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You tell the best story by putting your audience on the edge of their seats right from the start. Using well-chosen fragments, Liesbeth Zegveld managed to build a story in which the climax stunned everyone. Even the excellently prepared Margriet van der Linden sat at the moment suprême with eyes like saucers and chin on...
Over het randje gaan, grenzen verkennen en verleggen, het uiterste vergen van het bevattingsvermogen van de omstanders, prestaties leveren die niemand verwacht. En kabouters door een bos zien lopen. Of dingen in het water lezen. Een half jongetje de wereld zien redden. De eerste 11 dagen van augustus 2024 waren legendarisch, om nooit te vergeten. En dat allemaal in de…
"How nice it would have been if, as a (male) viewer, I had really been taken out of my comfort zone by the fact that the anger was not so obviously played and commented on. How thought-provoking I would have been when they weren't making goofy faces at their Rudi Carell-German that - if implemented consistently - would have made me laugh....
Het leuke van festivals als Boulevard in Den Bosch is dat je na een paar dagen vanzelf verbinding legt tussen alles wat je meemaakt. Niet dat alles op elkaar gaat lijken, zoals in de sport. Daar bepaalt een enkele chromosoom of honderdste van een seconde het verschil tussen wereldvrede of de apocalyps. Daar moet alles zo gelijk zijn dat over…
Right by St John's, next to the Tower Stage where Theatre Festival Boulevard holds its talk shows and free live concerts, is 'Tent Purple'. That tent is different, this year. Outside, kids in baggy trainers are doing break moves, inside it is steaming hot. For ten days, Tent Purple is Cypher HQ, the home of Bossche hip-hop and street culture, also known as...
Yesterday, someone from Amsterdam told me that he had long thought Boulevard was a provincial version of an Amsterdam rosé party: lots of conviviality, food, drink and mediocre art. Fortunately, after just one visit, he was convinced that something has grown in Den Bosch over the past 40 years that cannot be compared to other Dutch festivals. There...
It's cucumber time and many journalists are on holiday, so Culture Press has to turn up to interpret something that doesn't smell quite right. This time it is the press statement the directors of De Tocht have put on their website. In it, they explain how it was possible that this musical company, Friesland's pride, could suddenly go bankrupt. In a nutshell: it was not...
We had barely recovered from the rebirth of Celine Dion. The traditionally long-winded and kitschy 'Son et Lumière' with which France had this time made the opening of the Olympics a quintessentially French event had also unleashed a storm of protests with a tableau vivant after the sadly just short of famous painting 'The Feast...
A room full of beautiful shiny gold and silver objects, from coins to swords. With so many shiny items, the magpie in me wakes up. But instead of gold, I take home knowledge: insight into a culture that has been 'forgotten'. Dacia - Realm of gold and silver at the Drents Museum is one such exhibition that I am happy to...
"As for the victims, it was mainly employees with managerial duties who experienced the cross-border behaviour. This seemingly contradictory result with the discussed hierarchy is explicable from the fact that the perpetrator of the transgressive behaviour in the majority of these cases is (a) board member(s) or other manager(s)." Ivo van Hove suddenly left as director last year
With the new far-right cabinet, a new reality has also arrived for the arts. As before in Brabant, where the provincial councils no longer placed arts and culture under science and education, Schoof-1, despite an NSC minister on Education, Culture and Science, puts culture under the heading 'Culture, Sports and Leisure'. This is evident from the new classification of the...
Vrijdag 28 juni sloot Het Nationale Ballet in Amsterdam het seizoen feestelijk af met een gala. Het gezelschap van zo’n 80 dansers neemt daarin vooral relaties onder de loep. Van de 12 werken zie je maar liefst 9 duetten. Een liefdesbrief, een relatie in troubled waters, een wapenstilstand, een anticlimax, een conflict, een huwelijksdansfestijn, een levensreis, een onbereikbaar geluk, een…
In the series In Perspective, Erik Akkermans looks back and ahead at developments in cultural policy and practice. Today: from noise around the Fonds Scheppende Toonkunst to laurel wreath for the Dutch Composer The adagissimo of windmills Like two bedraggled schoolboys, we sat In the meeting room opposite Reinbert de Leeuw, chairman of the Society of Dutch Composers (GeNeCo). We, Cas Smithuijsen...
"I didn't hear a song I didn't know." Over white wine after Trajal Harrell's The Romeo, the lady was quite grumpy. I might add that I hadn't seen a move I couldn't have made myself. And yet that did not make me cranky. On the contrary: rarely have I been so happy and relaxed...
This is what charisma looks like. Arthur Verocai, now 79, tall and lean, stylish jacket around bony shoulders, only has to look into the hall once to overwhelm the audience. In the Concertgebouw's main hall on Tuesday night, the Brazilian legend stood in front of the Metropole Orchestra to belt out work from his scarce albums. He hardly needed to...
One of the lesser-known and thus hidden gems of this Holland Festival can be found in the Transformatorhuis of Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek. In that space, a single artist spends six hours every day shovelling 40 tonnes of sand from one pile to another. It sounds strange, but those who are there make something very special
Probably the most famous murder of a woman for what she is is that of the fictional Carmen, a free-spirited young Spanish woman with a fear of commitment. Opera composer Georges Bizet immortalised this character from a French story by Prosper de Merimée, making the crime of passionel a common term for what is none other than femicide. That habit of men killing women...
Jet fighters, drones, thunderstorms with accompanying flooding and lovely babbling brooks with the occasional bird in a pine tree. All of Austria descended on the Gashouder at Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek grounds this weekend and it is what it promised: spectacle as only Austrian music spectacle can be. Georg Friedrich Haas' work 11000 Saiten is a great superlative: surround with emdr and...
Future health minister and deputy prime minister Fleur Agema graduated as an architect early this century with a study on the ideal prison. Artist Jonas Staal re-examined her graduation design a few years ago. Agema appears to have an extremely dystopian vision of the world in which prisoners and guards must pass through a disorienting, inky-black, concrete hell to...
Live music in the theatre, I long for it more and more. Performances in which actors are accompanied by a soundtrack, amplified with or without transmitter microphones, always only half captivate. You soon find yourself watching a kind of live performed film. But without the comfort of a cinema and the technical capabilities of the camera.... Sunday 9 June sat in...
Jazz-Rock, it still exists. In all those years of sitting in the theatre, reading books or listening to David Bowie or Rufus Wainwright, I had kind of forgotten about it. Music by real men, Heavy Metal for people who have studied for it, Gothic but with several conservatory degrees under their belt. Subtle chopping where the drummer's left hand is a 17/23rd...
That's where Christiane Jatahy had me for a moment. When during her directed and devised story 'Despois do Silencio', one of the actresses falls into a Winti-like delirium, and her colleagues try to keep her from colliding unceremoniously with spectators in the front row, I briefly think it is real. That's how used to reality we are by now...
It was busy at Amsterdam's Westergas area, this Thursday, 6 June. Fantastic, of course, that not only do you have a couple of excellent running restaurants and clubs there, and the evening four-day march passes by while there is a big salsa party at the club near the world-famous Gashouder, but then it still feels a bit weird that the royal opening of the...
Utrecht was the first of the big cities to announce the opinions issued on cultural institutions' grant applications for the next four years. Large and well-known players like the Dutch Film Festival, visual arts institutions like BAK and IMPAKT and youth opera company Holland Opera saw their applications rejected, as did Het Huis Utrecht. At the same time, the advisory committee does recommend...
There was a time, not so long ago, when the Holland Festival had a reputation for being elitist. The festival, which was founded in 1947 to get the culturally starved Netherlands back on track after World War II, had a bit of that about it because, for a long time, "being elitist" was also completely...
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