Anything for which people enter a stage.
Ivo van Hove has not only a play made based on Ayn Roland's novel of ideas The Fountainhead. In 2006, the artistic director of Toneelgroep Amsterdam even wanted to base a whole new design of the theatre system on it. Eight years later, we can see that only the negative aspects of Van Hove's vision have been realised.
When someone speaks in sentences with words that repeatedly rhyme with 'art' or in which the syllable 'art' keeps popping up, you have to adjust to a different logic than that of everyday communication. If it is also a woman dressed in bright red who pronounces those words eloquently and with many mannerisms, suggesting that she is hyper-sensitive to anything to do with art, your thoughts balance between:
In Rome, they have known what good food is for 20 centuries or so. Bloodletting is everything. Seneca, a Roman of the better sort, wrote plays in which bloodshed was elevated to an art. Audiences feasted on them, just as they feasted on Seneca's recipes in Shakespeare's time, 1,500 years later, and as we feast on Game of Thrones on TV now. It can't be gory, can't be cruel enough. We like that.
From 2007, video artist Matthew Barney (The Cremaster Cycle) and composer Jonathan Bepler on a free adaptation of Norman Mailer's most maligned book Ancient Evenings. To Mailer's mythology of ancient Egypt, they added the equally mythical American automobile industry in an ambitious and operatesque film project with a demanding length of 5 hours 11 minutes.
From February River of Fundament on world tour and the Holland Festival
After impressive retrospectives dedicated to John Cage (2012) and Edgard Varèse (2009), the Holland Festival this year put Venetian composer Luigi Nono in the spotlight. Under the title 'Trilogy of the sublime', the imposing Gashouder was the epicentre of three full-length concerts, short 'Nono interventions' sounded in the Rijksmuseum's subway, a two-day symposium was organised around Nono, and his widow Nuria set up an exhibition entitled 'Maestro di suoni i silenzi'.
That Serbian Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austrian crown prince in 1914, thus triggering World War I, was until recently in the Netherlands no more than a dry historical fact. But now that it has been a century since this attack, this young freedom fighter is still getting a face in our country. But what De Warme Winkel is doing in the performance 'Gavrilo Princip' is much more than 'giving a face'.
Although both performances were created in very different ways, parallels can be drawn between 'Romeo and Juliet. To Romeo and Juliet‘ by Karina Kroft and 'Crastest Ibsen II - People's Enemy' by Sarah Moeremans / Noord Nederlands Toneel. Director Karina Kroft and actor Joep van der Geest in conversation about their relationship with a classic play and their audience.
Susanne Marx is at Oostblok, the former Muiderpoort theatre in Amsterdam, for two days with the performance 'Girl Loos'. You could call 'Meisje Loos' a critical family performance: for young and old, about growing up and playing with obligatory roles, male-female, white-black, dancer-rapper, harp or beatbox. Genderbending as a theme for the whole family, with a fringe programme featuring Karin Spaink, Linda Duits, Machteld Zee, Rickie Edens and Alex Bakker perform and engage in conversation.
Every Holland Festival there is at least 1 performance which a lot of people wonder why it is programmed. This year, that honour falls to 'Bestiaire d'Amour' by and starring Isabella Rosselini. We take a moment to look for answers.
Topical again, now that Toneelgroep Amsterdam is reviving the play, my review from 2014. This week, the stage adaptation of The Fountainhead premiered. The book is terrible, the performance rattles, the actors win only narrowly. The content, however, creates even more confusion, which is why I won't stop you from going to see it. And Hans Kesting, of course. I put it this way.
Literature is starting to conquer its place at Oerol, which makes sense because poetry and prose are everywhere. The landscape inspires writers and poets to write beautiful texts and at the same time, through literature, visitors take in the environment in a poetic way. What forms of literature can you encounter on Terschelling?
To make it 450e birth anniversary of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Krzysztof Pastor created a full-length choreography for the National Ballet, loosely based on The Tempest (1611). The performance is part of the Holland Festival. Dramaturge Willem Bruls adapted Shakespeare's last play about the island exiled prince Prospero and his daughter Miranda into a script in which the story is told four times, from as many perspectives. The result is enchanting.
Talent alone won't get you there. You also need a bit of luck. That luck happened to Alain Platel so often by now that you almost start to doubt your own wickedness. Still. Those who not only count a composer like Fabrizio Cassol among their friends, but who also gave singing prodigy Serge Kakudji a chance, deserve a bit of luck. What the trio has now achieved with 13 musicians from Kinshasa is downright revolutionary. And a death knell for those who believe that north and south can never really meet. I experienced it on Monday, 16 June. And it still echoes.
Nice 'old-fashioned' Holland Festival: a special set-up that confronts the audience with the implications of their own position and viewing behaviour. And that's just as well with Fassbinder's 'Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant'. Melodrama was no stranger to the German theatre and film wizard. The bitter tears are of a fashion queen and her entourage, clinical is the setting, wafer-thin the story, and yet unusually exciting how this lady drama develops.
Language is music. Sometimes we forget that. Then we think language is a way of conveying objective meanings. Kind of silly. Language is food for all the senses. No strumming is needed under that. That's pure opera without embellishments. The English-language performance 'tis Pity she's a whore' I saw at the Holland Festival yesterday proves that. Even if you don't understand the seventeenth-century phrases, it is a joy to listen to.
Saturday, June 14, went off in a flood of evening gowns, dinner jackets, Dutch celebrities and Gooische Tanks War Horse premiered. A play about a war in which the Netherlands was neutral, and of which there are memorial stones in every village in the rest of the world. You can go and see it. Or not. We have listed six arguments.
In an immaculate virginal white uniform, Don Juan gives a slick press conference for his wedding to Elvira. We hear the famous words with which Bill Clinton denied the Lewinsky affair. Actor Ischa den Blanken's grin speaks volumes when he says: 'These allegations are false.' We know: he is lying.
One of the rules of thumb of contemporary theatre art reads as follows: There is no middle ground in a production with an insanely long title. Such a production is either fantastic or dies of its own pretensions. At Judson church is ringing in Harlem (made to measure) / twenty looks of paris is burning at the judson church (m2m) is the latter.
"You know ma'am, that big red painting? Turn right before that". A young attendant shows us the way. At first glance, it's nothing. A man in semi-uniform, black trousers, white shirt, slowly turns on his axis. Sol Lewitt's mural, number 1084 from 2003, lends him the necessary decorum. Around the corner hang Barnett Newman and Andy Warhol. Would the man care? In this 'hall of fame' of conceptual art, the man's spinning stands out a little timidly. Some visitors remain standing, leaning against white walls or sinking down on the polished wooden floor. Those who take their time watch the spinning of the man and his fellow dervishes slowly take possession of the Stedelijk.
The dance course at The Hague Conservatory of Music has exploded. Sort of. Nancy Euverink, director of dance education is in fact stepping down from the Royal Conservatoire (KC). And not only that. Deputy director Tom Bosma is not staying on either. Who will take over after the final performances and in the new season is still unclear. An international vacancy has been posted.
Jubilation and cheers echoed last night in the sold-out Great Hall of the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ after the Dutch premiere of Delusion of the Fury of Harry Partch at the Holland Festival. No wonder, as the performance directed by Heiner Goebbels was titillating and the performance by the - conductorless - MusikFabrik perfect.
This year's trip will go to India and Nepal. Because that seemed nice to him. Visitors to the Dutch premiere of Jelinek's Die Schutzbefohlene were looking forward to the summer. Next year they would visit a friend in Vietnam. Little hassle to get a visa. As a white European, the whole world is yours. You can go anywhere. The man did not realise how privileged he was.
Even before the Holland Festival had begun properly, all tickets for the three performances of Handel's Orlando sold. What a crisis. However, it is not hard to guess why.
After partially or even completely failed productions of Falstaff The National Opera now does everything right. Twenty years after the previous attempt in the Holland Festival, Verdi's last opera gets a dream performance that could only just become audience favourite of the entire festival.
Jiří Kylián is not at the Holland Festival. He has his own festival. The small Korzo theatre hosted ten days of intimate works by the great choreographer. Varied and still impressive. Next year, Kylián will have been a choreographer for 45 years. How do you keep performing at the world's top for so long?
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