With text, movement, actors, sets.
Stop or keep going until you drop dead? And can you build on the other? Serious life questions that the occasional duo Peter Blok and Bas Hoeflaak will answer from a trapeze on the ridge of their circus, joking and snarking. The dry humour and mugshots of Peter Blok (experienced stage, film and TV actor) and actor-cabaret artist Bas Hoeflaak (Snipers) are...
Saying sorry seems to be difficult, if the songs about it are to be believed, and if we measure the time it takes Dutch governments to do it. But sorry is also very easy, if you consider how often you are not pushed aside in the queue for something or other, after the word 'sorry' has sounded behind you, or -...
Ik zeg toch sorry a theatre performance by Theatre Group Aluin and Raymi Sambo Makes about Keti Koti, the day celebrating the (official) abolition of slavery, will be shown in Dutch theatres from the end of September. At a time when more and more municipalities and organisations are openly apologising for the slavery past or letting their own role in this period be...
Shabnam and Theatre Group Aluin meet as part of her directing internship for the performance I Say Sorry. Aluin considers it important to give young people with an interest in text theatre the opportunity to develop as autonomous creators. Being able to create alongside your writing can be a great added value. This residency gives Shabnam...
There is at least one reason to go see Porca Miseria, Trajal Harrell's latest work. The Holland Festival hosts the American choreographer best known for his Vogueing work this weekend, and the soundtrack to his trilogy is nothing short of stunning. Starting with Willie Nelson and ending with the Lamento della Nimfa with which Claudio Monteverdi...
If humanity goes extinct, there has been a woman somewhere who was the last not to have a child. To whom does that honour belong? At the Holland Festival, an ensemble of 12 performers now perform a requiem for that last non-mother. Actress and singer Joy Wielkens is the extraordinarily disarming high priestess in this at times quite heavy evening, in which the end of...
It shows either enormous guts, or boundless naivety, to make a musical in which a slave trader in Africa is converted by a song to a life of love and respect for fellow human beings. Yet Yemandja, the play that was performed in a setless performance at the Holland Festival, is actually just that. I could also explain...
From Thursday 1 to Sunday 11 September 2022, the Nederlands Theater Festival will show the finest productions of the past theatre season. The Netherlands Theatre Jury, led by jury president Hadassah de Boer, selected the 12 most impressive theatre productions of the moment. Today, the jury announced its selection. Ten of the twelve productions from the selection can be seen during the upcoming edition of the festival....
In the French-speaking world, everyone has read l'Étranger (The Foreigner) by Albert Camus. The 1942 book, which many Dutch people have also read, if only because it is nice and thin for the French reading list, tells the story of a white French resident of Algeria, a so-called pied-noir, who is so convinced of the absurdity of life that he becomes a...
In Flanders, or rather in its cultural capital, Antwerp, the theatre sector is faltering. The Toneelhuis, founded in the late 1990s as a merger between the legendary Blauwe Maandag Compagnie and city company KNS, is in crisis after the departure of Guy Cassiers. It is now losing more than half of its subsidy after a scathing opinion. The Flemish government is stopping...
'For me, the world of Wotan equals the world of Putin.' Christopher Ruping, director of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen to be shown in Amsterdam in June, makes no bones about it: 'Siegfried [central character of Wagner's monster production, ws] is a very problematic character. He kills the dragon without asking questions. We give the dragon...
The comparison with the Derksen affair cited in this article no longer holds true as of this date, as the TV personality has been restored to full glory by the television station that previously 'cancelled' him. From Monday, 16 May, he will return to his old role as a 'grumpy old man' in Today Inside. See the link here.
Ok. One time I will say it. That Yara Piekema is the daughter of Harry Piekema. You know: that man who single-handedly gave that Zaanse Grootgrutter a human face. Harry was already a big one in Utrecht, and now it turns out he secretly, years ago, gave birth to an even bigger one: Yara Piekema, no longer the daughter of,...
On Good Friday, I, working for the Immigration and Naturalisation Service IND, attended the 100th performance of Solomon's Judgement at the Lourdes Church in Scheveningen. Wijbrand Schaap visited the confrontational theatre production in July 2021 and wrote back then about the perils of an asylum procedure at the IND. Where does the performance stand now? Just in a nutshell: in Salomon's Judgement, three actors do...
How beautiful art for children can be when a real artist is involved. When themes like death, falling in love, loneliness and exclusion are made palpable in such a beautiful way that you step outside with a deeper feeling about life? With theatre-maker Moniek Merkx, you can. A year ago, she stepped down as artistic director of...
That you are suddenly back in 1996 at Black Snow, the television series in which actress Tamar van den Dop managed to hook an entire generation of viewers at the time. Since then, her raven-black curls have turned into a glittering cloud of silver, but those who go to see Het Nationale Theater's Leedvermaak trilogy suddenly see that young Tamar again. A miracle of talent in...
'For the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to play all the notes written by Chekhov. It was an intellectual and artistic challenge to really work with Chekhov. I could really let Chekhov be one of the authors of the play, which is very unusual for me. After all, I'm used to writing plays to...
What magnificent beauty of Dutch language from Tom Lanoye! What greatness of stage by Theu Boermans! What great acting by Romana Vrede, Mark Rietman and Myrthe Huber! Three hours of enjoyment at the very highest level that culture has to offer. And then the Koninklijke Schouwburg in The Hague is not even sold out on a Saturday night. Did the big...
We always want to do the best, but usually fail horribly. Whether this is our habitual way of thinking, or whether we owe that idea to Ovid, we will never know. We can, however, say that the literary work 'Metamorphoses', published by Roman Ovid in the first year of our era, is the single most influential book of the...
Which sentence stuck with us? The question to the audience comes from Madeleine Matzer after the performance of 'Smart'. It is a rather loaded question, as the play is about very direct loss. When a child has just died in a stupid accident, every sentence you remember is worth gold. The blunt accident that the subject...
Few actors can portray timidity as aptly as Jan-Paul Buijs. With his wonderful Circus Treurdier, he made a catchy performance that anyone who has something against big mouths should enjoy. Especially at chat show tables and on Twitter, but also with the incessant smattering of columns in the Volkskrant; the big mouths of the betwetervolk exert a power that you...
During the upcoming Makersdag on 7 March in Het Huis Utrecht, the Utrechtse Lichting will present themselves, a group of Utrecht theatre makers who graduated during the pandemic. The circumstances in which these makers had to take their first steps in the field were tough during corona time. HKU Theatre, Theater Kikker and Het Huis Utrecht are therefore jointly offering these theatre makers the opportunity to...
Susannah Elmecky and Emma Remmelts were in the third year of the Utrecht School of Theatre when Covid struck. Now they have both graduated and started careers on stage. In this podcast, they tell how they experienced the time of lockdowns. Also joining us is Victorine Plante, director of theatre group Aluin, where Susannah Elmecky is now playing a beautiful role in...
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz. Remember that name. A writer who left us only two books, and whose life history reads like a twentieth-century horror novel. He wrote, in 1939, three years before his death by a torpedo in the Indian Ocean, 'The Man Who Took Trains', under his English pseudonym John Grane. This book, published in 2018 in the original German...
Giving up a loved one poisons bodies, which then repel each other. Is there consolation for pain from cruelty? About a thousand children under 20 die every year, most of them babies. And 600 people die in traffic, thankfully far fewer than before, but more since 1945 than in the Holocaust. There are no collective commemorations for it, bereaved families often suffer in...
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