cancer. Whereupon the victim confirms the doom himself. Who gets to sign off on this apotheosis we will leave in the middle because of the spoiler. The crazy thing is, no terrible shockwave goes through the well-filled...
With his previous novel Homeland, Spanish author Fernando Aramburu captured the hearts of readers across Europe. The bestseller about the consequences of violence by the Basque separatist movement ETA, won three awards and HBO adapted the book into a television series. His new one, Counting the Days, is a more intimate story, about a man who decides on a...
Toneelgroep Maastricht has created a contemporary version of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Garden. The edgy actors, starring Anniek Pheifer as Lyuba, make the show a comedy, but the tragic elements are not ignored.
Diversity is a fact, inclusion an act. Simple statement, if you come upon it, and Jenny Mijnhijmer, actress and writer, came upon it. She was asked during the pandemic to chair a committee for the Authors' Union to figure out how that advocacy group for writers could become more inclusive and diverse. She didn't really feel like doing that at all. After all, we already talk...
Het Houten Huis, a youth theatre company from Groningen, portrays the issue of bureaucracy in healthcare in a poetic and moving way with the performance 'If it goes differently'. This performance demonstrates that art is a powerful tool to raise important social issues and thus contribute to a more inclusive and just society.
"That's what I'm going to tell Nina first, that afterwards the young women were the first to stand up and applaud and yell with enthusiasm for our Coriolanus." Remco van Rijn, dramaturge at The National Theatre, speaking after a try-out, just before the premiere of Coriolanus on 18 February. And Nina = Nina Spijkers, the original director of the play What...
In Joy, the sequel to Manuel Vila's bestseller Ordesa, the protagonist is searching for himself and for little sparks of joy. In his rather barren and difficult existence, this is not yet easy. It must have been a double feeling. With his personal novel Ordesa (published in 2018, a story about the death of his parents and the existential emptiness...
Whether I was on champagne. Just a question from an acquaintance in the dance world. The occasion was Nederlands Dans Theater's announcement that it does not want to continue with top choreographer Marco Goecke until he really apologises for his assault on dance critic Wiebke Hüster of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. After all, the company had previously taken up the mantle of...
So it wasn't really that long ago that a world-famous composer could tell his 20-year-old lover to stop composing because he couldn't stand competition. And for her to do just that. It is a detail in the history of Gustav and Alma Mahler, long known to insiders, but which...
Someday, the diversity of theatre and the audiences it attracts will be fine. On Thursday, 16 February, I sat in The Hague's Theater aan het Spui in an auditorium that was on average 50 years younger than the average theatre audience and also had all the colours of the rainbow. You guessed it: youth theatre. The theatre where...
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