With text, movement, actors, sets.
Of course, we have Chriet Titulaer. But it kind of ends there. And to say we took those very seriously, back in the day? No. The future, and fantasising about it, is not really a thing in the Netherlands, at least not with the big publishers and broadcasters. A writer dealing with science fiction will never join a big...
Panic. On the tram between Leidseplein and Amsterdam Centraal, I suddenly lost the Dutch translation of 'string quartet'. So I typed 'violin quartet' into my facebook update, trying to make a connection between a blow job and Ligeti. Joking, perhaps, but there was something much deeper behind it, in that tram, after the music and theatre event 'The String Quartet's...
Our Thea Derks sat watching a traffic light for a few hours on Thursday 7 June and observed that the music was better. It happened during the opening of the 2018 Holland Festival. In the tradition of Ruth Mackenzie, the opening was of mixed reception, and that is actually a good thing. Even at a time when the Amsterdam Arts Council is in a...
'You simply cannot, as a big company, just bring journalistic theatre.' So says Jeroen de Man, who now directs the watery spectacle performance Ondine at the National Theatre. 'A bit of diversity is just fine.' So not everything in The Hague has to be as socially relevant as The Nation of Othello. Sometimes it can also just be about the...
Here it is. The one and only interactive Culture Press Holland Festival Special. A special that has already been deployed over the past few months, and will be added to in the coming month. During the festival, we have regular reviews and reports, and podcasts. A new edition of this Special will appear every week. On Mondays. And then you can also subscribe via...
It feels like a variation on a scene from a farce. On stage: Birmingham REP's public relations officer, a journalist flown in from the Netherlands for the premiere and the director's assistant rushed in. Location: an upmarket hotel in the heart of Birmingham. Time: Sunday morning a little after ten o'clock. The subject: sex and the all-encompassing concept of anxiety. Go! The big absentee is director Calixto...
Say 'Carlo Gesualdo' and you say 'heavenly music', and 'cruel disposition'. This Renaissance composer's name is inextricably linked to the gruesome double murder he committed on his wife and lover when he found them in flagrante delicto. Who else but The Warm Shop could make an appealing performance of this thought Tido Visser, artistic director of the Netherlands Chamber Choir. So.
Thursday 17 May opens SPRING Performing Arts Festival in Utrecht with, among others, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi by Dries Verhoeven and to come (extended) by Mette Ingvartsen. Over ten days, over twenty-five international dance and theatre productions, installations and performance works will be on show in public spaces and urban environments. A week earlier, festival director Rainer Hofmann looks relaxed. 'Until now...
Germans and humour. I have a bad experience with that. Will largely be because I don't get the finer nuances of the language, especially if it is meant for laughter. So it's not that the German sense of humour is wrong. In fact, sometimes something can just happen in German theatre that makes you laugh. I want...
'With my performances, I always try to make people feel that they are really going to miss a happening. 'The first performance with personal stories of four Moroccan-Dutch actresses in the big theatres of the Netherlands, the newest this, the most surprising that.' Daria Bukvić is one of the most exciting creators to enter the theatre world in recent years. She is not only...
'Never, never would I make a performance about my mother, or about myself. Jamais.' Caroline Guiela Nguyen, child of 'a marriage between a Vietnamese mother and a 'pied-noir' (Algerian colonial) is not into personal stories. The theatre-maker captured audiences' hearts at last year's Avignon Festival with the play Saigon. This moving, deeply human play...
Performing arts policy greatly determines what can be seen and heard on Dutch stages. It underpins government funding of theatre and music. This policy pays a lot of attention to the quality of performances, but it hardly discusses the choice of pieces played, let alone what kind of repertoire landscape...
Wijbrand Schaap speaks in the kitchen of The Cooperative (where it is remarkably busy), with Tony Minnema and Emile Ripke. They are the initiators and the names behind Theatreflix, a website on which, like Netflix with TV shows, theatre shows can be seen. For now, they have a base from their own work, as Tony Minnema himself has a fairly thriving business in...
Fifty-three 'ultras' from a football club in an art theatre. That might be asking for trouble. Especially if they were the hard core of, say, Ajax, FC Den Haag or FC Utrecht. But this is France. There are no hooligans in France. The 'ultra's' of Racing Club de Lens, for example: they are bound to throw a punch somewhere, but in...
For many a theatre lover, watching from the bench will be swearing in church. The atmosphere in the theatre and direct contact is missing. Totally true, and yet the advantages of sitting comfortably, watching when you want, subtitles and the on-demand W.C. break are also worth something. While enjoying a fireside chat, you're not looking at the back of anyone's head....
Listen to an atmospheric impression and the full interview with Stef Aerts here. Children have the ability to turn adults' worlds upside down. Eleven-year-old JR is really getting into it. On a school trip, he learns how the stock market works and then turns it to his will. In doing so, unhampered by a prefrontal cortex, that part of the brain...
Subscribe to our free newsletter. Because you can! Here's why. Holland Festival, Poetry International, a summer full of art. And meanwhile, a whole new arts system is being put together. The Netherlands is eager to get outside, experience music, experience art and eat food trucks empty. And flipping the subsidy system. It is a...
'I once performed in front of a hall somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with a lot of old people. The performance was announced as cabaret. But my work does not fall within one particular genre. Because of the designation 'cabaret', the audience had expectations that I did not meet. People wanted a fun, entertaining evening. My performance was rebellious, energetic. I jumped all...
I attended the try-out of Metropolis #1 at The Hague's Theater aan het Spui and a week later - because I couldn't believe my eyes the first time - I also went to the premiere. Rarely did I see something so blood-curdlingly exciting on stage. But unfortunately for the wrong reasons. A lot of a-musical notions Metropolis is the...
In the early 1990s, I am sitting in a small auditorium at The National Theatre in London. Before the performance starts, someone on stage asks if you want to greet the visitors next to you. This immediately creates a different, more intimate dynamic in the auditorium. On a tight stage with only a few props are four actors and an Arab musician. Yoshi Oida...
Platonov, Theater Utrecht's latest show, premiered on 2 March and is an instant hit: rave reviews in all major newspapers. Artistic director and director Thibaud Delpeut bases his version of this archetypal Chekhov play on the translation made by actor Jacob Derwig in 2000 for 't Barre Land. This equally legendary play fitted...
It all starts at Orange College, of course. A fictional school with very real problems. For Sadettin Kırmızıyüz, the place where he commissions the opening part of Metropolis, a series that should eventually count four episodes. It is one of Het Nationale Theater's biggest projects over the next four years, in close cooperation with Kırmızıyüz's own company:...
The Culture Council wants it. Everyone wants it. And Utrecht wants it too, of course. A physical sector institute, where in a corner an old PC is humming with the total digital archive of Dutch theatre, and music, of course. Plus a library. With real books, scripts, photos. In 2012, the building was divested and the memory could...
Today, the Culture Council comes out with one of the weaker advices in its existence. The Netherlands' highest cultural advisory body showed vision, leadership and boldness earlier this season with the 'Verkenning' and the 'Sectoradvies Muziek'. The exploration called for a reversal of subsidy flows, with urban regions taking the initiative. In the advice for the music sector, it broke...
The neat couple next to me, in the front row at the Holland Festival press conference, hadn't counted on it for a moment. Four members of the Nederlands Kamerkoor starting to undress one by one down to their pecker-sized nakie. A giggle, a small cough, but hey, this is the Holland Festival, they said to each other. So too...
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