Anything for which people enter a stage.
Theatre Festival Boulevard is a highlight of the festival summer every year. Because there are no barriers and because it carries the casual atmosphere of the city in every fibre. But it goes even further. Here are my seven learning moments: 1: Boulevard is more accessible than the city itself Some people find it verging on the hysterical, but...
When you make theatre for children and young people, you tell stories to children and young people from your adult existence as an adult. You can do that. You can get funding for that. Artemis, previously named the second-best theatre company in the Netherlands here, is such a company. But, because this youth theatre company is led by Jetse Batelaan, Artemis likes to do things differently. Stronger...
Miet Warlop has exciting ideas, and carries them out. Now she is not unique in that. More artists do that. What makes Miet Warlop special is that it invariably leads to really special work. Take her latest creation, to be seen at Theatre Festival Boulevard, 'Ghost Writer and the Broken Hand Brake': she puts three people on stage and...
Bossche Theatre Artemis is, after International Theatre Amsterdam, the best theatre company in the Netherlands. The company owes this to an illustrious past (Pauline Mol!!) and to Jetse Batelaan. This director recently received the prestigious Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale for his disruptive oeuvre. This consists largely of performances in which children take power, without...
The central character in theatre-maker Marijn Graven's Lo Lie Taa was there early. At least, so he tells the mirrored floor and the audience in his monologue Lo Lie Taa. As a nine-year-old, he was already madly in love with his mother and not long after, his life was defined by pursuing as many splashy results of his...
One of the benefits of advancing secularisation is that beautiful buildings are becoming vacant in more and more places. You can do things with those buildings. With art, for example. So this week, Studio Orka from Belgium did something beautiful in the Maria Church in Vught. They turned the empty neo-Romanesque building into, yes, an empty church....
The Theater aan de Parade is slowly but surely starting to become the blot of cultural politics in Den Bosch. The outdated theatre has too low ceilings, too much plush, asbestos and past to still be a credit to the Brabant provincial capital. Viktorien van Hulst, director of the now 35-year-old Theatre Festival Boulevard, made a point of saying during her opening speech on 1 August that the...
Canadian Emily Molnar is the new artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT1) from season 2020/2021. Looking at her track record, she has everything going for her: a loyal ten years as artistic director of Canadian BC (British Columbia) Ballet, a good reputation as a choreographer, acclaimed as a visionary, innovator and coach and she has a...
It is, so in his normal clothes, a cheerful, spontaneous guy who walks up to me in the hotel lobby where we have arranged to meet. Jeremy Dutcher the Canadian singer who is one of the main guests at this year's Amsterdam Roots festival, hardly shows any traces of the jet lag he must have undoubtedly sustained from his flight, which took off a few hours earlier...
'As programmers, we are more often in Ghent than in Amsterdam,' says Viktorien van Hulst, director of Theatre Festival Boulevard. The Bossche arts festival, which this year takes place from 1 to 11 August under the Sint Jan and at unexpected locations around the North Brabant capital, has for years stood out for its close ties with our southern neighbours. 'The Dionysian artists are sitting...
Amsterdam is once again spoilt for choice with Julidans, an international festival packed with impressive dance. The second festival night features Child by Peeping Tom. The work of this Brussels-based company is a phenomenon and I am a fan of it. Ever since its dance trilogy at NDT1: The missing door (2013), The lost room (2015), The hidden floor (2017) (reviews under...
Post-colonial criticism and reflection ran like a thread through this year's Holland Festival programme. Not only William Kentrigde and Faustin Linyekula, the associate artists with whom the festival's programmers collaborated, their work addresses the devastating effects of centuries of Western European trade and commerce. In reframing political and social history and reclaiming...
28-year-old Jeremy Dutcher is a sensation. With his reinterpretation of native songs by Canadian Indians, he won the Canadian equivalent of the Grammy last year; names like Arcade Fire, Feist and Kaytranada preceded him. Amsterdam Roots Festival is now bringing award-winning Canadian musician Jeremy Dutcher to the Netherlands for a performance at the Bimhuis on 10 July 2019. When...
The 2019 Holland Festival was the best in decades. At least in the 25 years I have consciously witnessed it, I cannot recall a national festival that coupled so much impact with so much prestige. Whether visitor targets were met or not will be of no concern to me in this regard. It is, as Volkskrant colleague Hein Janssen once remarked,...
Stereo is primitive. Cinema operators have known that for a while, and so has anyone with a 7:1 set to go with their TV. Two speakers, no matter how good and big or small, remain two speakers. Now, of course, we also only have two ears, but they can place 360-degree sound thanks to some clever ribbing and our own smart brains. So sound should be...
The nominations for the 2019 Swans have been announced. Here is my annual prediction of who will win one. Spoiler alert. This year, it will be a cautious prediction. Even though in past years I wasn't far wrong (sometimes completely right) in guessing the winners, now when it comes to the dancers, you have to choose from superlatives: 'let them be on a...
You must be a Pole. That, as the Dutch premiere of 'Process' at the Holland Festival showed, is no laughing matter. This performance, an adaptation of Franz Kafka's famous novel of the same name, conveys that feeling very poignantly. Five hours long, interrupted only by two half-hour intermissions, during which a mackerel sandwich can be eaten. Or a bowl of mixed nuts. Observant...
A black man sits on the edge of the stage of Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg, pardon ITA. He observes us with intense gaze as we walk into the auditorium. - As the incarnate subtitle of the performance Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe. Behind a gauze screen are the instruments of Asko|Schönberg, which, together with Roomful of Teeth, signs for...
The Americans have a word for it: production value. By this you can indicate that a performance is technically perfect. The sound is right, the stage setting is excellent, the costumes are all right, the lighting brilliant and the actors, singers and musicians: top notch. Even the extras are at their best. So a show with high production value can rely on little...
It must have started with a big plan in Simon McBurney's head. The Brit, a master of mathematically precise text theatre full of technical gadgets, saw the amazing floor of the Rabozaal of Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg and his brain started working. Something about a backcloth covering the full width of the hall, something about a doll's house, something about...
With all the socially critical, exotic and personal life art at the Holland Festival, Van Manen, Forsythe, Arqués is actually an outlier, a statement without a message. Dance has enough on its own, expresses itself full-length. And how. Work of overwhelming quality. How much better can it get? At most by giving it a message anyway. There is room there. The rest is complete....
'I think they understood.' Faustin Linyekula says it, very quietly, a little apologetically almost, to his fellow actor at the end of the performance Congo. A slightly relieved laugh can be heard in the main auditorium of Frascati, where Princess Beatrix is also seated. Shortly before, Daddy Moanda Kamono had erupted in an increasingly desperate tirade against our shared past....
The Holland Festival, with its ample offerings, is sometimes its own competitor. For instance, I missed Turan Dokht and the premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande because I was at aus LICHT. To attend a performance of Debussy's only opera, I had to pass up Abd Al Malik's concert. - Cultural choice stress, frustrating on the one hand but a blessing on the other. Was it...
French is made for rap. Forget all that American-English mincing, listen to the rhythmic drone that good French-language rap offers. One of the possible benefits of a self-absorbed US and a post-Brexit Europe is that we might start hearing that beautiful language of our southern southern neighbours a bit more often. 'Speak French to me, darling!' Macron will be delighted. Wednesday...
Why do we actually want to see blood so much? That's what I wondered during the performance Roughhouse. This American-German piece is showing in the Holland Festival (Wednesday 12 June still) and in it there is no blood. That's also what it's about. That blood no longer flows anywhere, in the media, in art. That everyone always gets up again, that...
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