Fringe notes (4): The politics of bricks and hula hoop #edfringe
Two very different forms of political theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe: feminist varieté and an immersive mode at the Maidan. You'll be throwing bricks before you know it.
PODIUM ART
Anything for which people enter a stage.
Don't wait for the masses and determine the start of your cultural season yourself
Retrospectively, I proclaim last Monday night, 15/8, as the opening of my cultural season. Viavia I ended up, in fine company, at the Crazy Goat. A music cafe that might as well have been in New York, Paris or Berlin. This is in The Hague: an ini-mini stage in a building where the money is not spent on chipped-up old school benches,...
Amsterdam wants to, does not want a Dance House. Rotterdam makes a Dance House
The Amsterdam Fund for the Arts would love a central 'vibrant dance venue' in Amsterdam. But surely such a Dance House has just been torpedoed? It was striking: in the Introduction to Dance to the grants awarded by the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK) for the 2017-2020 grant awards, they note an "ardent need" for a "dance house": a central place for development, production and the...
Stop theatre-goer loneliness. 5 lessons from Boulevard
10 days of Festival Boulevard. I threw myself into it. I saw 14 performances, saw a lot of corners of Den Bosch (and Tilburg) up close and experienced more different theatre than usual in six months. I also ate more chips than is good for me, drank more beer than usual and enjoyed eavesdropping on conversations of...
NOS, Phoebe: Bruce Springsteen's 'Born in the USA' is not blind flag-waving.
That US athletes are also dominating these Olympics no surprise. And especially after the suspension of many Russian athletes due to the biggest doping scandal since the former GDR and ahead, Lance Armstrong, no more than logical. That those American athletes are also highlighted in the NOS daily talk show is therefore justified. Putting them on screen with the...
Fringe notes (3): 5 Questions to Tim Honnef, Dutchman at the Fringe #edfringe
Tim Honnef is one of the few Dutch with a performance at the Fringe. How did he end up here?
NJO Music Summer presents 'Drama in Vienna'
Since its inception, the NJO Music Summer has spread its wings. It started in 2001 as a summer course for music students who were allowed to work with internationally renowned musicians, composers and conductors. Since then, the NJO Music Summer has grown into an unmissable, audience-friendly festival, covering the entire province of Gelderland. On Friday 19 August, it takes a step across the border to Overijssel,...
Being different: Theatre Sonnevanck's house brand on #tfboulevard
The hero who does not know his own strength (Wildman); a mad scientist who goes too fast for everyone (Galileo); a dream empress who gives thanks for the fairy-tale wedding and steps out of her role (Sisi); guinea pigs who rebel against the popularity contest they are caught up in (Guinea pig!) and an ugly duckling who accepts the chaos, but doubts that the chaos...
Jetse Batelaan (Artemis) is a great innovator of theatre #tfboulevard
Jetse Batelaan is one of the greatest theatre innovators of this still young century. His star rose in 2003, with a show in which five unique actors made reality theatre, and vice versa. Now, 13 years later, Batelaan has been the boss of one of the country's best youth theatre companies for some time, pushing the boundaries of that industry once again. And that...
Fringe notes (2): Choice stress, tinder appeals and a Fringe thriller #edfringe
How to avoid choice stress at the Edinburgh Fringe bursting at the seams on all sides? We conduct an experiment: a day on the flow of flyers.
A few comments on bare breasts (m/f) on #tfboulevard
Let's talk about breasts (m/f). Or, if that's a bit too confrontational: the tendency of young up-and-coming acting talents to get naked on stage. And then do something with juice. Of fruit mostly, or just water, or oil and glitter. At Festival Boulevard yesterday, for the third time in a week, I had...
André Manuel and Ben Duke: craftsmanship of the highest order on #tfboulevard
Being the best at your craft, and then not in one craft, but in three or so. That, too, is what makes an artist an artist. Ben Duke is a great artist. He is a gifted dancer, a phenomenal actor and a cum laude graduate in English literature. It is therefore logical that he wrote the greatest poem in British history, the...
Eyes Wide Shut: why Schnitzler's 'Dream Novel' is still best read.
At the end of this month, Toneelgroep Maastricht will present 'Eyes wide shut'. The play is an adaptation of Stanley Kubrick's film of the same name. The latter was in turn inspired by Arthur Schnitzler's 'Droomnovelle'. The book was published 90 years ago and caused quite a stir. Sexual charge Over the years, quite a few literary studies have been devoted to Dreamnovelle. But what has...
Lotte van den Berg's 'Time Loop': timelessly intimate with perfect strangers #tfboulevard
Friday afternoon, 5 August 2016. The weather is nice. In the intercity to Den Bosch, I read a book I couldn't finish on holiday. I can't manage it this time either: Den Bosch is always closer than you think. Again, the walk from the station to the Joseph Quarter takes less time than Google Maps indicated to me. That came...
'Return Turkey': brave confession from a gutmensch on #tfboulevard
The world is changing quite a bit and it's nice when artists do something with it. Festival Boulevard gives Lizzy Timmers the opportunity to make an attempt. That attempt, performed in a somewhat run-down cultural centre in a real Bossche power district, is quite something. Backurk is the name of this semi-documentary performance. Timmers has immersed herself in young, well-educated, well-integrated Turks who have come to the Netherlands to...
Griet Op de Beeck's MONA will blow you away at Festival Boulevard #TFBoulevard
No, these sentences are not in Griet Op de Beeck's theatre monologue Mona, but nicely sum up the bestseller Come Here That I Kiss You (28 printings in just under two years). Op de Beeck adapted the first part into one of Festival Boulevard's most impressive performances. We do see nine-year-old Mona's sentence as a backdrop, complete...
Fringe notes (1): Hard lessons in comedy at Edinburgh Fringe festival #edfringe
Amazing how more than a thousand performers at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival are willing to try their hand at the most difficult genre: comedy
Horror and humour vie for power at Festival Boulevard #tfboulevard
Project Cloud, the latest experiential artwork by Bossche city artist Lucas de Man, may need a disclaimer. Anyone entering the seven-storey work had better not do so in the company of a solid existential crisis. The visitor before me did, and still needed a very good talk with a psychological counsellor afterwards. Who...
'Bicycle thief': Last-century Flemish formation theatre at Festival Boulevard #tfboulevard
Once upon a time there was this film, Ladri di Biciclette, Bicycle Thieves in Dutch. Italian director Vittorio de Sica established a totally new film movement with it in 1948: neo-realism. Amateur actors pretty much played their own lives at the bottom of the social ladder. Engaging, inspired, raw and confrontational, especially at the time. Little people, caught in the spiral of social...
Tent Theatre in Den Bosch: high quality, shame about the sound #tfboulevard
Sometimes, people are so angry politically that they furiously turn down the chance to become the country's boss themselves upon hearing the word 'prime minister'. Oscar Kocken, the cheerful host and creator, together with Daan Windhorst, of 'Het Torentje' noticed this last Friday. He was trying to warm up a passer-by to his performance, in a tent on the...
Tomorrow's dance summit now on show in The Hague
Nederlands Dans Theater's summer course gives a glimpse of the future. At the top dancers of tomorrow, but also the choreographers: many of the company's dance makers created a first piece for this summer course. This year, the course also gives a look at the old stage of the half-demolished Lucent Danstheater in The Hague. You can catch a...
If you have nothing but love - Zvizdal is stunning highlight of Festival Boulevard #tfboulevard
I experienced by far one of the most impressive theatre experiences of my life on Friday 5 August 2016. I was a guest at 'Zvizdal - Chernobyl so far, so close' by the Flemish company Berlin, in co-production with Het Zuidelijk Toneel. I saw this 'documentary installation' in an empty factory hall in Den Bosch, where the work is a beautiful resting point in...
Masterpiece Hieronymus Bosch dominates opening Festival Boulevard #tfboulevard
Adding three tonnes a year is cause for celebration. But Viktorien van Hulst, at the helm of the Bossche Theatre Festival Boulevard for the second year, had to restrain herself in her opening speech. Because the subsidising Performing Arts Fund does not give money to a large number of well-performing fellow institutions despite a positive assessment, the suffering in the performing arts exceeds the joy. Torn is called that....
Chamber opera 'I'm leaving': away from the smartphone
Last year the hit of Stadsfestival Zwolle, to be seen again this year at NJO Muziekzomer: the opera Ik vertrek by Lucas Wiegerink. The NJO Muziekzomer kicks off its new edition today, 4 August, with the publicly accessible dress rehearsal of The Mother of Black-Winged Dreams by Hanna Kulenty. I wrote about this opera, in which protagonist Clara is besieged by inner demons, here last week....
Performing arts employers (NAPK) angry: subsidy system must change
They totally agree with us, the employers in the performing arts sector. These company and theatre directors and other managers of dwindling coffers, gathered in the Dutch Association of Performing Arts (NAPK), are circulating a letter today, calling on the Lower House to review the system of subsidies. After all, now the middle class is falling between the cracks. Has happened before, and...
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