Usually without lyrics, often with music, always with movement
Nothing defines us like our taste. And especially taste in music. We find that music taste defines exactly who we are and can easily distinguish us from people who have distinctly different, and therefore lesser, tastes. Pinkpop, a pop festival with several world-famous headliners, experienced this. Each world star plays to their own audience, which schi...
Neues Stück 1 Seit sie - Ein Stück von Dimitris Papaioannou is a long title for an overwhelming piece, which Tanztheater Wuppertal is bringing to the Holland Festival this year. Nine years ago, on 30 June 2009, a month before she was to turn sixty-nine, Pina Bausch died suddenly. The world-famous and highly influential choreographer of experimental, haunting and unparalleled dance theatre left behind a...
It is the spatial arrangement that immediately impresses in The Way You Sound Tonight, choreographer Arno Schuitemaker's ninth performance. There are roughly 25 seats too few. The last Holland Festival visitors to walk onto the Rabozaal stage during the premiere have to find their own place on the still-scented wooden floor. Pijpela Schuitemaker has, to my...
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...
What a grandiose invention to think of breakdance as martial arts dance! In a sense, of course, it has been so from the beginning. Young people in New York's poor neighbourhoods developed their spectacular dance techniques in the 1980s. These were a means for them to express themselves in their own unique way. This was a necessity of life in a society that...
If you want to see a do-nothing dance programme, TWOOLS 18 by Scapino Ballet Rotterdam is the wrong place. If you want to see how young creators live their world, you're in the right place. TWOOLS the 18th edition TWOOLS is an occasional platform that offers young choreographers the chance to work with a top company. All the makers participating in the 18th edition of TWOOLS...
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...
With 'The Way You Sound Tonight', which will have its world premiere at Holland Festival 2018, choreographer Arno Schuitemaker takes the next step in his creative development. He describes his performance as an 'acoustic ballroom'. I speak to the 1976-born dance maker, who once studied at Delft University of Technology, about his work and his motives. 'In the trilogy 'WHILE...
In Kata, the latest work by French breaker and choreographer Anne Nguyen, hip-hop men transcend the clichés of hip-hop. Toughness, untouchability and the usual frontal relationship with the audience are exchanged for indirect gestures, delayed effects, diagonals and laterals, double entendres and irony. Nguyen, herself an adept practitioner of capoeira, ming chun and breakdance, challenges her dancers to show their...
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...
The separation between the Netherlands and Belgium was due to an opera at the Brussels Monnaie Theatre in 1830. During a certain song in the opera De Stomme van Portici, the flame flared and the opera-goers ran out of the hall like an angry mob to chase Den 'Ollander out of town. Such behaviour turns out to be more logical than you...
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...
In Dutch Doubles 2018 by the Dutch National Ballet, choreographers collaborate with other artists for the second time. The chemical reaction between Wende Snijders and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa almost blows up the formula. BAM! The audience jumps up. BAM!"It had to take 11 years for me to make something here again?", choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa seems to be saying. The Belgian/Colombian is lumbering...
Cinedans has been around since 2003. Back then, it was a single evening, part of Amsterdam's Julidans festival. Pretty soon, it grew into something bigger. According to Martine Dekker, involved with the festival since the 2011 edition, this was due to the overwhelming supply of dance films: 'From the second edition, filmmakers were invited to submit films,...
Yoga and mindfulness at work are popular, but there is a new trend in 'workplace wellness': dancing at work! On 17 May, Dance to the People is organising the Dance@Work conference in Utrecht. During this event, dance professionals will show business how dance contributes to the well-being of managers and their teams. With this initiative,...
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...
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.
'I admire the strength of women. I experience it as greater than that of men. Women's strength lies in the dedication with which they can deal with things. The courage to push boundaries.' Jens van Daele, in his latest theatre show 'Nighthexen 1: Jeanne', pays tribute to the strength of women and highlights their heroism from...
First there was Kinder Matteüs: an interactive musical production with the Holland Baroque Society and the Nieuw Amsterdams Kinderkoor. Now The Dutch Junior Dance Division with the Matangi Quartet brings Last 7 Words to music by Haydn. You came to church every day, didn't you?" I ask Thom Stuart. No, the choreographer firmly denies. 'I never come to church.'
'A frenzied mastery' is the name of the documentary that Manon Lichtveld and Bas Westerhof made about Krisztina de Châtel. The emotions really hit home when visiting their parents' home in Hungary. We met them in the Rabozaal of Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam. They were also filming. Bas Westerhof and Manon Lichtveld. Cameraman Leo van Emden and I followed Koert...
As soon as I, as an art consumer, begin to suspect arbitrariness in the artist or his creative process, I drop out. Incidentally, this observation now surprises me. After all, I am no fetishist of form, nor am I a canon junkie, and I am not qualified in any of the standard artistic disciplines. Not a composer, not a performing musician and not an actor. Neither filmmaker nor director, nor a lyricist graduate....
Rule of Three is a piece for three dancers: Steven Michel, Julien Josse and Courtney May Robertson. NAH makes the music live, the lighting is by Jan Fedinger and there are some lyrics by Lydia Davis. Rule of Three was released last month at De Singel in Antwerp, and its Dutch premiere is today at the Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam....
NDT 1 concludes its triptych Side B: Adrift with Franck Chartier's new The Hidden Floor. After the performance, I literally lose my way. Different worlds "Franck?", I call out. In the rain, an unremarkable man approaches me. Yes, comes the reply from under a cap. It's Franck Chartier, on his way to the studio in...
A field littered with landmines. This is what life feels like sometimes. In waiting rooms, for example. Uncomfortable situations. What should you say to each other? Timorous glances shoot past each other. Hidden tension pounds against your muscles. Everyone is afraid of everyone else. And of themselves. Fobia by Davide Bellotta is one of three works with which young choreographers present themselves in the programme
I actually experienced it once! In the middle of a theatre performance, an elderly lady, who had nothing to do with the story, walked onto the stage. She must have got lost in the interval and ended up behind the wings through a door that was accidentally open. While the actors were engaged in a deeply serious Hamlet, she came laconic
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