Things we do for members and partners.
The new format of the Holland festival puts the spectator first. Plenty of visible events, free performances and being in the middle of the city. It's director Ruth McKenzie's trademark. It is therefore not surprising that she does not shy away from the digital universe. After all, what better way to share than digital art? But what then is digital art...
Manger, the new performance by Boris Charmatz and Musée de la Danse, gives spectators all the space they need. Where you line up to watch or just to listen, who or what you watch and for how long, is up to you. The Purification Hall on the Westergasfabriek site, majestically empty and echoing, creates a wondrous atmosphere in this for Charmatz'...
It is one of the most pre-discussed performances of this Holland Festival. Newspapers, magazines and webmagazines dived en masse on The End featuring Japanese superstar Hatsune Miku. That she is not real. About all of us being fascinated by the virtual and technology. About her two and a half million Facebook friends. About the fans who have written more than 100,000 songs for her. About the costume designs...
Inspired by stories by Borges, whose widow was present at the launch of the online interactive musical piece at the Holland Festival, The Book of Sand still looks most like an elaborate, very chic music video. Is that a bad thing? "Neither the book nor sand possess a beginning or an end." Borges' story, to which the title refers, is about...
A confession. There is no other way. So: yes. I was lying between immaculate white sheets in a comfortable bed with actress Lina Issa and it was beautiful. She whispered soft words in my ear, put a hand on my hand and it was very quiet around us. Thanks to that whispering, the noise of the big city fell away. Trams...
Emio Greco and Pieter Scholten rehearse their new performance Extremalism in Marseille. The two dance companies under their direction, ICKamsterdam and Ballet National de Marseille, have merged for this occasion: 30 dancers on stage, six authors and designers in the auditorium, and the crew of technicians is also made up of Amsterdamers and Marseillais. They are working together on the biggest production that Greco and...
Lulu, the opera that Alban Berg left unfinished on his death in 1935, is considered an undisputed masterpiece, which is frequently performed. The opera is at the Muziektheater for the third time this millennium, but for the first time with the third act completed by Friedrich Cerha. South African artist William Kentridge will direct. He and the performers were honoured after the...
The first weekend of June, something exciting is happening in The Hague. For adventurous men. By adventurous men. On a stage. By music-making men that is. Mr Cello One of these men I once saw (sometime in the nineties in Groningen) going wild on his instrument. With an almost bare bow, missing a string, but...
A young blonde woman climbs a staircase in a round, windowless room and emerges into a desert. She runs laps around a red cloth, singing "everything's repeated many times". Or: the same young woman lies in the same windowless round room, but now in a different dress and with a curious machine. "everything's repeated many times". Or: the same...
Stepping into M.U.R.S. is a treat. This is the smart city, the city of our near future. Communication electronics and fun rule. It resembles a fairground or a huge disco. Exciting voices welcome you. You whirl in with the crowd. Everyone joins in. Your phone is in touch. Cheerleaders stand on a stage,...
THE Symphony Orchestra is as good as bankrupt. The 2014 figures show that. So it is total nonsense that responsible minister Jet Bussemaker reported in her answers to questions by MP Jacques Monasch less than a month ago that the orchestra was well within the own income norm of 21.5%. Not only did she already use incorrect figures in her answers, now...
Metropolis at Holland Festival: 4 ways to look at the future.
Stars, we don't really do that in the Netherlands. Our ground level does not allow diva behaviour. In our lowlands, you get a plus if you have stayed so nicely ordinary despite your success. Even if you stand in the Arena with your songs, like the Toppers, this weekend. How different it is in Istanbul. There, you are allowed to be shamelessly famous. Like.
As Big as the Sky I am looking forward to Arnoud Noordegraaf's new multimedia project, As Big as the Sky, with sets by Ai Wei Wei. Noordegraaf is a master at blurring the boundaries between film and reality. His music is elegant and appealing and serves the story. As Big as the Sky, op...
When you think of Carel Kraayenhof, you don't immediately think of a young squatter orating about Karl Marx in circle discussions. Yet protest resides in the musician, just like in the tango. This becomes apparent when the interview gets off to a brisk start.
During the Holland Festival, theatre company La Fura dels Baus lets us experience the city of the future with the interactive performance M.U.R.S. As an overture, HF has programmed the film Metropolis, Fritz Lang's magisterial 1927 dystopian vision, which rightly became known as the mother of all future films. Iconic imagery, biblical influences, Marxist dialectics and actually still surprisingly modern. New York,...
Visiting M.U.R.S. without the app on your smartphone is a challenge. The performance by the infamous Barcelona-based theatre collective is a commentary on how people are unwittingly becoming part of a SMART society run by international corporations via all sorts of gadgets. Are you in or out? Is there actually anything to choose? According to Jürgen Müller, one of the founders of...
A tricky question, but Festival Havenwerk director Erik-Jan Post has an idea and likes to bad some sacred cows. About arts education. About the concept of 'amateur'. About how big you should want to be as a festival. 'We are much less a festival in the classic sense. Havenwerk is more of a meeting place, with the participants at the centre. This year, therefore, the entrance fees are...
In The Loom of Mind, Icelandic folk singer Mugison, his bosom friend Pétur Ben, and Flemish baroque ensemble B.O.X. join forces. What does that sound like: melancholic Icelandic blues with 17th-century instruments? Like a stand-up storytelling concert performance? Or like a drunken panda who wants to have a game? How did you find each other? Pieter Theuns, lutenist and founder of B.O.X.: "I found Mugison...
Three Sisters by Chekhov directed by Theu Boermans is back with the Nationale Toneel. Two and a half years after its original performance, the play will play nine times exclusively at the Royal Theatre in The Hague. There is news about all three "sisters". Anniek Pheifer (Masja), Ariane Schluter (Olga) and Sallie Harmsen (Irina) talk about their careers and about Chekhov....
World War I film festival at De Cacaofabriek, Heerlen.
Theatre group Vis à Vis, based at Almere Strand since 2007, has been around for 25 years. In all these years, the group has mainly created accessible, successful open-air theatre performances such as PICNIC, Silo 8 and HaRT. Visual comedies with lots of spectacle, where solid themes are treated in a light-hearted way. EXIT is their anniversary performance. A dozen questions to Arjan Anker, artistic director of Vis à Vis:...
Dutch composer Theo Verbey (Delft 1959) writes music of lush tonal beauty, in which the achievements of centuries of musical tradition resound. He made his name with works such as Triad (1991) for orchestra and Expulsion (1988) for large ensemble, and with orchestrations of pieces by composers such as Modest Mussorgsky and Alban Berg. For the closing concert of De Vrijdag van Vredenburg, he wrote Traurig wie...
Europe's biggest hangout. That's the best way to describe the roof of that half-sunken car park in the heart of Rotterdam. Transformed fifteen years ago into the impression of a ship's deck, that 'Schouwburgplein' is now mostly owned by groups of skaters, vagrants, street urchins and other metropolitan troublemakers. Visitors to the Schouwburg usually rush without looking around too much to the...
The annual major sculpture expo in The Hague in 2015 is called 'Vormidable'. In its own museum, on Lange Voorhout and at several satellite locations, Museum Beelden aan Zee shows how Flemish art experienced a true revival from the 1990s onwards. Panamarenko, De Bruyckere, Fabre, but also lesser-known names renewed sculpture - in two opposite ways. Guest curator Stef van...
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