Things we do for members and partners.
The Encounter, a large-scale solo performance by British multi-talent Simon McBurney, had its Dutch premiere at the Holland Festival on Thursday. The Encounter combines the dramatic power of a Hollywood blockbuster with the polished simplicity of 20th-century, stripped-down, edited - call it Brechtian - theatre.
No actor to be seen in the auditorium of Theatre de Veste in Delft. Just a house with walls and roof of transparent cloth. It holds thirty people. On the walls of the hall around it, projected images pass by at whirling speed. This is fascinating: usually, when you are in a house, the walls close you off from the surroundings, but this time they actually give a view of a world as big and beautiful as you never experience in ordinary life.
On Thursday 9 June 2016, Marieke Rijneveld received the Netherlands' highest poetry prize: the C. Buddingh Prize.
Aase Berg from Sweden, Luis Chaves from Costa Rica and Sinéad Morrissey from Northern Ireland read their full selection of festival poems. Translations into Dutch and/or English will be projected directly along. The readings will be preceded by an introduction to the poets' work. Presentation: Feline Streekstra. Ever since her first collection Hos Rådjur (1997), Aase Berg has been writing direct, hard and compressed poetry full of...
Report on a hidden battlefield. Poetry International in Rotterdam has moved into a new, informal venue. The home of the Ro theatre in William Boothlaan, just over basic than the Theatre on that strange square. And the terrace between roaring motorbikes is lively, full of old and young lovers of poetry. Or of spoken word, or from slam. Anyone who might think Poetry International is an elitist poetry festival will be deceived on this sunny Thursday afternoon. A stenographic report.
No, the culture debate on 8 June in the province of Overijssel was not uplifting. The Cultuurnota 2017-2020 was adopted unanimously, except for two votes from the SGP. No fireworks about, for instance, the forced cooperation between the Orkest van het Oosten and Het Gelders Orkest. No hefty investments to fix national and provincial cuts. All spokespersons came up with predictable monologues, comparisons were made with other regions and, above all, they looked enviously at the Randstad, but there was no debate. The Christian parties are worried about empty churches, and the PVV, which is of course actually against subsidies, made some obligatory remarks about safeguarding the Overijsselian identity.
How can you rewrite an intensely complicated history from a different perspective? By using grotesque glass puppets and not actors. This revolutionary invention was shown at the Holland Festival on 8 June, and can still be experienced there 9 June. In that film, Egyptian artist Wael Shawky takes us back to bygone centuries and shows us...
Brazil's Christiane Jatahy was already with the play last year What If they went to Moscow at the Holland Festival. She came, saw and conquered. This year, she comes with the final part in the trilogy of stage adaptations, The Walking Forest. The title refers to the three witches in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, who foretell his rise and fall. The play was the starting point for a performance with four video screens, a bar, an actress, a dead fish and, oh yes, an audience.
The poetry readings are at the heart of Poetry International festival. Anneke Brassinga, Laura Accerboni and Jeet Thayil read all the poems they have brought for the Poetry International Festival. The translations into Dutch and/or English will be projected simultaneously with the reading, so you won't miss a word. Prior to their readings, the poets will be briefly...
Perhaps the first words man ever uttered were poems. In any case, man will have sung first, before using words. If we can at least describe the primal sound expressed at the time to indicate that that dove is really yours after all as singing. The fact remains, Poetry International the festival that had a wonderful opening night yesterday, is dedicated to one of the oldest art forms in the world: poetry. But just how sprightly is that art?
Anyone who can remember the fall of the wall has grown up with the threat of nuclear attack. And with that comes the idiotic government advice to get under the table in case of a nuclear explosion, preferably with a colander on your head. And to keep plenty of canned food and water on hand.
Who will go home tonight with the C. Buddingh' Prize, the award for the best Dutch-language poetry debut of the past year? That will be announced tonight at Poetry International. A Quattro Mani makes a prediction.
Once, Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen had the Mauritshuis built with money earned in Brazil, including in the slave trade. Now a Brazilian is exhibiting in that same Mauritshuis with perfect 3D replicas of the backs of famous paintings. He made five new ones especially for this exhibition. Four well-known masterpieces from the Mauritshuis, but also a painting relating to the Brazilian adventures of the time.
All four nights of Poetry will be streamed live via YouTube. Tonight: the opening. Live from the Rotterdam Schouwburg.
It promises to be a beautiful portrait, the film director John Albert Jansen is making about poet Remco Campert. Poetry International (from 7 to 11 June in Rotterdam) is already screening a preview. 'I find it moving to see that there is still a certain shyness in Remco, as if the little boy is still hidden under the surface. That comes across very nicely.'
From scene 1, 'Sketches/Notebook' by Meg Stuart and her group Damaged Goods engulfs the audience in a plethora of experiences. Bending over and making quick spins. Swinging a lamp and putting some fellow performers in a circle of light. Making figures with your hands. Laying stones on the floor and walking intently around them. Choosing from richly stocked clothes racks to make a colourful, bizarre creation of yourself. Put up a wall around yourself and then watch what the other does with it: imitate, move, break down, dissolve in space. Playing with beams of light and rope. Running around. Jumping in place. Rattling wildly on and drum kit. Lingering musical motifs.
From choreographer Meg Stuart has shown work at the Holland Festival before: 'Alibi' (2002) and 'Forgeries, Love and Other Matters' (2004). This year, 'Sketches/Notebook' surprises, being more playful and lighter than her previous work.
In his youth, Harrison Birtwistle (1934) was one of the Angry Young Men of English music, now elevated to the peerage and going through life as 'Sir Harry'. He trained as a clarinetist and composer at the Royal College of Music in Manchester, where he was annoyed by the conservative climate. Together with John Ogden,...
On Saturday 4 June 2016, I attended the royal opening of the Holland Festival and was able to attend no review write about, because I was sitting in the front row of the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg. As the stage was elevated, I was looking against a black wall, above which only the front actors were visible. The back and lower half of the stage were completely eluding me.
Me wrote that on, and the Holland Festival generously offered me the opportunity to go and see the performance again, from a better seat. At the same time, the organisers told me that the first three rows of the Stadsschouwburg would be compensated at this performance. So I went to Amsterdam one more time, on Monday 6 June.
Before the performance, while not eating a blackened hamburger in theatre restaurant Stanislavski, I heard from the neat people at the little table next to me that the front seats were offered at a sharply reduced rate, and that people like them who had already bought tickets had the choice of thus getting a partial refund or going on the waiting list for a seat with better sightlines. Whether they eventually managed to get one of the spots with better visibility, I don't know. The performance
Wunderbaum. Among lovers of fresh and young theatre, this collective of creators stirred something up at the beginning of this century. They were born and bred under Johan Simons, where they formed the youth team of his legendary theatre group Hollandia. And because back then, every young maker really had to do something with the world, JongHollandia, later Wunderbaum, wanted the same. But because they lived in the post-ideological era and saw every day how the ideals of their teachers, parents and mentors came to nothing, it mainly became a club of doubters. And they were very good at that.
So you can get too close to a work of art. I don't even know if it really applies to paintings, that toxic fumes can rise from them, as some claim, but it certainly applies to theatre art. During the opening of the Holland Festival 2016, I was sitting in the front row of the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg. Normally already not the best place for those who want to keep a bit of an overview of what is happening on stage. For the occasion of 'Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wussten', the stage had also been raised by half a metre, which meant I spent about four-fifths of the time watching actors' heads bounce over a light rail.
For Theatre of the World, his fifth full-length opera, Louis Andriessen (1939) drew inspiration from the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680). He was the last Renaissance man, someone who could do everything and knew everything. Kircher wrote books full of the most diverse subjects, from the meaning of hieroglyphics to vulcanology and musical instruments. He even designed a cat piano, based on the idea that each cat screams at a different pitch when you tap its tail. After his death, Kircher fell into disrepute as a charlatan.
However, unusable for science, he forms gefundenes Fressen for a composer like Andriessen, who likes to explore the boundaries between reality and fiction. His opera Writing to Vermeer (1999) is based on fictional letters to the Delft painter; Rosa, a Horse Drama (1994) is about the murder of a composer, allegedly part of a conspiracy against music.
Is the language of poetry still free from ideology and manipulation? Or is it nonsense to think that poetic language escapes framing, the ideological loading of words? That is the main theme of this year's Poetry International poetry festival, which kicks off on Tuesday 7 June.
The show Sketches/Notebook (2013), which has its Dutch premiere at the Holland Festival on 6 June, is virtuosic, radical and extremely gentle. Choreographer Meg Stuart loves small scale, even when she occupies the biggest stages with partners like the Volksbühne (Berlin), Théâtre de la Ville (Paris) or the Münchner Kammerspiele. Details win out over big lines and often play a leading role in pieces that scrutinise human behaviour incredulously.
Sketches/Notebook stands out
The garish signs KEUKENHOF keep on whizzing past café Foolish Business, on a very sticky Tuesday morning. Hordes of tourists throng behind them, ready to spend money on picturesque pictures and unique experiences. My interest today is in the opposite, the desolate 19the century colonies in Drenthe, then called 'Dutch Siberia'. To me, Drenthe is known as ' a cyclist's paradise' but writer Suzanna Jansen wrote the 2008 bestseller The Pauper's Paradise about, in which she meticulously traced her family's history back five generations.
She is wearing a summery blue dress and is in transit to the 'crime scene' of our conversation, Veenhuizen, to drive past her 'favourite places' with RTV Drenthe. This is a tad ironic, since she knows Drenthe mainly through her ancestors, who lived and died under miserable conditions in the colonies.
15 June 2016 goes there in Veenhuizen theatre show The Pauper's Paradise premiered in the courtyard of the Gevangenis Museum, about 'one of the most dramatic hidden histories in the Netherlands'.
As many as 1 million Dutch Descend from Veenhuizen clients[hints]From the registers reveals that Ruud Lubbers, Geert Mak and Alexander Pechtold, Thea Beckmann, Anton Pieck and Bert Haanstra, among others, are related to paupers from the 19th-century poor colonies[/hints].
A week ago, the theatres affiliated to the VSCD presented beautiful figures. Although the number of performances fell, average attendance had risen again. Many in the industry frowned, and after some arithmetic, Wijbrand Schaap, after initially good news to the conclusion that it was entirely not is going so well with the performing arts. And again, that message can be criticised; the VSCD does not include all theatres, some have merged etc. Another day later, Jeffrey Meulman explained in his blog the finger on the sore spot:
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