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'He fears that the real thing may have come along a hundred times, but he missed it.'
'Exactly. And how old are you?'
'Twenty.'
'Well...'
The Dodo International Choice journal, episode 2: Wijbrand Schaap came, saw and was overcome by Kris Verdonck's seven installations about plighted people. It should have ended with terrible bangs, a canned fireworks display a few metres from the spectators. But that's not allowed in the Netherlands since Enschede. And certainly not with Belgian fireworks. Theatre-maker, installation artist and video jockey Kris Verdonck ended up...
In suits, wearing animal masks, five actors pose on stage. They represent a bear, rabbit, deer, rooster and monkey. From this 'freeze', they start making animal noises and moving around. A rhythmic performance follows. Fascinated, but confused, the audience watches the alienating dance. What do these animals have to do with the war in Iraq anyway? Just when you start to wonder if you are in the right audience, the actors take off their masks and answer: 'Have you ever wondered what the war in Iraq has meant to the animals there? We never hear anything about them in newspapers or on TV.'
A new day, so new chances to find the Fringe's greatest gem. Today, I am taken from Theatre Bellevue into a nearby alley. Suddenly I see her lying there. A junk, like there are more walking around in Amsterdam. I prefer to walk around it quickly. Afraid of smelling them or being accosted. Metro, a piece of...
Such a cool late summer evening as Thursday 9 September 2010 is a perfect night for the try- out of actor group Wunderbaum's location play 'Natives'. Clear sky, mildly rising autumn chill and virtually windless. Location: a swampy lawn between two abandoned housing blocks in Rotterdam's Pendrecht district. Once built from post-war ideals of family happiness, convenience and accessibility, but soon too cramped, ageing and...
In my search for the gem of the Fringe, I stumbled upon two musicals at the Rose Theatre on Wednesday night. At the Fringe Festival, anything goes, yet I was surprised by Christiane by F*K Theatre. In this musical, young people sink to the bottom of society. They drink and blow. Everyone lives in their own little world. Main character Christiane falls in love with an addicted boy and so also comes into contact with the dark sides of the drug scene. You expect to see the raw sides of this dark world in a story like this, but from the first song Christiane far too well behaved. It reminds me of a feel good-school musical. Eight neat boys and girls sing about 'a trip with friends around you'. They do this so sweetly and in harmonious harmony singing that what you hear and see is totally inconsistent with the story.
Nik van den Berg is undoubtedly someone to keep an eye on. In theatre Bellevue, he gives a parody of a rock star in a bizarre act. 'Is this it,' I think for a moment, but it soon becomes clear how cleverly Van den Berg shapes this stage beast in a fur coat. In an unintelligible language, he plays a number of songs, meticulously portraying the mannerisms and gestures of a great rock artist.
Slowly he takes a sip of tea, takes another drag of his cigarette, drops the ash into his tea and then, in utmost concentration, throws the entire cigarette into the tea. A soundtrack starts, then Nik starts the concert with his electric guitar. The songs in NIK©#2 be about life, its problems and difficulties. But it could just as easily be about making a cheese sandwich. Van den Berg's timing is peerless, as is his empathy. This certainly worked on my chuckles, though there will be those who expected more from it.
'Butt-fucking at extra cost.' 'Do they also do blow jobs without a condom?' 'That one sucked my cock once and then she was nauseated all night. In the morning she puked in my bed.' Constantly they do suggestive dances and constantly they look into the room, with fixed smiles that are somewhere between amused and sneaky. The six actors of About Animals are challenging and relentless. Susanne Kennedy's direction of Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek's play is unprecedentedly bleak and arrives as a punch in the gut.
Jelinek's wrote a text about prostitutes and their clients, partly based on eavesdropping tapes from an Austrian escort agency, in which the men talk about women as if they were animals, or more precisely, like farmers talk about their cattle. In her direction, Kennedy places great emphasis on the viewer's gaze. 'The woman is being watched and is always an object, the man is watching and is the subject. Looking is not innocent,' She said in an interview. The three men, in foul light blue show suits, talk over the women; the women, in dresses on which little subtle emphasis is placed on their nipples and crotch, obligingly talk after them. They look at us defiantly, making us complicit in the humiliating situation.
When the 30th edition of the Netherlands Film Festival kicks off on 22 September, the first Golden Calf will be awarded to Rolf Orthel. This was announced by festival director Willemien van Aalst at a press conference today.
Producer and director Orthel receives this award for his special merit for Dutch film culture. In 1975, he made a name for himself with the impressive documentary A semblance of doubt, about the prisoners and guards of Auschwitz and Westerbork. As a producer, he often committed to difficult projects by young makers. The documentary he produced Bastøy, about a Norwegian prison island, will premiere this festival.
Just when it was announced that musical production house M-Lab is in financial distress, there comes a helping hand from Dutch theatre critics. Indeed, the annual Prize of Criticism goes to the laboratory that produces musicals that almost always matter. We quote the jury report:A laboratory is not only for somewhat unworldly scientists who are fiddling on the square millimetre...
She has just returned from a long holiday in her native Norway and, although many Norwegians find Ibsen boring these days, she herself loves his work. Maren Bjorseth is a third-year directing student at the AHK. Her Dutch is flawless; it is hard to believe she has only lived here for two years. Maren is one of four directing students chosen to take a master class from German director Thomas Ostermeier, artistic director of Schaubühne Berlin. Last year, the Stadschouwburg showed his Hamlet (starring a nasty, rather fat Hamlet) and in December, Ostermeier will direct Ibsen's Spoken at Toneelgroep Amsterdam.
The master class is a collaborative project of TF with the AHK and actors from ACT. It is the first day of school for the students and, as Maren says, they were immediately thrown into the deep end: 'It was very short and intensive, we worked from ten to three and Thomas Ostermeier came to watch twice. So it really is a work in progress.'
"I am fifty-eight." Plumply, Saskia Lemming (Oda Spelbos) reveals her biggest secret to husband and jaded folk singer René Lemming (Peter Bolhuis). He married her 12 years ago, thinking she was a young blonde. In turn, he reveals that he actually wrote 'You are the cream of my crop', his number one hit, for another woman. The bomb bursts on reality show 'The Lemmings'. Or rather: on stage at De Balie, where Hadewich Minis, Peter Bolhuis, Oda Spelbos and Yorick Zwart compete in Night guests. A three-hour improvisational 'jam session'.
The room is lit in red. This creates a shadowy atmosphere as you might expect at a nightclub. The music starts playing and from the stairs a young lady in a snappy outfit comes down. She serves pieces of sausage and plays with the crowd. She introduces herself as Lolita. A man in the front row may unbutton her zip. She...
By Willem Jan Keizer
Rotterdam - The fifteenth edition of the Gergjev Festival officially kicked off Friday evening in the presence of Her Majesty the Queen in concert hall de Doelen with a concert by the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Valeri Gergjev. Although the festival takes place at some 20 venues across the city - not only in de Doelen but also in the Laurenskerk, the conservatory, museum Boijmans van Beuningen and numerous other unexpected locations - the festival is virtually invisible in the city.
"We are artists. Acting is a vocation. Not everyone understands that. Sometimes it's a lonely existence." Understanding, almost motherly, Shelley Mitchell addresses a group of Dutch actors at De Balie. The American actress and founder of The Actors Centre of San Francisco introduces them to 'method acting' during a three-day master class. Not pretending, but becoming one with your character. A way of acting that has won many famous actors an Oscar. Think of Robert De Niro, Juilette Binoche, Al Pacino and Kate Winslet.
Hannah and Martin by Mugmetdegoudentand is not only a heartwarming performance, played by one phenomenal actress and one inimitable theatre personality, it is also a brainteaser. Trouw reviewer and theatre scholar Robbert van Heuven felt challenged to write a short essay in response to this performance.
It was a wonderful idea, but it is already, halfway through the day, in danger of falling victim to that same success. #askacurator, The Twitter campaign by more than three hundred museums from around the world, whereby internet users can ask questions to museum directors, is suffering from an onslaught of viagra, porn and other nonsense sellers. After all, that type of internet entrepreneur is figuring out what topics...
Sound recording available to listen to here!
You will hear successively Axel Rüger, director of the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, responding to the assertion made by VVD member Mark Harbers that the art world is not entrepreneurial enough. This is followed by responses from former CDA culture spokesperson Nicolien van Vroonhoven (consistently called Nicolien van Vroemhoven by presenter Twan Huys) and former NNT actor Boris van der Ham, now culture spokesperson for D66.
Indeed, the name Xynix was somewhat outdated. And since, thanks to the efforts of its own company and Yo! Opera, which started as a youth opera festival, opera nowadays turns out to be suitable for young people too, a more adult name is appropriate: Holland Opera. The company settled in Amersfoort in a former company building near the railway station: De Verensmederij. The building, after a renovation, is...
Then you just have to have Twan Huys. The presenter of Nova who managed to kill all Job Cohen's election ambitions in a few schoolmaster questions. He will be able to pull the same trick on Sunday 29 August with a few left-wing politicians and arts bobos in the traditional Uitmarkt debate in Paradiso.
'In this museum, we so often extol the landscape, that for once we wanted to show the destruction, upheaval and impending change of the landscape.' According to Han Steenbruggen, director of Museum Belvedere in Heerenveen-Oranjewoud, it was time for an exhibition that shows what war, natural disasters and climate change do to the landscape: 'With this exhibition, we reflect and respond to...
The destructive power of war and hatred
Writer Wajdi Mouawad (b. 1968) fled his native Lebanon at the age of nine. At the time, a brutal civil war had been raging there for years. Together with his family, he ended up in Canada via France.
There, he develops into an internationally renowned playwright. His work is now performed all over the world. The Ro Theatre introduced Mouawad to the Netherlands for the first time this theatre season.
Director Alize Zandwijk chose the play Fires and puts on a bold and convincing version. Assisted by a talented cast of actresses and actors. You see the mother Nawal Marwan and her twins Jeanne and Simon. Nawal is dying.
1 September is 'Askacurator day'. Already more than a hundred museums in now 14 countries are putting their curators at the computer on that day to answer questions from internet users. It is a first. Never before has such an askacurator day been available worldwide, and never before have internet users been given access to the people behind museums such as the Tate Modern, Van...
By Leo Bankersen
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, this year's surprise Golden Palm winner, will get its first Dutch screening at the new festival World Cinema Amsterdam next weekend. The Cannes jury had caused some noise with this choice even among critics. After all, was this ghost story by the Thai filmmaker with the unpronounceable name now a dull and obscure film, or rather a cinematic masterpiece?
The Dodo has had its baptism of fire. We now know what the basics are, and therefore what can be improved. and of course there will be others with even more suggestions. We're going to take all that into our tents this July, think and sleep on that and then go with the new insights....
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