With text, movement, actors, sets.
One of the special performances at this year's Holland Festival is 'Ça Ira (1): Fin de Louis' by French company Compagnie Louis Brouillard. I visited the performance earlier in Luxembourg and spoke to the director and writer of this over four-hour marathon about the French Revolution. It seems quite something: 40 actors on stage...
It must have been down to my indestructible mood, and the deep need to finally deliver some good news about the cultural sector, but I was so wrong. Tuesday I reported that the performing arts were recovering after Halbe Zijlstra's draconian cuts, but that is so not the case. As much as the sector itself would like it to do well, the figures contradict it time and again.
Surely the Association of Theatre and Concert Hall Directors has taken us all for a ride again. With a real infographic still do. But, as it goes with infographics: you can put in all the bright colours and shouts, and even shout 'Bravo!' and 'Applause!'at the bottom, the numbers themselves don't lie, even if you present them slightly differently than last year.
Choreographer Jan Martens' new performance, The Common People, is on show in Utrecht this weekend during Spring. Dozens of volunteer performers have a blind date on the stage of the Stadsschouwburg's main auditorium. The audience can walk in and out between performances, drink a beer for the duration of one or more duets or browse on the back stage and...
On Monday 23 and Tuesday 24 May, the VSCD met, and the Congres Podiumkunsten (@congresPK) was going on at the Nijmegen Concert Hall De Vereeniging. I went to check it out and discovered some new things.
Things have changed in Dutch theatre since the beginning of this century. Somewhere around the year 2000, I was a guest at a meeting of the Association of Theatre and Concert Hall Directors, and it was a bizarre experience. I found myself among a gathering that could best be described as a gentlemen's club, where the number of upstanding municipal officials exceeded the number of artistically inspired theatre lovers.
Now, 16 years later,
The honour of opening Utrecht's dance and performance festival SPRING fell this year to choreographer Nicole Beutler[hints]Nicole Beutler (Munich, 1969) is a choreographer and theatre maker. After studying Fine Arts at the Art Academy (Münster and Munich), she came to Amsterdam for the AHK's School for New Dance Development, where she graduated in 1997. Her work is at the interface of visual art, theatre and dance(Source)[/hints]. The performance 6: The Square exhibits an inimitable fascination with dancing and thinking in squares. Squaredance, a very old folk dance tradition in couples, especially popular in America, and the futuristic functionality of Bauhaus are linked in this choreography to thoughts about creating order and pigeonholing. How exactly
This is a review of a performance that is already over, and which, moreover, I participated in myself. That's not allowed at all. But it's also a story about refugees in Europe, a theatre floating above the clouds, a church made of marzipan, tunnels in Palestine and 49 draws. So I do it anyway.
Last weekend, during the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, a miracle happened at the Royal Flemish Theatre in Brussels. Scenographer Jozef Wouters and his crew had settled in the old hall with its domed roof. Completely renovated ten years ago, 'de Bol' is now an old-fashioned frame theatre equipped with the latest theatre technology. Including those 49 draws, and that was what it was all about.
On a pull,
Champagne at BAK in Utrecht, deep disappointment at The New Institute in Rotterdam: the Council for Culture has spoken. Today, Thursday 19 May 2016, the first advice after the draconian art cuts by the first Rutte cabinet came out, and heads are rolling. Amsterdam loses prestigious presentation institution De Appel, in The Hague fellow institution Stroom has to redo its homework. The Orkest van het Oosten and the Gelders Orkest have to come up with merger plans within two years. In Utrecht, the city company Theater Utrecht will no longer receive funding despite artistic appreciation. Het Zuidelijk Toneel in Eindhoven Tilburg must make new plans and Opera Zuid must quickly raise its artistic quality. These are the main conclusions of the Culture Council's opinion.
As dramatic as some of this may sound, the advice is actually not, when you look over the whole battlefield. Thanks in part to
'This regime also rules over you after you die. The regime steals your story. They use you to tell their own story. Relatives are forced to sign statements that the dead were killed by the opposition. The regime uses the dead to oppress the living.' Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury made a statement: Gardens Speak (Gardens Speak). An installation, an immersive[hints]definition: immersive, making you forget the real world around you[/hints] performance, in which the spectators themselves are actors. A performance that consists of a mountain of earth from which soft voices sound from beneath tombstones. That performance comes in June to Amsterdam, as one of the examples of the new Holland Festival programming by festival director Ruth MacKenzie.
The pile of earth in and on which the installation takes place represents the many thousands of anonymous backyard graves in Syria. At the beginning of the Syrian civil war, the struggle was still mainly between opponents of President Assad's dictatorship and his (secret) police. The first victims were often still just students taking part in peaceful demonstrations, handing out pamphlets, or attending the funeral of a friend. After all: bombing funerals was and is a proven method of murderous regimes and crime syndicates to eliminate insurgent networks.
Tania El Khoury heard of the Syrian alternative in 2013: the private burial in one's own backyard, or failing that, in an anonymous city park, with no headstone or memorial. Such an action is both an expression of fear and an act of resistance: these are deaths that the government can no longer abuse. 'The play was not originally intended for European audiences either. It was made in Lebanon and the text was also in Arabic. The last thing I thought about was the European audience. The idea was
Simon McBurney is a real theatre nerd. Exceedingly interested in mathematics and physics, he enjoys nothing more in the theatre than building technical illusions. He is also an in-demand actor and director, who, when he has a performance at London's Barbican Centre, gets a visit from Kate Bush, who humbly comes to congratulate him on his work. This year, he is,...
Toneelschuur, Don Carlos (stage) Nina Spijkers brings Friedrich Schiller's classic play back to its essence. No lavish scenery depicting the Spanish court, but canvases peeled off layer by layer. playlist M31 Foundation, Nederlandse Reisopera, Theater na de Dam, Der Kaiser von Atlantis (opera) Forty years after its world premiere at Theater Bellevue, Victor Ullmann's Der Kaiser von Atlantis will be re...
Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes is not a rewarding play to direct or perform. For that, the image of man that the American (1905-1984) portrays is simply too morbid. The Nationale Toneel, directed by Antoine Uitdehaag, unfortunately fails to add sufficient psychological layering to it. In The Little Foxes, successfully filmed in 1941 with Bette Davis in...
Hoe langer ik in de toneelsector rondloop, hoe meer ik erachter kom dat die zogenaamde crisis in de podiumkunsten niet ligt aan de mensen die toneel maken, en ook niet aan de mensen die er al dan niet naar komen kijken. Goede wil is alomtegenwoordig. De enige echte oorzaak voor een vertrouwensbreuk tussen spelers en publiek die ik kan aanwijzen is de negentiende-eeuwse uitvinding die we ‘schouwburg’ noemen. Laat me uitleggen.
This was our April fool's joke for 2016. Thanks for sharing! During renovation work at the Stadsbank van Lening building on Amsterdam's Oudezijds Voorburgwal, a manuscript of a work of poetry that has since been attributed by literary historians to Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679) has recently turned up. It concerns a rough, unfinished version of a play entitled 'Alva' and is dated around...
How far can you go in using Shakespeare's name for a theatre production? Or rather, when does an adaptation of a classic stop being an adaptation, and when should you just come out and say that you have written your own play? And then, if you've reported in your four-year plan that in 2016 you will be doing a Shakespeare...
On Monday 14 March, Theatre Rotterdam will present its plans for the upcoming arts plan period. On Thursday 10 March, Bianca van der Schoot already told about it during a public meeting with a class of Utrecht theatre scholars. What became clear from her story is that she has little desire to start bringing world repertoire with the old Ro theatre share in Theatre Rotterdam. She has a lot of...
1. Kwatta, Mariken (youth) The question was not whether Nijmegen youth theatre company Kwatta would ever venture into Mariken van Nieumeghen, but when. The bar was set high with successful previous book and film adaptations, but where the medieval Mariken needs two miracles, Jibbe Willems' adaptation is exciting even without a fall from a great height and the miraculous loosening of iron rings...
The great thing about visiting openings is that sometimes you get to experience something that no one expected. Like at the mini-exhibition 'Bep Rietveld, daughter of...' at Kunstruimte Kuub in Utrecht. It features 72 paintings by the daughter of Gerrit Rietveld, the man who gave De Stijl its furniture and houses. This Bep, not without merit with the paintbrush, created a...
On 30 January, choreographer Erik Kaiel was presented with the prestigious Victor Award at IPAY, an international youth theatre fair in Canada, for his performance Tetris. "It's a kind of Buchmesse for youth theatre. If you get picked up there, you go around the world" says Kaiel. Kaiel (1973) has been working in the Netherlands since 2003 and has so far produced his work at...
The raw in Something Raw can mean all sorts of things. The first thought might be something rough, as in the effect of sandpaper on skin or the havoc left by an elephant in the china shop. But rough is a derivative meaning. Raw first of all means unprocessed and fresh. There is a certain hope in the combination of rough and raw: artists who like...
There is one thing almost as much fun as going to see a play. According to some, it is even more fun than going to see a play: reading a play yourself. And then not by yourself, but with a few others. That you divide the roles and start reading aloud. With a cup of tea, coffee or a glass of wine on the side....
Following the exploration of the labour market in the cultural sector made by the Social and Economic Council (SER) and the Council for Culture last month, there was a lot of attention on the low earning self-employed in the cultural sector. Promising headlines such as "Everyone gets paid except the artist" (NRC) and "It's a matter of waiting every month to see if I earn enough" (Volkskrant) could account for recognition...
Three mongols playing Mongols. Dschingis Khan, the opening performance of Something Raw, is provocative and consequential. With this performance by German theatre collective Monstertruck, or the also Berlin-based Man Power Mix by Sheena Mcgrandles and Zinzi Buchanan, the festival Something Raw lives up to its name. Something Raw is a festival in which Amsterdam theatres Frascati, De Brakke...
Never before has the Holland Festival placed itself at the centre of society as it is today. The 2016 programme is steeped in the turbulent times in which we live. The Netherlands holds the presidency of the European Union this spring. Artistic director Ruth Mackenzie has taken this fact unflinchingly to give 'Europe' a wide place in the programming. In presenting...
Anyone who wants to credibly transfer a historical play to the present had better be radical, director Theu Boermans must have thought. And anyone who sees his adaptation of Nikolaj Gogol's The Revisor at the Nationale Toneel cannot help but agree with him. With references to asylum seekers, cubicle snoopers, data espionage and subsidy fraud, the play seems written yesterday. Yet Boermans remains...
Time for our success list. In 2015, we attracted 60,000 more visitors than in 2014. That's something to be proud of. A website that focuses on the stories that existing media find the small, and then figures like that. That we attracted those 300,000 visitors is one, that they spent an average of 2 and a half minutes per story,...
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