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You don't really give it much thought, how weird standing still in a shopping centre like Hoog Catharijne is. At least: if you are not standing still with your head towards a shop window or your fingers in a bowl of fast food. The code for glancing around a shopping mall is so common that it takes some getting used to even for yourself when something forces you to suddenly
Holland Festival
A sociable group of ladies who came in laughing and chatting, leave the room bewildered and tearful. Upset, embarrassed, this is how I see all visitors coming out. What is hard to describe in words is written on their faces. Exhibit B by Brett Bailey is more than impressive. It is an exhibition that confronts and touches.
Anyone suffering from the misconception that dance is about beauty is mercilessly disabused of the dream by Gisele Vienne. Her pieces are about pain. Sometimes gory and explicit, sometimes sublimated but no less powerful. The Pyre is an overwhelming piece that leaves the audience dizzy.
Holland Festival
Seagull, an early play by Anton Chekhov, is about drama in the same way that his equally famous play Cherry Garden is about cherry growing or real estate fraud. Not so. It seems to be a mistake that stage artists often make and that Chekhov cites in his 115-year-old play: thinking that everything is always about you. Which is why Thomas Ostermeier, lauded German director, cannot be blamed for the fact that his direction of The Seagull at Toneelgroep Amsterdam is about theatre.
So there is figurative music. Music that, like a figurative painting, offers a fairly accurate depiction of reality. Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo's composition 'Hurricane Transcriptions' is just such a picture:
Holland Festival
'The Pyre', the latest show from internationally rising star Gisèle Vienne, initially seems less disturbing than her previous work. Pieces like 'Jerk' (2008), based on the true story of a young serial killer, and 'This is how you will disappear' (2010), starring a dark forest, were only seen in a few places in the Netherlands. Hopefully, this performance at the Holland Festival will change that. Gisèle Vienne once studied harp, then philosophy and eventually trained as a puppeteer. But Vienne sees herself primarily as a visual artist working with time, on a stage, where different rhythms, motifs and figures come together.
Holland Festival
Men and women together on the dance floor, it is still forbidden in large parts of the Muslim world. Two years ago, the dance performance 'Nya' was at the Holland Festival, a piece written on the skin of nine Algerian dancers, mostly B-Boyz from the streets, but also the son of a ballet teacher from Algiers participated. This year, French choreographer Abou Lagraa, his wife Nawal Ait Benalla and much of the Algerian cast returned to the Holland Festival with a piece in which women also dance.
Ah, what the heck. We can, of course, study the piece for ourselves first and then come up with a peppery response and interpretation to it, and it will certainly come. But why
Holland Festival
Mary is arrested at a demonstration and thrown into a cell next to a heroin addict, while her sister Martha has just started a shelter for the homeless. And Lazarus, yes, Jesus brings him back to life here too, with downright breathtaking sounds. And we are not even halfway through.
'That men and women in the Islamic world live apart from each other, that is a big frustration,' says choreographer Abou Lagraa. 'That is what El Djoudour is about.'
Because of his background, Abou Lagraa has a special, enlightening perspective on these issues.
Holland Festival
If after only the first 15 minutes, half of the middle row flees the auditorium, and you look at your watch, thinking, my god we still have over five hours to go, there is something thoroughly wrong with the performance. 'Shéda', by Congolese playwright Dieudonné Niangouna, is an insane tub of chaos of incoherent tirades. Declaimed screaming at a stretch by 12 hyperactive African and European actors, each with a fixed character, who return as gods to apocalyptic worlds, à la Mad Max, beating each other up with bizarre lyrics. Goodness, it is impossible to make sense of it all. Yet it continues to fascinate. Why?
Holland Festival
Amsterdam, 5-6-2013 - It is difficult to go uninhibited to a production that has already caused so much controversy as Sunken Garden by Michel van der Aa. This "first 3D opera" was slammed as "soporific" after its premiere at London's Barbican Theatre last April, but also hailed as "the future of opera".
With a real gala, the Reisopera 2.0 presents itself. And immediately strips the gala of its stuffy image. With thanks to the Nederlands Blazers Ensemble.
Holland Festival
An explosion in a crowded market square claimed 24 lives, including seven children. When the village commemorates that tragedy a year later, a little boy falls out of a window and a girl disappears before
Tjitske Reidinga, our favourite actress, who is in the middle of her golden years, is coming up with a new summer comedy: 'An Ideal Woman'. The blonde who theatre people have known for a long time, but ordinary people only got to know through the TV series Gooise Vrouwen, gets to decide what she does at the New Delamartheatre for three years, and so she is now going for Mad Men....
The booking agency is sending around enthusiastic emails, and some British newspapers don't seem to like it, But still. Martin and Mariëlle are through to the semi-finals of the ITV show Britain's Got Talent. And that seems to be quite an achievement. Judge for yourself.
Holland Festival
Would Gilles Jacob, the director of the Cannes Film Festival, see it as a godsend or a knee-jerk reaction to American studios? That Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby Wednesday's opening film certainly means spectacle and a lot of attention. But it is not a world premiere,
De Verleiders, last season's big theatre hit, heads the jury selection of The Theatre Festival 2013. The by a group of actors and cabaret artists, including Pierre Bokma and
When both nu.co.uk, BBC news and virtually every German newspaper simultaneously cover an opera, something must be going on. And there is: Nazis! Wagner! Outraged spectators! More than that: doctors had to be called in!
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