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A piece of music in which the vocal soloist is given a tattoo in the last fifteen minutes, live on stage. In Laura Bowler's Advert, performed by Laura herself together with the Hamburg-based Decoder Ensemble, you can experience just that. Not unexpected when you realise that Bowler trained not only as a composer but also as a theatre maker. She studied after the conservatoire at the Royal...
The drum kit is pop music's most important instrument. German composer Enno Poppe, who grew up without pop music, has a fascination for percussion. A new work can be heard during November Music this year: Streik. Composed for 10 drums. I spoke to the 1969-born composer about this work and his inspiration. Listen to the podcast: What immediately...
With Ben Okri, the Internationales Literatur Festival Berlin (ILB) has brought in the grand master of contemporary literary storytelling. 'See the magic of things around you.'
Large spinning steel behemoths, mowing blades or relentless hands of a clock, which grind you as a human being if you don't duck, or jump, or roll away in time. There were two of them during Festival Circolo in Tilburg, this year, and it always impresses. It happened at Un Loup pour l'homme in the Spoorpark and at La Chute des Anges in...
"We all want to play, but labels sometimes make that difficult. Then you start doubting your qualities." Instead, Dutch and Brazilian choreographer Guilherme Miotto (45) wants to break down boundaries and make art accessible to everyone. On Thursday 24 October, his double performance 'Unpunished Youth x Poles' can be seen at Festival Circolo in Tilburg. Guilherme Miotto is more interested in what makes us...
Biogas. It works. In Tilburg, they have taken a big step in making circus romance more sustainable. The campfires, from the first edition the anchor of Circus Festival Circolo, have been modified. No longer fuelled by increasingly soggy firewood, beautiful yellow flames now play around glowing chunks. The wood fire became a gas fire, but designed by a pyrotechnician with circus experience. The flames...
Quantum entanglement, supersymmetry. The nerd in me could not get around the mystery of cosmic twins, which hundreds of billions of light years apart yet simultaneously take over each other's state when one of them is seen. Or something like that. In Blood Sister, Matzer's latest play, it's not billions of parsecs, it's an Atlantic Ocean and 17 years of life that those two identical sisters...
She sometimes sees people drop out when she tells them that her performance is inspired by burlesque. "They often have certain preconceptions about this and think it's 'something only dirty men want to see'." It remains difficult to convince people to take the first step and attend a burlesque show, says Baines. The twenty-two-year-old South African loves...
I remember it well, it was during a meeting of the magazine industry, sometime in 2012 or 2013. A grave mood hung in the Amsterdam debate centre De Balie, because the circulation and turnover figures of the major magazine publishers (plural at the time) had just been announced. The downward trend that had started years back had nothing to do with the crisis, but...
It is mouse-still in the studio auditorium of Korzo in The Hague. A few dozen spectators in the stands, a tangle of bodies on stage, shuffling, sighing and exerting their utmost strength, sliding, climbing and balancing on, over and under each other. Impressive, sensual too, this continuous movement that does not run from applause moment to applause moment, but rather lets you breathlessly follow how it...
Eye Filmmuseum turns the spotlight on the American avant-garde film of the 1960s this autumn. An explosion of form experiments in a turbulent era. A movement that still inspires.
The less real theatre is, the better it works. That insight dawned on me again this weekend, in Utrecht's Stadsschouwburg. Twice, in fact. Friday with the reprise of Aluin's Twelfth Night, Saturday with Koning Krump, the masterpiece by Het Nut. Two Utrecht groups, once sprung from the same theatre school, and drunk in the same theatre cafe, where...
It was with a certain scepticism, I must confess, that I began Winny Sorgdrager's book "Oxygen of Society. Why Culture is a Government Issue".1 I won't elaborate; let's just say that a book about Dutch cultural policy has been published before. More than once, in fact, and in those books...
This year's Netherlands Film Festival conference for industry professionals emphasises collaboration, transparency and trust. With contributions ranging from a presentation of the Ketentafel Film en AV to a plea for more creative friction.
Op vrijdag 20 september leidde Grammy-genomineerd componist Miho Hazama in de Conservatoriumzaal in Amare de big band van het Koninklijk Conservatorium. En hoe. Dancer in nowhere Een sprongetje. Een plié op een been. Een relevé op de tenen. Een plié op twee benen. Het hoofd opzij en als een klok ritmisch naar de andere kant en terug. Een halve arabesque…
It was a remarkable report, this morning. According to newspaper Tubantia, the new cabinet was still willing to make extra money available for regional museums in Twente. It would be a sum of 1.5 million euros, earmarked to set up a joint presentation of Twente's history by De Museumfabriek in Enschede and Techniekmuseum Oyfo in Hengelo. According to...
There are finer ways to wake up than with the finance minister. This Eelco Heinen was speaking to the Radio 1 News on Wednesday 18 September, and he really felt like it. Cheerful, perky, and full of good cheer, he told how they were going to energetically implement VVD policies in the Schoof Cabinet. And then followed the next...
The cultural sector can breathe a sigh of relief. Apart from the damning increase in VAT on everything beautiful and fragile from 9 to 21 per cent, the Basic Cultural Infrastructure (BIS) has been secured for the next four years. With inclement winds coming from the corner of PVV, VVD and BBB, this can be called a windfall. There is even a modest increase coming,...
Thirty-five euros an hour for a space that can just fit a piano or a drum kit. That is the rent charged by the municipality of Utrecht to music teachers who wanted to continue their practice on Utrecht's Domplein after their cooperative went bankrupt. For many of the teachers who thus became victims of their board's mismanagement, that means a cost increase
Increase in VAT and gambling tax + reduction in municipal and government subsidies disastrous The cabinet's proposed cultural policy will result in a €350 million haircut and a negative domino effect in the arts and culture sector. This is shown today in an analysis of data from private funders, municipalities and the arts and culture sector. "Just before Budget Day, we as a consortium are sounding the alarm....
On Saturday, I caught myself having a wonderfully sexist thought. Not surprising, probably, as sexist thoughts appear to be in the standard package of the product 'man'. But there I was, sitting in a not so very full auditorium during the Gaudeamus Festival at For Real by Andrea Voets. There, the idea struck me that it was pretty weird to see a woman concentrated...
At 1 hour and 50 minutes, it happens. That's when Nicolien van Vroonhoven, culture spokesperson for the governing NSC party, makes it clear what the fuss is about. "The cultural sector should also take a look at itself, because there are whole groups in society that have nothing to do with culture." Venue: pop temple Paradiso in Amsterdam; the occasion: a church early...
'Plattenbau,' the driver says with some horror as we pass some boarded-up concrete porch flats. The GDR-built flats are in Alt Schöndorf, two kilometres outside Weimar's historic centre. Nailed shut for years, and squatters didn't look after them either. A hated legacy, but more by the West than the East. The...
Wat is de overeenkomst tussen een reggaetonbandje, twee pizzabezorgers, een slager, een talkshowhost met neanderthaler-DNA, het Vietnamese Rode Leger en een Chinese universiteit? In de verbeelding van Guillermo Calderon: een koe. De Chileense theatermaker en auteur is inmiddels een beroemdheid in het internationale theater en toert sinds afgelopen zondag door Europa. Althans: of hij er zelf bij is, weten we…
The management of ITA (International Theatre Amsterdam) is terminating its collaboration with Ivo van Hove with immediate effect. The world-famous director of high-profile, often rather serious performances, had become discredited. An unsafe working climate had developed under his management. Not only the strict leadership by van Hove himself, but also the transgressive behaviour of his life partner and regular designer Jan Versweyveld was...
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