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THEATER

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Suburbia's Enemy of the People warns against neoliberalism

Enemy of the People is the summer performance of Theatre group Suburbia, directed by Albert Lubbers. The play taps into current events of corrupt bankers, environmental scandals and government officials covering up whistleblowing issues. This strong performance is sharp in tone, polemical and with vicious humour. Better than in previous Suburbia performances, the familiar dynamic acting fits nicely into the theatrical space. This time, that space is the big open barn at Stadslandgoed de Kemphaan.

Read More "Suburbia's Enemy of the People warns against neoliberalism

Wunderbaum sends you into the night with a smile #HF16

This year's Holland Festival spotlights Rotterdam-based theatre collective Wunderbaum with the revival of 'The Coming of Xia', premieres of 'Privacy' and 'The Future of Sex' and the film 'Stop acting now'. With this film, Wunderbaum concludes their four-year project 'The New Forest', a 'Platform for social change', according to Wunderbaum, "The New Forest depicts transition and casts a... 

Read More "Wunderbaum sends you into the night with a smile #HF16
Stella actors Oscar Batterham and Richard Cant © Matthew Hargraves

Neil Bartlett's Stella: so perfect it's a bit irritating #HF16

The smallest details speak for themselves. For the second time during this edition of the Holland Festival, the legendary BBC series This Life comes along. Richard Cant, who plays a flawless lead role in Neil Bartlett's play Stella, was previously seen in This Life, the series that set the standard for the modern docusoap in 1996. So now live, up close, in De Brakke Grond's Red Hall, the man who also played a solid role in Midsomer Murders.

Read More "Neil Bartlett's Stella: so perfect it's a bit irritating #HF16

Grunberg doesn't come out of his hole in The Future of Sex #HF16

Woody Allen made sure in 1972 that his fans could not watch Star Wars with dry eyes years later. The final scene of his film 'Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, But Were Afraid To Ask' shows us the male brain as the bridge of a Star Cruiser where the crew is hard at work to bring a date to a successful conclusion. The spermatozoa in the front are a bickering gang of take-off runners, on their way to an uncertain descent towards beating egg.

Read More "Grunberg doesn't come out of his hole in The Future of Sex #HF16

The Dark Ages: beautiful investigative theatre by Milo Rau. #HF16

When we think of 'The Dark Ages', we think of the rough raw dark Middle Ages, with church and king and no hygiene. However, Swiss director Milo Rau's performance, now at the Holland Festival, refers to a much more recent piece of European history. In a recent interview With the Culture Press, he said:

Read More "The Dark Ages: beautiful investigative theatre by Milo Rau. #HF16

Though dated, Pina Bausch' Nelken still impresses #HF16

This way from row nine, it is like being knee-deep in carnations yourself. The heads of the audience in front of me merge silently into a forest of stems crowned with pink, through which dancers carefully step back and forth like leggy chickens.

The find is great: Nelken by Pina Bausch depicts paradise as a place where you have to be careful or things will go wrong. The carnations force the dancers to be careful. As a spectator, you go along with them, without all the underlying thoughts immediately coming through to you.

Read More "Though dated, Pina Bausch' Nelken still impresses #HF16
Gardens Speak ©-Tania-El-Khoury-1-

Digging in the earth stays on the surface in Gardens Speak #HF16

There I am. Next to Holland Festival director Ruth Mackenzie, on a grave, as part of the installation Gardens Speak on the stage of the main hall of Theatre Bellevue in Amsterdam. There is nothing to see, little to hear. Tone lights suggest a rising sun after a few minutes. I get up together with the ten other visitors. Quite a shame, because I was actually quite comfortable lying there.

The programme booklet sounded promising:

Read More "Digging in the earth stays on the surface in Gardens Speak #HF16

Make money with Culture Press? You don't even have to become a member!

You can of course member be, or donor, from Culture Press. This has huge advantages: you have access to our premium-stories and may also publish[hints]Anyone who is a member, benefactor or bearer can access the CMS and submit stories for review by the final editors[/hints] on the site. But of course, you don't necessarily have to become a member to support the good cause. Indeed, you can support the charity and just make net money. How can you do that? By recruiting members: if partner of the cooperative. When you recruit members for us through the partner programme, we give you a piece of the proceeds.

How does that work?

Read More "Make money with Culture Press? You don't even have to become a member!

Melancholia-Bryony-Dwyer-junges-theatre-basel-©-Sandra-Then

All 18 gloomy: Melancholia is concert for sour old men #HF16

We are all going to die! We already have that certainty in. And since the dawn of mankind, every new generation invariably knows that it is going to happen to them now. After all: their successors have never prospered anywhere like today's youth. Nice premise for a concert, thought German director Sebastian Nübling[hints]Nuling was a guest at the Holland Festival last year with an adaptation of Hebbel's play Nibelungen, read the review and a interview.[/hints], good idea to programme, thought the Holland Festival. I seriously wonder why.

Read More "All 18 gloomy: Melancholia is concert for sour old men #HF16

We are the forest. Christiane Jatahy achieves maximum impact at #HF16

There are countries in the world, where the boundaries between art disciplines are not as sharply drawn as they are here. The Holland Festival, under the new leadership of Ruth MacKenzie, is catching us up. She is bringing events here where the boundaries between visual art, performance, video, film and performing arts can no longer be drawn. Events that generate meaning in ways that are quite new to us, such as The Encounter, last week, and Gardens Speak, later this week.

Read More "We are the forest. Christiane Jatahy achieves maximum impact at #HF16

'The European is an orphan' - Milo Rau on The Dark Ages #HF16

Swiss playwright Milo Rau created a theatrical trilogy about the demise of the European ideal. The second part The Dark Ages is now at the Holland Festival. Rau combined his actors' painful, personal life stories with themes from the works of Chekhov, Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies. With a Freudian sauce: 'Countless people who are The Dark Ages have seen ask me: 'Milo, is something wrong with your father?'

Read More "'The European is an orphan' - Milo Rau on The Dark Ages #HF16

Ça Ira: political theatre with the allure of House of Cards #HF16

Over four hours long Ça ira (1) Fin de Louis, a performance by French director Joël Pommerat, to be seen this weekend at the Holland Festival. He reconstructed events in France between 1789 and 1794, better known as The French Revolution. What begins as a sometimes hard-to-follow, animated history lesson culminates in an impressive 'whodunnit', balancing between re-enactment and live television.

Read More "Ça Ira: political theatre with the allure of House of Cards #HF16

Tantalising intimacy porn in 'Privacy' raises relevant questions #HF16

Wine Dierickx ( Wunderbaum) and Ward Weemhoff (The Hot Shop) are an artist couple and we will know it. Engaging and with humour, they take us into their private lives or that which we think that is their private life. Know after all, we don't do it.

Read More "Tantalising intimacy porn in 'Privacy' raises relevant questions #HF16

McBurney's The Encounter points visitor #HF16 to a different way of life

The Encounter, a large-scale solo performance by British multi-talent Simon McBurney, had its Dutch premiere at the Holland Festival on Thursday. The Encounter combines the dramatic power of a Hollywood blockbuster with the polished simplicity of 20th-century, stripped-down, edited - call it Brechtian - theatre.

Read More "McBurney's The Encounter points visitor #HF16 to a different way of life

Thoughts as fuel for space travel

No actor to be seen in the auditorium of Theatre de Veste in Delft. Just a house with walls and roof of transparent cloth. It holds thirty people. On the walls of the hall around it, projected images pass by at whirling speed. This is fascinating: usually, when you are in a house, the walls close you off from the surroundings, but this time they actually give a view of a world as big and beautiful as you never experience in ordinary life.

Read More "Thoughts as fuel for space travel

The Walking Forest is performance you definitely want to watch twice (HF16)

Brazil's Christiane Jatahy was already with the play last year What If they went to Moscow at the Holland Festival. She came, saw and conquered. This year, she comes with the final part in the trilogy of stage adaptations, The Walking Forest. The title refers to the three witches in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, who foretell his rise and fall. The play was the starting point for a performance with four video screens, a bar, an actress, a dead fish and, oh yes, an audience.

Read More "The Walking Forest is performance you definitely want to watch twice (HF16)

This is more than a review of the opening of the Holland Festival

On Saturday 4 June 2016, I attended the royal opening of the Holland Festival and was able to attend no review write about, because I was sitting in the front row of the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg. As the stage was elevated, I was looking against a black wall, above which only the front actors were visible. The back and lower half of the stage were completely eluding me.

Me wrote that on, and the Holland Festival generously offered me the opportunity to go and see the performance again, from a better seat. At the same time, the organisers told me that the first three rows of the Stadsschouwburg would be compensated at this performance. So I went to Amsterdam one more time, on Monday 6 June.

Before the performance, while not eating a blackened hamburger in theatre restaurant Stanislavski, I heard from the neat people at the little table next to me that the front seats were offered at a sharply reduced rate, and that people like them who had already bought tickets had the choice of thus getting a partial refund or going on the waiting list for a seat with better sightlines. Whether they eventually managed to get one of the spots with better visibility, I don't know. The performance

Read More "This is more than a review of the opening of the Holland Festival
Stop-Acting-Now-©-Wunderbaum

Wunderbaum sows beautiful doubt in Mijke de Jong's 'Stop Acting Now' (HF16)

Wunderbaum. Among lovers of fresh and young theatre, this collective of creators stirred something up at the beginning of this century. They were born and bred under Johan Simons, where they formed the youth team of his legendary theatre group Hollandia. And because back then, every young maker really had to do something with the world, JongHollandia, later Wunderbaum, wanted the same. But because they lived in the post-ideological era and saw every day how the ideals of their teachers, parents and mentors came to nothing, it mainly became a club of doubters. And they were very good at that.

Read More "Wunderbaum sows beautiful doubt in Mijke de Jong's 'Stop Acting Now' (HF16)

This is not a review of the Holland Festival opening (HF16)

So you can get too close to a work of art. I don't even know if it really applies to paintings, that toxic fumes can rise from them, as some claim, but it certainly applies to theatre art. During the opening of the Holland Festival 2016, I was sitting in the front row of the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg. Normally already not the best place for those who want to keep a bit of an overview of what is happening on stage. For the occasion of 'Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wussten', the stage had also been raised by half a metre, which meant I spent about four-fifths of the time watching actors' heads bounce over a light rail.

Read More "This is not a review of the Holland Festival opening (HF16)

Meg Stuart at Holland Festival: 'The sacred theatre is gone, but the expectations remain.'(HF16)

The show Sketches/Notebook (2013), which has its Dutch premiere at the Holland Festival on 6 June, is virtuosic, radical and extremely gentle. Choreographer Meg Stuart loves small scale, even when she occupies the biggest stages with partners like the Volksbühne (Berlin), Théâtre de la Ville (Paris) or the Münchner Kammerspiele. Details win out over big lines and often play a leading role in pieces that scrutinise human behaviour incredulously.

Sketches/Notebook stands out

Read More "Meg Stuart at Holland Festival: 'The sacred theatre is gone, but the expectations remain.'(HF16)

Suzanna Jansen on Pauper Paradise: 'Poverty still leads to isolation'

The garish signs KEUKENHOF keep on whizzing past café Foolish Business, on a very sticky Tuesday morning. Hordes of tourists throng behind them, ready to spend money on picturesque pictures and unique experiences. My interest today is in the opposite, the desolate 19the century colonies in Drenthe, then called 'Dutch Siberia'. To me, Drenthe is known as ' a cyclist's paradise' but writer Suzanna Jansen wrote the 2008 bestseller The Pauper's Paradise about, in which she meticulously traced her family's history back five generations.

She is wearing a summery blue dress and is in transit to the 'crime scene' of our conversation, Veenhuizen, to drive past her 'favourite places' with RTV Drenthe. This is a tad ironic, since she knows Drenthe mainly through her ancestors, who lived and died under miserable conditions in the colonies.

15 June 2016 goes there in Veenhuizen theatre show The Pauper's Paradise   premiered in the courtyard of the Gevangenis Museum, about 'one of the most dramatic hidden histories in the Netherlands'.

Pauper image without text

As many as 1 million Dutch Descend from Veenhuizen clients[hints]From the registers reveals that Ruud Lubbers, Geert Mak and Alexander Pechtold, Thea Beckmann, Anton Pieck and Bert Haanstra, among others, are related to paupers from the 19th-century poor colonies[/hints].

Read More "Suzanna Jansen on Pauper Paradise: 'Poverty still leads to isolation'

Art in the pincers. Why theatres do have to come up with jubilant figures.

A week ago, the theatres affiliated to the VSCD presented beautiful figures. Although the number of performances fell, average attendance had risen again. Many in the industry frowned, and after some arithmetic, Wijbrand Schaap, after initially good news to the conclusion that it was entirely not is going so well with the performing arts. And again, that message can be criticised; the VSCD does not include all theatres, some have merged etc. Another day later, Jeffrey Meulman explained in his blog the finger on the sore spot:

Read More "Art in the pincers. Why theatres do have to come up with jubilant figures.

Joel Pommerat: 'History does not repeat itself. Instead, we can learn from it.' (HF16)

One of the special performances at this year's Holland Festival is 'Ça Ira (1): Fin de Louis' by French company Compagnie Louis Brouillard. I visited the performance earlier in Luxembourg and spoke to the director and writer of this over four-hour marathon about the French Revolution. It seems quite something: 40 actors on stage... 

Read More "Joel Pommerat: 'History does not repeat itself. Instead, we can learn from it.' (HF16)

Figures don't lie: Dutch venues are doing badly

It must have been down to my indestructible mood, and the deep need to finally deliver some good news about the cultural sector, but I was so wrong. Tuesday I reported that the performing arts were recovering after Halbe Zijlstra's draconian cuts, but that is so not the case. As much as the sector itself would like it to do well, the figures contradict it time and again.

Surely the Association of Theatre and Concert Hall Directors has taken us all for a ride again. With a real infographic still do. But, as it goes with infographics: you can put in all the bright colours and shouts, and even shout 'Bravo!' and 'Applause!'at the bottom, the numbers themselves don't lie, even if you present them slightly differently than last year.

Read More "Figures don't lie: Dutch venues are doing badly

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