Things we do for members and partners.
Margret Sara Gudjonsdottir explores the unequal power relationship between spectators and dancer. And goes very far in doing so. Uncomfortable' is still the mildest description for the work 'Soft Target'. Which is not at all the case for a conversation in private.
It was so nice, using the 1980s band Talking Heads' song 'Road to nowhere' to get your political message across. Now yes. Ex-Senator and Governor of Florida Charlie Crist thought he could get away with it, and he may have succeeded politically, financially he is going to lose out big time. The compensation amount has not been disclosed, but...
"I don't care about the body, I make music," Savion Glover said last night, leaning against the doorframe of his dressing room after the performance Bare Soundz. The dance audience at Utrecht's Stadsschouwburg theatre struggled to master the mores of a jazz audience. As the concert progressed, it increasingly produced encouraging yells when the three tap dancers loosened up
It is nothing new that simple movements, close to the everyday, are given a place in dance performances. But the particular way they are constructed and highlighted in 'Studium' by Belgian group Busy Rocks makes you look at them with fresh wonder.
Three of the four dancers, darkly dressed, lie down on the floor against each other in carefully crafted poses. On this construction of bodies, a dancer, dressed bright white, takes her place in a horizontal position. The lighting makes the body lying above seem to float. The underlying figures push up the limbs in such a way that the white figure moves as if she is walking. The manipulation is done with great precision. Looking at it with tilted head, one sees perfectly natural steps.
Cesc Gelabert is a distinct figure in the world of modern dance. The Catalan with German roots makes a habit of keeping repertoire from the hot period of dance innovation alive, touring theatres and festivals with it for decades. So no Cinderella and Swan Lake for this engaging perfectionist, but dance steps from a Berlin...
We gathered the cream of Dutch dance journalism for these ten days of dance innovation. Fransien van de Putt, well known in Belgium and the Netherlands, Maarten Baanders, well known in the wide surroundings of Leiden and Daniël Bertina, well known in the wide surroundings of Het Parool were ij the opening of Springdance and were actually happy with what they got to see. ...
The opening of Springdance was a beautiful, continuous movement, from left to right across the stage of Utrecht's Stadsschouwburg theatre. Before the performance, Wijbrand Schaap spoke to choreographer Guilherme Botelho about this special dance piece.
From left to right, single people move across the stage, unceasingly and in droves sometimes, for an hour. It is addictive, this locomotion in Sideways Rain, the endless forward motion in one and the same direction of what appear to be ever-new people. Through subtle costume changes, a dark lighting scheme and Murcof's dramatic drones, it is very difficult at first to tell the 15 dancers apart. They become a fascinating stream of passers-by, on their way from somewhere to nowhere. Unlike the view along the public road, the dancers do not carry the usual bags, umbrellas and hats and, moreover, move mainly on four legs.
Jens van Daele concludes his series of choreographies on the seven deadly sins with the performance Brides for Peace. The piece is based on the art performance Brides on Tour by Italian artists Pippa Bacca and Silvia Moro. Hitchhiking and dressed in wedding dresses, with a text 'Peace' on their chests, they travelled from Milan to Jerusalem in 2008. The journey went...
I am not a connoisseur of the performance practice of Bach's St John Passion and know that other piece, the St Matthew Passion, mainly from a few TV excerpts and far-flung arrangements like the one by Platel's Pitié. So don't expect me to pass judgment on how good the version, which was seen and heard at the Concertgebouw on 5 April 2011, was, comparatively...
Reports of the collapsing music industry have been rife. Apparently, as a musician, you no longer survive on the basis of record sales (alone). In niche genres, however, it is easy to survive. So proves the band Current 93, which performed in Stadtgarten, Cologne, last week. Playing live a lot and selling merchandise seems to be the golden rule for...
We were deep in Amsterdam's canal belt for a while. After all, prominent resident of this city Rudi Fuchs was presented with a new booklet, written by himself together in the pages of De Groene Amsterdammer. This weekly magazine, by all accounts the oldest in the country, hosts the art connoisseur and former museum director in its pages. On it, he stomach writing about artworks that...
After the cry, now the official piece. With a fitting, tad Den Uyl/Van Agt-like title: 'Less where it can be done, better where it must be done.' But let's not laugh too hard. It is quite brave what they have done. Gitta Luyten, Marianne Versteegh, Joke Hubert, Henk Scholten, Siebe Weide and Ben Holvast, together as bosses of arts umbrellas and cultural sector institutes also...
Amsterdam-based company Dood Paard itself translated Shakespeare's 'Othello' and waves goodbye to the bard with 'Bye Bye'. The quirky collective performs a one-and-a-half-hour topical comedy of manners and soul mirror, in which pointing at 'The Other' is central. Shakespeare's plays are quite often performed quite reverently. . Moreover, the adored 'bard' from Stratford-upon-Avon has bestowed on the English language countless expressions that have come to...
To protest against the cuts in culture, you can of course shout loudly, but as an artist you can also just do what you are good at - make something really beautiful. Dutch film director Danyael Sugawara (Alles stroomt) opted for the latter and in a day and a half he and the best Dutch actors shot Na U, a small drama about unconditional love and...
Dutch theatre-maker Adelheid Roosen, who is currently working with director Merel de Groot on a theatre project with Syrian art students, sees her project hindered because of student protests, although we are not entirely sure in the totalitarian country, from which we rarely receive news. The University of Damascus, where she is working on the project To tell You I call...
His Dutch has never been his strongest point, and he doesn't like to speak either. Still, a Holland Festival press conference is something to be at, so we take Pierre Audi's lesser performing skills for granted. in February, he presented the programme of the 2011 edition, which promises to be a very nice one, and which hopefully will not be the...
Annet Lekkerkerker is business director of the Holland Festival. She puts on a six-million euro festival with a grant of over four million euros.
Trouble with your voice? You don't talk about that. Because competition is so high in the music industry, there is a taboo on showing weaknesses. While the consequences would be much smaller if attention was given to it sooner. Time for the Muziek Centrum Nederland to ask the question at its music café on 3 March where...
Bettina Masuch (1964) has been artistic director of Springdance since 2008 and presents its third festival programme this year. We asked the woman behind this leading festival for innovative dance about this season's highlights. One of the performances she describes already makes us very curious: the Japanese street fighters of Contact Gonzo. Could just happen that somewhere between 14 and...
Art costs money. The current Rutte administration has hammered that into it: it's expensive, no one but a small club of insiders goes there, and either way those are leftists or pseudo-leftists who can easily pay for it themselves. So much for the government's opinion. The opinion of the art world can be guessed: it is...
The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra currently has an unprecedented luxury: it is releasing CDs on two labels at the same time. How is that possible? The orchestra signed under its own name with BIS Records, the label with which the eccentric owner Von Bahr releases one extraordinary recording after another, while chief conductor Yannick Néze-Séguin is old-fashionedly under contract as maestro with EMI....
Sometimes this is not about hard news, subsidy stress or downplaying for a while, but about other matters of art. Director and writer Erik Snel sent us the following sigh, now made topical again by
The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra is rated differently by conductors. Either you can get along with it and then it's a party, or it never becomes anything and then it stays at the occasional conducting session. Moreover, the musicians' enormous responsiveness is feared.
OK. A pilot. When Jeroen Stout lost his Wednesday film fork in Radio Kunststof on Radio 1 in December 2010, we made him an offer he could easily refuse: to do something like that with us. But that we would then look for a way that suits The Dodo. After all, audio online may be the...
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