Things we do for members and partners.
Next week sees the start of festival Dancing on the Edge. Unlike its name suggests, this festival, with performances in The Hague, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Rotterdam, is not only about dance, but also about film, theatre and politics. The 'Edge' it is about, the festival looks for in its theme: an urgent artistic dialogue with the Middle East. More needed now than...
Inside Out. Almost six months after its Cannes premiere, we talk to producer Jonas Rivera about the reactions. Does the Pixar hit help parents understand their children better?
In the 1970s, Reinbert de Leeuw stormed the popular charts with recordings of Erik Satie's early piano music. He managed to strike exactly the right chord with his ultra-rare performances of pieces like Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies. The albums sold like hot cakes and were awarded gold and platinum records. Two decades later, he recorded them...
It is not often that a film about an event in 1992 is so poignantly topical. That was when a group of some 300 right-wing radicals set fire to an asylum seekers' centre in Rostock. Miraculously, no one died then. But it did scar many for life. Among them was the director of Wir Sind Jung, Wir Sind Stark. Filmmaker and son of...
10 years ago, it all started. A group of recent graduates of Leiden University found that their dear Alma Mater [hints]Latin for nurturing or caring mother. Alma mater refers to the university or sometimes the school where someone received their education. In ancient Rome, the term Alma Mater was used for the mother goddess; in the Middle Ages, Alma Mater referred to...
For months now, the news has been about little else but refugees and asylum seekers, and supporters and opponents of their reception have become increasingly polarised. A situation that is very reminiscent of the theme in Elvis Peeters' 2006 novel De ontelbaren (The Indivisible). The atmosphere in the countries where refugees - 'fortune seekers' according to some - seek refuge is becoming increasingly grim. Also in our...
The Cinekid children's film festival announced the winners on Thursday. The real-life French teen film Le Nouveau was awarded double.
In 1985, Unsuk Chin (Seoul 1961) won the Gaudeamus Music Prize with Spektra for three cellos, six years later she made her breakthrough with her Akrostichon-Wortspiel for soprano and ensemble composed for the Nieuw Ensemble. In 2004, she won the Grawemeyer Award, the world's most prestigious music prize; in 2007, she made a deep impression with her opera Alice in Wonderland. Tomorrow, Thursday 22 October.
As I wrote in my earlier article about the Nederlandse Dansdagen, choreographer Loïc Perela won this year's Nederlandse Dansdagen Maastricht Prize. It earned him 12,000 euros to put into his new project HASHTAG. The award has helped some previous winners on their way (Monique Duurvoort, Joost Vrouenraets, Erik Kaiel, Muhanad Rasheed, Joeri Dubbe,...
On 20 November 1961, Michael Rockefeller was eaten by Peppie the cannibal. It happened on a muddy riverbank in the Asmat, a swamp area on the south coast of what is now Papua New Guinea. Shocking enough, that fact. Shocking also is that no one is officially aware of it. No perpetrators have ever been identified, no one has confessed, but there are...
She is one of Finland's leading contemporary authors, but in the Netherlands few people have heard of her: Leena Lander[hints]More on Wikipedia: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leena_Lander[/hints]. High time that changed. We asked her translator Marja-Leena Hellings why you should read her newly published new novel Zondagskind. Leena Lander's (born 1955) new novel Sunday Child tells the story...
"It's all right." In how many songs of the Top 2000 does that phrase appear? Too many to mention. So now the task is to sing all those different "It's all right"'s in the melody in which every audience will recognise them. The four actors in 'Total Eclipse of The Heart' by Theatre Group Kassys fill a thick hour in this way....
For a moment on Friday, 16 October, it looked like Leila Josefowicz would give an encore, but it did not happen. The audience in the sold-out Concertgebouw had cheered her for minutes for her phenomenal rendition of Scheherazade.2, the second violin concerto (or third, if you include Dharma at Big Sur for six-string electric violin and orchestra) by John Adams, who himself led the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra...
29th Cinekid children's film festival opens with new television drama for youngsters. In the Medialab, children can make their own VR glasses and do virtual bungy jumping.
Selfies from the Golden Age. The Mauritshuis gives this subtitle with a wink to its new exhibition Dutch self-portraits. With it, the museum seeks a new connection between 17th-century art and today's world. And that attempt has succeeded, thanks in part to the ingenious exhibition design by Jelena Stefanovic of Studio OTW. Since the 2012-2014 renovation and expansion, the...
From today, the documentary performance Tagfish tours the Netherlands. The Belgian theatre collective Berlin has been making finely crafted theatre installations since 2004, playing on the border of documentary and fiction, television and theatre, current affairs and eternity. Tagfish is ostensibly about the perils surrounding the redevelopment of a piece of wasteland near Essen. Die Zeche Zollverein already had a monumental...
On Thursday 8 October, I saw a live performance of Verdi's opera Il trovatore at Amsterdam's Muziektheater for the first time. It was not an unmixed pleasure. During the first two acts, The Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, the National Opera Chorus and the soloists were so out of sync that I considered leaving at the interval. A good friend...
A few thousand years from now, archaeologists will find a bizarre concrete sculpture in sediment layers at the bottom of the future European Sea. Round, organic shapes, a square box with ready-made chambers, pipes, and a relief in the soil. Totally different from the concrete boxes they found before. Unknowingly, they will rediscover the mystery of the Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie. The...
The first weekend of October saw the Netherlands Dance Days (NDD) take place in Maastricht. As Ruben Brugman reported, important prizes for the dance world are awarded there. But the Dance Days seem mainly intended to promote Dutch dance, more than being a critical evaluation or artistic boost. At the Dance Days, no pithy speech on the State of Dance as...
On 7 October, the first try-out of Calliope Tsoupaki's opera Mariken in de tuin der Lusten will go on at Theater aan de Schie in Schiedam. Sunday 11 October is the world premiere at the Koninklijke Schouwburg in The Hague. At the invitation of Opera2Day, Tsoupaki immersed herself in Mariken van Nieumeghen, heroine of the miracle play of the same name that took place exactly five hundred years ago in...
Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games... Would young people still be interested in history? Writer Anke Manschot believes so. On the eve of Children's Book Week, which starts today, her exciting and gripping historical book The Leap of Normandy, the world's first children's novel about D-Day, was published. Five questions for the author. Historical juvenile novel During a holiday in Normandy,...
Not many directors have become very iconic very young. Chantal Akerman was, both for experimental film and feminist. She broke through in 1975 with Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film that is as disruptive as it is understated. It is her most important work, and also her most radical. The protagonist leads an existence of...
Those who go to a dance performance want to enjoy beautiful movements, expression, movement composition and a fine stage setting, wrapped in music or a soundscape. But there is something, which is always overlooked: the sound of dance itself. Dancer and choreographer Eline van Ark discovered that this forgotten aspect holds great richness and subtle expressiveness. The sound...
During a festive dinner at Theater aan het Vrijthof in Maastricht, 'Zwanen' were awarded to dancer Jorge Nozal of NDT 1, Ann Van den Broek for The Black Piece and to Roel Voorintholt (Gouden Zwaan), artistic director of Introdans. The annual highlights festival De Nederlandse Dansdagen hosted this successful 'Swan Dinner': posh sponsors and stakeholders ate side by side with messy dance artists. This is how it should be...
Bodies are dragged away to loud applause and cheers: a more symbolic beginning Nederlands Dans Theater could not have imagined. With Start Again, the international ballet company highlights an exile until 2019 at the harbour in Scheveningen. A tricky location, because remote. But also a dynamic place. A Dutch choreographer would surely invent a choreography there with ferries, cutters and lifeboats. NDT, however, chooses the...
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