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That he prefers not to hear news about the weather, but that there were once people alive who he knew, and what the weather was like then, Ed Atkins cannot talk about that often enough. So he repeats that phrase endlessly. A 'loop', then, as we know it from music and video art. But performed live. Is...
"The easiest gain is then to produce less. Because high production implies a lot of energy and material use, travel movements and other forms of impact." Last week, the Council for Culture's long-awaited opinion on sustainability was released, and sooner than I could click 'open', all was set. Came all because of the above sentence, which, mentioned in...
ANOHNI lived in Amsterdam for a year as a young child, in Gerrit van der Veenstraat, formerly Euterpestraat. The street where the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) had its headquarters during the war in what is now a nice school with a focus on art. Opposite was the building from which Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung organised the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews. The...
The picture is immediate. Vast glaciated vistas, patches of fog and the twilight of a land where the sun rises only once a year. Something like that. And then that soaring music that in one long tone makes all air traffic redundant for at least a month. Beneath it the rumble of shifting earth plates. For the first time in 10 years, Sigur Rós made another...
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...
Dansen, van superamateur tot wereldklasse professioneel, gaat gepaard met grensoverschrijding, machtsmisbruik, fysieke aanslagen en seksueel wangedrag dat in stand wordt gehouden door een hardnekkige zwijgcultuur. Het langverwachte onderzoek door Marjan Olfers, ‘Schaduwdansen’, naar grensoverschrijding in de danswereld, had nog schokkender resultaten dan iedereen vooraf vreesde. De cijfers zijn inmiddels genoegzaam bekend: een meerderheid van de dansers heeft grensoverschrijdend gedrag aan…
Nieuws van de Raad voor Cultuur: ‘De vier teams ontwikkelden diverse bouwstenen, die ze verder geconcretiseerd hebben. Daarnaast hebben de teams elkaars ideeën getest en verrijkt. Aan het eind van de dag presenteerden ze aan de hand van visualisaties hun bouwstenen aan leden van de raad.’ Dit citaat is, met de titel ‘Laatste bijeenkomst designteams nieuw cultuurbestel‘ afkomstig van de…
'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 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'd give it to us if more theatre-makers for adults would once again revisit the magic you still had in your childhood...
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