With text, movement, actors, sets.
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...
Abonneer je op onze gratis nieuwsbrief. Omdat het kan! Dit is waarom. Holland Festival, Poetry International, een zomer vol kunst. En ondertussen wordt een heel nieuw kunstbestel in elkaar gerommeld. Nederland staat te springen om naar buiten te gaan, muziek te beleven, kunst mee te maken en foodtrucks leeg te eten. En het subsidiestelsel om te gooien. Het is een…
'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 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 sleek stage with only a few props are four actors and an Arab musician. Yoshi Oida...
Platonov, Theatre 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 an old PC is humming in a corner containing 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...
The previous cultural exploration among playwrights gives cause for further exploration. From the earlier article, we take away that further privatisation only partially captures public money and objectives. See also from elevation ideals to efficiency thinking. We also take away that a public as all-important leads to one-sided popular culture, entertainment and false competition with the free circuit. It all has very little...
Toneelgroep Amsterdam and Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam will continue together as 'Internationa(a)l Theater Amsterdam' (ITA). Not to be confused with the just-removed Internationaal Danstheater Amsterdam. I find the name 'ITA' rather chilly. Maybe as cold as Toneelgroep, but at least that still contained the word 'group'. That has something cosy about it. ITA is something like ING. Great ambition and no roots. For a moment...
Is she on a podium of honour or a scaffold? Joan of Arc holds a monologue. She shouts out her words. The beat of the music propels an ominous atmosphere into the room. On the floor, five dancers make resolute movements. In a long series of statements and confessions, Jeanne speaks out what moved her to seek the battlefield. And.
So certain words are taboo. Moroccan Said explains that his ideal woman has to be a virgin, chaste, and so should not let him ... well, that is. That word you are not allowed to say. The Turkish Evrim thinks that's big nonsense again. Why not call a spade a spade? In Habib, the latest performance by theatre group ZEP, it is all about...
Two men. Not even very muscular, not even very tough. But what dockworkers. And what simplicity to tell something really beautiful. One rolls himself up like a stone and the other rolls that stone up a mountain. That mountain consists of stage sections that are each at least half a metre in height from each other....
On 6 December 2017, the Taalunie Toneelschrijfprijs was awarded to poet, writer and playwright Ilja Leonard Pfeiffer. With his play about Bram Moszkowitcz, titled 'The lawyer', he was the preferred original work among 47 submissions. According to the Taalunie, Pfeiffer's play 'balances magisterially on the fine line between tragedy and comedy, realistic drama and meta-thought, slapstick and emotion....
Called The Winter Collection, it is a five-day mini-festival full of surprises. Utrecht-based Theatre Kikker has now made it a tradition to provide some real surprises every year around Sinterklaas. 10 performances by young creators, from video art, to rowdy dance performance, from a silent monologue to post-dramatic cyberpunk, enough to give any theatre lover a wake-up call....
A collection of makers they are. A collection, but not a collective. What an 'f' can't already make up. So language is quite a thing. And crowdsourcing is quite a thing. These makers collect words from their audience, and give them back in a performance. That's 'BOG.', a still fairly young group trying to use language to make theatre to get us to...
Beethoven and Bach brought the true music. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen the future. The rest, from Beatles to hoempa, was 'jazz', commercially capitalist and therefore pernicious. Very briefly, this is what we should know Theodor Adorno from. Paul R. Kooij now plays this art-philosophical sharper in a performance by Mirjam Koen. Just when the division based partly on Adorno's thinking between...
In recent years, Toneelgroep Amsterdam's artistic director Ivo van Hove made three performances of works by Couperus. In three short interviews, I look back at the last part, Little Souls. Despite the long meandering sentences and the romantic, sometimes very passive characters, this book (or actually it's four books)is a timeless masterpiece that, as far as I'm concerned, all...
In the final part of 'books of little souls', the once disgraced Constance sits in the dark and draughty country house where her reluctant parents-in-law used to live. Constance married their only child, Baron Henri van der Welcke, against their wishes. Constance's and Henri's son Addy is the only thing that connects these two people. Love for each other is never...
Utrecht's Wolvenplein prison is sort of empty. Anyone who doesn't happen to have a conviction behind them themselves should go there for fun. I did so myself two years ago on an art project about the surveillance society. When I returned on Tuesday, 17 October 2017, for The Prison Monologues, the impression was still there. The...
Dat je een schoen aan kunt trekken. Maar ook niet. Dat het eigenlijk niet zoveel zin heeft om een schoen aan te trekken, als je hem later op de dag toch ook weer uit zult doen. Why bother? Waarom leven? Herkenbaar? Voor wie ooit in een dip zat wel. Theatergroep Kassys, onlangs nog wereldwijd een hit met ‘Total Eclipse of…
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