Skip to content

THEATER

With text, movement, actors, sets.

Jetse Batelaan and Bambie otherwise do quite well together in youth theatre

We like to play by the rules. That's quite OK if you're driving through a historic city centre in a tractor or truck combination, for instance, but it gets tricky when the rules stop obeying themselves one day. The actors of the rather physical theatre group Bambie, Paul van der Laan, Jochem Stavenuiter and Tessa Jonge Poerink, have worked with... 

Matzer brings SMART - an unguarded moment that changes everything

Een dag als alle andere. Gewoon, onderweg. Naar je werk. Naar huis. Je kent het wel. Je kent de weg, de auto, het is rustig. Geen tegenliggers, vrijwel geen zijwegen… Je ontspant achter je dashboard. Zo’n dag dus, als allerlei andere. Tot dat bericht, dat ogenblik… dat alles verandert. Voor haar en voor hem en vooral: voor altijd.  SMART is een… 

Publishers but also journalism on blast in show Newspaper

With the performance Krant, Dutch playwright Joeri Vos of De Veenfabriek aims to criticise the major Belgian newspaper operators in the Netherlands. But it also paints an unflattering picture of journalism. Vos, he revealed beforehand, has serious concerns about the independence of news supply. After all, Dutch dailies such as AD, Telegraaf, Volkskrant and NRC, as well as many... 

Don't F*ck With Artemis: Aluin's revenge comedy offers solace in times of despair

In terms of religion, we are badly off with a single supreme and omniscient god who is also Love. Theologians and philosophers have therefore been earning a fat living for a couple of decades explaining all the misery in the world where God is only love. No. Then the classical Greeks. With them, free will ruled. Not... 

Club Gewalt shows depth but not feeling in 'Anthropocene the musical'

Sometimes I dream of a subsidy system where artists can actually carry out their wild plans all the way, to the extreme. Or, indeed, are obliged to do so. That, for example, if you make a musical, you actually have to put a live band on stage, and are not allowed to use a studio recording. And that you then have to pay money for that... 

Subject: Application for programme manager Culture & Social Domain

Dear Library South-Kennemerland, I would like to apply for the position 'Culture & Social Domain Programme Manager' that you published on the 'Cultural Vacancies' website. You see, I am a huge supporter of the idea that a library should associate itself with books as little as possible. After all, that's where the clouds of dust meet you. Of course, you also knew all along that a bookcase... 

Fear and trembling in the cultural sector: the dark side of the 'trickle down'

Pure panic and existential angst: that's the picture you get when you approach makers in the arts personally about the effects of trickle down (the trickle down of corona funding from the government to those makers). The Creative Coalition may be making a fist for them, talking to the minister about it, the institutes debating it, but the makers are silent.... 

PODCAST: Everything had to be different for Patricia Goduto

Patricia Goduto (37) was on stage in major Stage Entertainment shows early this century when an old childhood trauma played up and plunged her into a years-long psychosis. Her life changed irrevocably, she became addicted to drugs and alcohol and was declared incurable by her practitioners. Now she has been on stage for a few years, cured of her... 

Sandra Kramerová shows in 'Majka' that much fight is still needed for women's emancipation: how a good performance can still make you feel like you're missing something

Creating a character you really feel involved with as an audience is what dance maker Sandra Kramerová is rock solid at. Her solo performance Majka drags me along from the start. But precisely because she performs her choreography so strongly, I am left with the feeling afterwards that I am missing something. That's a wonderful experience. It's not going well... 

Words & Music: cut-ups & fuck ups, Berio & Burroughs at Asko|Schönberg

For the second time, Asko|Schönberg organises Words & Music, a festival full of cut-ups & fuck ups. A rush of sensations: fantastic, grim, absurd, disruptive and with humour. A day of cut-up, cut-up and brand-new performances in Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ and Tolhuistuin. After the successful first edition in 2020, Asko|Schönberg will once again bring together makers from different disciplines in unique ways,... 

Nerd podcast S2A3: With Cees Debets (National Theatre) and Marijn Lems (NRC) on the uncertain times in theatres

The theatres are struggling to fill up, technicians have hung up their lights, but tickets are not on sale for Het Nationale Theater's Trojan Wars. So in this long-awaited Nerd podcast (the AVROTROS thinks the tune is really terrible), we talk to Cees Debets, the director of that great theatre company from The Hague. Marijn Lems also happens to have a few... 

Diepenheim's theatre workshop undermined by 'rules and codes' And Corona.

Er is opschudding in de wereld van het circus en openluchttheater, nu een belangrijke werkplaats annex festival in het beroemde kunstenaarsstadje Diepenheim zijn directie verliest. Ruth Semmekrot, sinds 2013 directeur van Kunsten op Straat Overijssel, legde afgelopen vrijdag plotseling haar functie neer. In een verklaring op Facebook stelde ze: ‘Ik heb gestreden. De bestuurlijke en politieke dynamiek waar ik in… 

Review Hebriana: Dead-end lives

Put three neurotic sisters with their mother hen and errant brothers-in-law together in a parental holiday villa with beautifully translated text by Las Norén and you're bound to get some nasty Scandinavian family stuff. But luckily there is the wafting acquaintance Axel, a convincing role by Mark Rietman. Already at the start of the performance with the tableau de la troupe alongside... 

Podcast on the accordion's orchestral power: Blood Chorale by Toeac at November Music 2021.

The link between the Orpheus myth and Arnhem potenrammers is more obvious than you might think. At least, if your name is Peer Wittenbols and you are one of the country's best playwrights. That you can also think of accordions as part of that is, in turn, extraordinary. Still, Blood Coral, a performance by accordion duo Toeac, with a lead role for Jack Wouterse on a text that promises... 

Podcast artZINnig #1: comedian Thjum Arts on humour, social work and the meaning of life.

'The contact you make with your audience as a comedian is the highest thing for me.' When comedian Thjum Arts (1993) started breaking through as a comedian around 2018, he wondered if this was what he really wanted. As a human being, should he really want to talk about himself so much? Studying social work would... 

Jan-Peter De Graaff composes Parallax: 'I show how much effort people put into creating their own world' #novembermusic

Jan-Peter de Graaff (b. 1992) is and thinks big. As an islander, raised on Terschelling as a child of musicians, he also perhaps perceives things a little differently from the peripheral city. The height of the sky, the nothingness of a strip of land surrounded by the movement and power of water; they suggest infinity and the mystery of higher powers. That perspective... 

Waanzee: Grunge theatre by Ko van den Bosch and Rosa could be a bit angrier

Ko van den Bosch once founded the ruthless theatre company Alex d'Electrique and theatre would change permanently because of him. They made punk theatre and because there was very little video anyway, the myths about trays of shit and actors attacking each other with chainsaws are more numerous than it actually occurred. I have long thought that in a... 

Compact Iliad by Alum is ode to invincible writer Homer.

Troy is rather hot, this year. The Hague has just premiered Trojan Wars, a crazy marathon performance (5 hours), with 35 actors for 40 roles and a text that, apart from being by Homer, is very clearly by Peer Wittenbols. Who I admire boundlessly. A review by colleague Peter Olsthoorn can be read on this site.... 

New Maas Theatre and Dance management sets high stakes with peppery game show

We spend much of our lives saving our asses. You'd better be a bit cheerful about that, because life is not manufacturable anyway. These are no small life lessons that René Geerlings, the new boss of Rotterdam-based Maas Theatre and Dance, deploys in his first play as artistic director. Still... 

Great, scintillating Trojan Wars from National Theatre

Dance and ballet, theatre with gory atrocities and clattering emotions, imaginative lighting, set and costume effects and, above all, enthusiasm bursting forth. HNTjong's 'biggest production ever' with 30 actors for 50 roles is overwhelming. Thanks also to the corona crisis: the National Theatre had to postpone the performance for a year and a half and lift it over two summer holidays, with all the misery... 

Night-time silence walk with Schiphol hatred to close Holland Festival 2021

Admittedly, I was never a fan, but how I hated those planes last night. I was walking through a dark, nocturnal forest between Lage Vuursche and Hilversum. Where, in the silence, I could have listened extra carefully to creaking twigs, shuffling insects, whispering trees and the occasional owl, I heard above all how happy we all are that after corona we have another... 

Tobias Kokkelmans starts as director of the Dutch Theatre Festival: 'More exchange between different groups in audiences and creators.'

'As for many people, the theatre festival really does mean something. Like the Fringe, it is impossible to imagine without it. I've been able to make artistic friendships there, I've been able to have arguments there, I've met people who I thought were adversaries who turned out to be comrades-in-arms. Because there are not only performances, there is... 

Back to the primal power of magic, through youth theatre. With thanks to Jetse Batelaan.

Plays often end in chaos. An overturned liquor cabinet, a blood blade among royals, we're used to a few things. Jetse Batelaan's latest play, baroque and sharper than he showed before, also ends in beauty, but then that is actually the beginning. Indeed, the ending is sterile and stripped of any life. But that is where the performance begins. The artistic director of... 

NTF Pro: professionals look for gripes at Dutch Theatre Festival.

Those who fear - by virtue of being white men or women - that the descendants of enslaved people are coming to punish them for being grossly at fault for the consequences of the now infamous VOC Mentality, can sleep a little more peacefully again. During the first day of the Dutch Theatre Festival, Thursday 2 September in Amsterdam, surprisingly conciliatory noises rang out when it came to... 

Small Cultural Membership
175 / 12 Months
For turnover less than 250,000 per year.
Posting press releases yourself
Cultural Membership
360 / Year
For cultural organisations
Posting press releases yourself
Collaboration
Private Membership
50 / Year
For natural persons and self-employed persons.
Exclusive archives
Own mastodon account on our instance
en_GBEnglish (UK)