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Of course, we have Chriet Titulaer. But it kind of ends there. And to say we took those very seriously, back in the day? No. The future, and fantasising about it, is not really a thing in the Netherlands, at least not with the big publishers and broadcasters. A writer dealing with science fiction will never join a big...
The Holland festival has a tradition of combining film with live music. Whether it's the post-punk band Mogwai at Mark Cousins' Atomic Cinema or a live accompaniment to a silent film, something magical usually happens. That was certainly the case at the screening of Fritz Lang's Der Müde Tod (1921), accompanied by composer in...
Menno Pols, reporter for De Gelderlander, was denied accreditation (free ticket and other benefits) for the three-day Manana Manana festival in Vorden this year. Reason: an article he wrote last year about the money flows within the club behind the festival. That club earns millions mainly from Zwarte Cross, the biggest festival in the Netherlands with 220,000 tickets sold. The accreditation...
The feeling of walking around in a bazaar straight out of one of the fairy tales of a thousand - and - one nights. Your eyes feast; colourful Persian carpets, atmospheric lanterns and exclusive 'merchandise'. With the new exhibition Iran- Cradle of Civilisation, the Drents Museum takes visitors to one of the oldest civilisations in the world. For the...
Alejandro González Iñárritu's Oscar-winning virtual reality installation Carne y Arena is coming to the Netherlands. Share the experience of illegal migrants clashing with US border police.
Panic. On the tram between Leidseplein and Amsterdam Centraal, I suddenly lost the Dutch translation of 'string quartet'. So I typed 'violin quartet' into my facebook update, trying to make a connection between a blow job and Ligeti. Joking, perhaps, but there was something much deeper behind it, in that tram, after the music and theatre event 'The String Quartet's...
Our Thea Derks sat watching a traffic light for a few hours on Thursday 7 June and observed that the music was better. It happened during the opening of the 2018 Holland Festival. In the tradition of Ruth Mackenzie, the opening was of mixed reception, and that is actually a good thing. Even at a time when the Amsterdam Arts Council is in a...
The Holland Festival presents Hyena, in which Mollena Lee Williams-Haas recounts how she kicked her alcohol addiction. Her husband Georg Friedrich Haas wrote the music to accompany her blood-curdling account. She is accompanied by Klangforum Wien and conductor Bas Wiegers, who also performed the world premiere two years ago. Hyena can be heard once at Muziekgebouw aan het IJ on Wednesday 13 June....
The cultural sector is sometimes behind, but more often ahead. In the - otherwise very much to be welcomed in terms of content - advice issued by the Amsterdam Arts Council on the future of the local Stedelijk Museum, you can read that job security in the art sector is once again under pressure. Especially for young entrants from 'diverse' backgrounds: 'Preferably, the museum will make greater use of...
What a grandiose invention to think of breakdance as martial arts dance! In a sense, of course, it has been so from the beginning. Young people in New York's poor neighbourhoods developed their spectacular dance techniques in the 1980s. These were a means for them to express themselves in their own unique way. This was a necessity of life in a society that...
Steve McQueen is an artist who narrates big and difficult subjects in a physically tangible way. Hunger strike, sex addiction and our discomfort with male sexuality, slavery. These are the things we would rather not see anymore, not want to discuss and certainly not want to feel. In his feature films, McQueen manages to strike a balance between the aesthetic and the physical ...
The miracle happened right at the first location. On a bare piece of dune in front of beach café Oscars there are rocking benches. From one of those benches I looked, swaying, over a slope of marram grass, then a couple of terraces and beyond that the sea. As it was a weekday, but summer warm, some bathers had already settled into beach chairs. Crowded it was...
'You simply cannot, as a big company, just bring journalistic theatre.' So says Jeroen de Man, who now directs the watery spectacle performance Ondine at the National Theatre. 'A bit of diversity is just fine.' So not everything in The Hague has to be as socially relevant as The Nation of Othello. Sometimes it can also just be about the...
Music and images, it remains a tricky combination. Do you see a picture with music, or do you hear music with a picture? That question was not answered unequivocally at the opening concert of the Holland Festival. The slowly changing colours of Gerhard Richter's canvases were matched by Marcus Schmickler's slowly fading sounds. While Richter's Patterns soon became boring,...
At the film sector's traditional Spring Consultation, the panel at the Ketelhuis shed its light on the video on demand explosion, among other things, and on the advice of the Council for Culture. Will operators support the film sector with levies on sales?
Here it is. The one and only interactive Culture Press Holland Festival Special. A special that has already been deployed over the past few months, and will be added to in the coming month. During the festival, we have regular reviews and reports, and podcasts. A new edition of this Special will appear every week. On Mondays. And then you can also subscribe via...
With 'The Way You Sound Tonight', which will have its world premiere at Holland Festival 2018, choreographer Arno Schuitemaker takes the next step in his creative development. He describes his performance as an 'acoustic ballroom'. I speak to the 1976-born dance maker, who once studied at Delft University of Technology, about his work and his motives. 'In the trilogy 'WHILE...
In Kata, the latest work by French breaker and choreographer Anne Nguyen, hip-hop men transcend the clichés of hip-hop. Toughness, untouchability and the usual frontal relationship with the audience are exchanged for indirect gestures, delayed effects, diagonals and laterals, double entendres and irony. Nguyen, herself an adept practitioner of capoeira, ming chun and breakdance, challenges her dancers to show their...
Alí Calderón has written quite a body of work, but I didn't hear much of it during my stay at Poetry International. However, the poem 'Democracia Mexicana' did come along three times. A formidable poem, as it ends with a rotting baby corpse, so not for the soft-hearted among us. Democracia Mexicana is Calderon's hit poem. Like pop singers can make a hit...
Welcome to the culture press podcast. Episode I don't know how many. Today, once again, I am keeping my mouth shut, because the floor belongs to the new poets of the Netherlands. I saw and heard them on Thursday, 31 May 2018, during poetry international. The evening was dominated by the presentation of the Cees Buddingh Prize. The prize for the best Dutch poetry debut of 2018....
No love without power relations. And certainly not when that love takes place in a royal bedroom. That bedchamber is now the setting for a tragic love triangle between a king, his lover and his wife in Lessons in Love and Violence, the third opera by English composer Georges Benjamin and playwright Martin Crimp. The Elizabethan drama Edward II...
It feels like a variation on a scene from a farce. On stage: Birmingham REP's public relations officer, a journalist flown in from the Netherlands for the premiere and the director's assistant rushed in. Location: an upmarket hotel in the heart of Birmingham. Time: Sunday morning a little after ten o'clock. The subject: sex and the all-encompassing concept of anxiety. Go! The big absentee is director Calixto...
Danez Smith is quite something. Or rather two, because the American poet likes to be addressed in the gender-neutral, or rather gender-plural plural form. A form of address not yet very common in Dutch, and thus avoided by everyone. Thursday night, 31 May at the former ro theatre, now Theater Rotterdam - Witte de With, fell around the...
You must be a serious misanthrope not to have a good time in Stadspark Maastricht that Friday. The sun is shining. It is subtropical warm with a light spring breeze. The location, next to a pond embraced by ramparts and turrets, is perfect. Under the ancient oaks, some 40 food trucks and bars with simmering kitchens await you. Oh...
The lectern. The lectern. The paper holder, if possible with its own light, which, shining upwards, draws stern shadows of the reading glasses on the poet's face. It is the kind of necessary evil that every poetry or literature festival has to deal with. Only the powerpoint is missing to make it a boring seed onion conference. Poetry International Festival Rotterdam has in...
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