With text, movement, actors, sets.
Albania's National Theatre, recently declared a protected monument by Europa Nostra, was unexpectedly destroyed on Sunday, 17 May, after two years of protests. Early in the morning, when it was still dark, the bulldozers came. A sudden wave of policemen wearing mouth caps chased activists and artists out of the theatre and formed a cordon around the audience....
'I did get startled at first by being so laconic under the lockdown. I thought: don't I care enough to step over it so lightly? I also fully understand that people are very sad that it's all off, but apparently I'm a bit more fatalistic about that.' Greg Nottrot, playwright and enigma maker,...
'I have only met one person for more than 3 minutes in five weeks. I live alone, I see people at the groceries, I take walks and bike rides, but apart from that I don't see anyone live.' Rainer Hofmann, artistic director of Spring, is experiencing a very different spring than intended, thanks to Corona. This month, the major Utrecht festival of innovative art was supposed to...
We are fairly bombarded to death with online theatre experiences. Frankly, I avoid them. I always thought theatre was something to be experienced live. Bobbing shoes are terrible, visible consumption when speaking is something I can't stand at the moment and the sound is always mediocre. I want live theatre, and nothing else. Leave TV to the TV makers, they have studied for that. Still...
It is with great regret that the Holland Festival is forced to cancel the 73rd edition, which was to take place from 4 to 28 June 2020. The corona pandemic's persistent, domestic and foreign restrictions and uncertainties make it impossible for the international performing arts festival to take place. The ongoing, restrictive measures that the central government had to announce 21 April last,...
An artists' protest in Albania deserves extra attention. Especially as EU accession negotiations resume. Indeed, the protest action is impressive and offers a view of EU accession from an interesting perspective. That of a people who are committed to democratic values, who value their own history and culture, who do not want to give way to...
Director Noël Fischer, artistic director of HNTJong, Het Nationale Theater's youth club, learned a week ago just before the first try-out that she and Trojan Wars would not be allowed on stage for the try-out, nor for Saturday's premiere. No ordinary performance but a marathon performance with three parts, with fodder for the mind (music) and the...
Yesterday, I read this update from Madeleine Matzer on facebook: 'Two years ago, I chose this view. So beautiful. So quiet. So serene. And so well suited to the hectic and dynamic life I normally lead. Insanely meaningful work with wonderful and inspiring colleagues, a large and delightful social network, and then also all those opportunities for...
When he started for himself in 2006, the CoC's question was not, how Oscar Kocken would later deal with a global pandemic of apocalyptic proportions, income-wise. This is just to show what a toughass our minister of economic affairs is, and how we still get some understanding of the wall of misunderstanding where the...
Fred Goessens has been dead, but is still alive. As uncompromising as ever. The Netherlands' most reliable actor makes an interim will after twenty-two years with Toneelgroep Amsterdam. 'I had shit on everything' This interview was published 10 years ago in TheaterMaker, the trade magazine for the theatre sector. As Fred Goessens is now leaving ITA, the company where he once...
Talent is often developed thanks to considerable opposition. Rodaan Al Galidi got talent for life thanks to more opposition than a white, former blonde Dutchman like me will ever meet. He escaped from Iraq and then spent years in the purgatory of the IND and COA, the abbreviations that define the border of the Netherlands. He wrote down what he...
The great philosopher of the 1968 left-wing uprisings was untrustworthy both privately and in his philosophy. His muse Simone de Beauvoir was also a victim. In almost an hour and a half, theatre company OT Rotterdam unfolds the disenchantment of De Beauvoir in a brilliant role by José Kuipers, opposite Tim Linde as ex-student leader Benny Lévy and confidant of Sartre. Kabbala Piece...
What. Have. We. Terrible. Much. Too. Learning. If there is 1 thing the musical Tina makes clear, it is that. Especially at the stormy premiere, Sunday 9 February, a few hours before storm Ciara blew the last bubbles out of the Utrecht champagne glasses. An almost completely white auditorium, in Black Tie, that is, with only a few people from...
Much has already been said about Almere, that it is ugly, for instance, or too car-oriented. There are also few cities in Europe where the four-lane roads extend as gloriously to the shopfront as in Almere. I'd like to add a note of praise. Coming from the station, walking across an artificial dune of car parks and fast-food chains, skimming past...
In the days when Europe was still a loose collection of city-states and duchies, where groups of men, for want of football, went on raids a few times a year to burn houses and rape women, a language emerged in the marshlands of the Rhine delta. We know this because plays were written in that language, which is among the earliest preserved...
'I didn't know you could also be digitised away in this sector, but so you can.' Susanne Visser and Annemiek Lely sounded the alarm on Saturday 7 December. Their jobs as ushers at theatre performances are in jeopardy. Companies would rather keep people engaged through podcasts, and such an usher only costs money. On Monday, December 9, we obtained...
I spoke to Peter Pluymaekers, artistic director of Theatre Group Zep, about what it is like to make theatre for vmbo students. The occasion was the not-so-jubilant performance of Cleopatra. Listen to the podcast on anchor: 'I'm always a bit reluctant to do Shakespeare. I find him difficult, and young people often find him corny. I felt the same about the...
The myth just had to end. Nan van Houte, former director of Amsterdam's small theatre Frascati, has buried Action Tomato. During Requiem for Tomato, on 4 November 2019, she made it crystal clear that this legendary event has been measured too big by our theatre historians. In 1969, when a few tomatoes were sent to the al...
Before I say anything substantive about Lazarus, Sunday 13 October the musical premiere for people who never go to musicals, a few misunderstandings the world over. First of all, the album Blackstar, which David Bowie released three days before his death on 11 January 2016, is NOT the soundtrack to Lazarus, his musical that was released a month before his death....
'We will never be 'the same' enough, we fringe characters: bipolar, borderline, gay, lesbian, indeterminate, narcissistic, autistic, hysterical - and we are all fatally insecure and we all need a hug.' Permanent, seemingly inevitable insecurity is peculiar to the theatre industry. Ramsey Nasr hit that sharply in his speech on receiving his second Louis D'Or. The courage, or sometimes almost masochistic...
Boukje Schweigman's world is exciting, but never deadly. Whether she makes an experiential performance in a beautiful location during a summer festival, or takes a more artful approach in the plays she makes for theatres: you only see nice people. Even in Val, her latest. In it, we see a lot of nice people falling. Falling deep, sometimes....
There has been quite a bit going on about borders, lately. That is what authors Floor Leene and Greg Nottrot have made a performance about, together with Wil van der Meer, Tijs Huys and Pascal van Hulst. Directed by Daniël van Klaveren, the Nieuw Utrechts Toneel (NUT) ensemble performs the play on the oldest border we know,...
Janine Abbring has managed to pull the somewhat ramshackle institution Zomergasten out of the doldrums. She has fun, is excellently prepared, is genuinely interested in her guests and has managed to push the eternal battle element into the background without making the broadcasts less exciting. That battle element was always: does the interviewer succeed in 'breaking' the guest? Because.
Police sirens sound less frequently in Groningen than in a city like Amsterdam. When they sounded last Wednesday night, it was because residents of the premises behind the local art academy, Minerva, raised the alarm. Standing on the roof was not an owl, but an almost naked man shouting that he was going to rob the Coop. Mads Wittermans, the actor in question, had forgotten the...
Dragan Bakema will play the lead role of Newton in David Bowie's Lazarus. Gijs Naber has been forced to hand back the role after coming to the conclusion that he has made too much hay in recent times. Gijs Naber: "In the run-up to the rehearsal period, I came to the conclusion that I have been making too much hay in recent years...
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