Conny Janssen Danst celebrates its 25th anniversary. To mark the occasion, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam will be stage and laboratory for Conny Janssen, her dancers and her team for three weeks. A video installation, performance, live rehearsals and an exhibition will portray the point at which the group has arrived on its development journey. Unorthodox "My start with the group 25 years ago was...
The most beautiful end of the world is in Lars von Trier's Melancholia. Floating poplars, a woolly planet eating us in a wave of atmospheric mist. I'd sign up for it. Anything better than the sloshing slabs of earth full of screaming puppets in the failed 2012 disaster film. Then again, not as much fun as the end of times in The Hitchhikers Guide...
The prize for the longest and most artful kiss of 2017 has been given away and goes to Conny Janssen Danst. In a small tent on the square below Bossche Sint-Jan, this danced kiss forms the technical and dramatic highlight of Clarity. Two dancers, spinning pirouettes while keeping their lips connected, a video artist and the floating music performed live by iET were on Saturday ...
[This post was already online under the title 'Save us from the Transition Office', but has been updated in a few details] While you are preparing for a well-deserved holiday, people in the arts sector are working on a new model. That new model is needed because the old model is no longer adequate. That old model, and we are of course talking about our...
The advantage of being a subscriber to Culture Press is, of course, mainly that we can exist thanks to you. So our independent sound remains audible, so you get the interpretation of the news as you get it nowhere else. In June, a total of 14 authors hit the road for you to see as many Holland Festival performances as possible....
Even abroad, it is noticeable that Jiří Kylián's work is not showing at NDT. Even though the so-called embargo is expiring and this is his anniversary year. No Kylián past three years The Financial Times reported. Laura Cappelle describes a fine performance by Nederlands Dans Theater in Paris and concludes that Kylián's work is not among the...
You can think of several reasons to go and see MIRROR MIRROR by Conny Janssen Danst at the RDM Submarine Wharf. But there is one in particular. Conny Janssen Danst is back in a former submarine hangar in Rotterdam with MIRROR MIRROR. That shed is located on the waterfront near the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and an Innovation Lab. An industrial setting that also returns...
The plofnies came totally unexpectedly. The family father behind me, out with wife and presumably reluctant adolescent son, burst out after about 10 minutes into the performance. Just when a deafening silence had descended over the sold-out Theatre Carré. At least four people, including myself, were shocked to the core. A sneeze had never been this loud before, but as quiet as during...
Flexing is a street dance style from Brooklyn, New York. Thirteen men, three women strong is the formation that has caused a furore in America in various guises (HyperActive, MainEventt, Ringmasters), from the local talent show Flex in Brooklyn to America's Best Dance Crew. Now the crew, led by pioneer Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray, is on a world tour with a show, which they will perform with the...
On Anton de Komplein, it is less cosy than on the roof of Parking 58 in Brussels, where I saw danse de nuit earlier. Above South-East, the moon is hidden behind a thick haze, the square feels big and empty so without the market. The performance by choreographer Boris Charmatz/Musée de la Danse, also today and tomorrow,...
Rito de Primavera, on show at the Holland Festival early this week, is a group choreography for fifty young dancers. Choreographer José Vidal has loosely based himself on Sacre du printemps, Stravinsky and Nijinsky's 1913 piece for the Ballet Russes. Fragments of Stravinsky's music have been turned into 4-quarter beetz by DJ Jim Hast, while Vidal has minimised the ritual aspect of the sacrifice, essential to the many versions made throughout the 20th century (besides Nijinsky's primal version, Massine, Béjart and Bausch, among others).
What remains is an overwhelming visual experience of a gigantic mass of dancers looming out of the darkness. The coordination of the group, at times dancing wildly through each other, at other times circling the stage in long parade, is impressive. It produces a fascinating, eye-opening aesthetic, but the group dance in no way challenges the audience. You could call it a pile of kitsch, or opium for the people. Either way, it is a form of spectacle that I consider unworthy of the Holland Festival.
School trip
The performance begins like a school trip. Near the box office, spectators are prepared in groups for what is to come. They are kindly requested to take off their shoes upon entering the theatre, and then to walk barefoot, hand in hand with fellow spectators, through the dark. Regularly, someone calls loudly for silence, as the performance has already started. There is also something uncomfortable about the nervous manner in which the audience, which is supposed to line up in rows after the instructions, is marched away to the performance space two buildings away.
The initiation of the visitors continues in the Purification Hall, when they pass through the pitch darkness hand in hand with the cool sand at their feet. It provides one of the few ambiguous moments during Rito de Primavera. Where is this going? What fairy tale are we being led into here? From which tourist boat have we fallen off, to now attend the rituals of which people again?
Naked!?
At first, the total experience that so many contemporary theme parks are looking for really takes shape. For half an hour, I stare at a stage in the dark. I see and feel a lot of people there, I think naked because sometimes there is a clever flash of soft light, but the dominant darkness prevents me from getting a grip on it. Ethereal singing composed by Andrés Abarzúa - a single chord sounds gurgling from many throats - accompanies the entrance of all the other spectators for half an hour.
The bleachers surround the playing surface. It is only the red and white bicycle lights of the guides of the many groups of spectators that give you some orientation in the space. It has something of Tintin in Takatukaland. An audience paying to be at a miraculous, never-before-seen, spring nymphing ritual.
Rito de Primavera, José Vidal & Cía. Photo: Fabian Cambero
Logic
The artificiality of the setting gives a certain tension. In the darkness, as a spectator, you can imagine all sorts of things about what is to come. But at some point, the bicycle lights go out, a sign that all spectators are seated, and the dancers all put on trousers. The light increases and the first beetz cum stravinsky supplants the singing. When, after the uncertain introitus, the actual spectacle begins, its logic becomes all too clear. A perfectly organised group choreography takes over.
In what follows, nothing is left to chance. And that is no luxury with so many dancers in semi-darkness, especially as half of them are also new to the work, because from the Modern Theatre Dance Department of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. The group makes pulsating movements, dialogues with a neighbour, runs in groups, starts singing again, postures and occasionally lifts a single person in the air.
Impact-aware
But just as the darkness gets used, so does the group. They are all very young people, fairly relaxed dancing together. The uninhibited attitude with which the complicated group choreographies are performed is touching. A naive kind of surrender or faith speaks from it.
But gradually the effects, of the group choreography, of the light that creates the photographic vistas, the repetitive singing and beetz get boring. The repetition of moves is effect-laden, rhetorical, self-affirming. Nowhere a moment of debacle, of faltering. No one who has a question, can't keep up, is wrong
Boris Charmatz has been a guest at many editions of the Holland Festival with impressive, provocative, socially engaged, finely composed and conceptually strong dance performances: Aatt enen tionon and Con forts fleuve (both in 2001); 50 years of dance (2010), Enfant (2011) and Manger (2015). His latest choreography, danse de nuit, premiered in Geneva last September. During the Holland Festival...
Many dance students have a one-sided view of what a successful dance career entails. Namely: dancing with the dance company of your dreams, in a theatre, on a stage. This is what Ulrika Kinn Svensson, artistic advisor at the Fontys Dance Academy in Tilburg, tells Inclusive Dance Event. But because of the weak labour and income position, partly due to disappearing subsidies, that dream does not always come true. There is...
Culture Press is an indispensable addition to the cultural news in your newspaper, on the internet or on TV. Independent, quirky, rebellious and above all: useful. After all, there is already enough nonsense about art. You'll understand that we don't serve the millions of readers that the big publishers and their advertisers exist on. Which is why everyone else does so little about art....
We are real Holland Festival specialists by now. We go and see performances beforehand, interview makers, actors and walk around the halls, in the foyers, just about every day. We hear a lot, we see a lot and we share it here. Cultural journalism as it should be, in short. Cultural journalism that should also be there. And it totally succeeds if you take out a subscription. Then you get...
What does it mean for a dancer with an intense career when she decides to choreograph as well? In March, Battle Abbey premiered, Heather Ware's first full-length choreography in collaboration with Swedish cellist Jakob Korányi. Heather Ware, a dancer with LeineRoebana since 2003, embarked on the path to creating her own choreography without a plan....
Joop Oonk (27) creates dance performances with the Misiconi Dance Company, but not of a standard kind. She also calls it inclusion dance. Dancing with wheelchairs, for example, and then doing it in public spaces. Time for a chat with this extraordinary choreographer. Fortunately, you don't have to be an art barbarian not to know the word inclusion dance. Joop Oonk choreographer, artistic director...
A dance performance for youth (6+) recently caused a stir. Pupils from groups 5 to 8 of the Islamic Aboe Daoedschool in Utrecht visited IJspaleis (6+) by dance theatre group plan d-. At a dance of two penguins in love, one of the teachers requested that the performance be stopped. This scene was not considered suitable for the pupils, the explanation said. It...
What happens when you take someone's head off? Little, you will say, since the accompanying body dies. But then you are wrong. Because at the first GRIP evening at Utrecht's Theater Kikker, Steven Michel showed that the rest of the body then just takes over. Fascinating to notice how you go from a bare back to...
The first bare female breast I consciously observed in my life was the happily swishing boob of the girl in the Fa advertisement. It must have been sometime deep in the 1970s. The same time the Pacifisties Socialistiese Partij also did something similar with a cow in the background. Now, a good forty years later, the...
While Jan Martens' latest work, The Common People (2016), was at Amsterdam's Stadschouwburg last weekend, Utrecht's Theater Kikker is showing two older hits this week: Sweat Baby Sweat (2011) and The dog days are over (2014). Sweat and Dogdays are blockbusters and have already toured the world. At Kikker, they can now be seen as part of a...
The South Pole does not score high with holidaymakers. But maybe that will change, if at least many children see Ice Palace (6+) by youth dance group plan d-. Renamed 'd-travels' for the occasion, plan d- proposes an adventurous trip. It takes the dancer/tour leader with his billboard some effort to get people excited about it, but already...
'Before we start the actual presentation, let me give you some facts & figures,' says Els van der Plas, general director of the National Opera & Ballet. 'No, not the alternative facts,' she adds wittily. The ghost of the US president will be through the Stopera more often this afternoon. Van der Plas recalls the successes that...
Ruth Mackenzie has achieved an enormous amount in the short time she has been boss of Holland Festival. I've experienced the festival now since the late 1990s and watched it evolve from something very personal and sometimes obscure (under Ivo van Hove), to an ethereal feast of sizzling aesthetics (with Pierre Audi), to what it...
The performance PARA | DISO Revisited is hard to get out of your system. The sneering angel, the ecstasy of the female dancers, the noble classical knight. And sublime dance. Man, man, man. La Divina Commedia revisited PARA | DISO Revisited is a reworking of youPARA | DISO from 2010. The work concludes a series of four volumes inspired by Dante Alighieri's...
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