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Holland Festival
They are gentlemen of age and therefore with a history. Grey or bespectacled or bald - or with a combination of all three. Their music has taken them everywhere. And now they are in a packed Carre: the Orchestre El Gusto. To their own delight, as they thank the audience for coming. The musicians from the kasbah of Algiers play the music as it is
Holland Festival
Our king is not yet known as a lover of culture of the less bite-sized kind. The kind of performances, like the opera Quartett, with which the Holland Festival opened on 1 June. So it may have been a bit of a letdown for him, his
Holland Festival
An explosion in a crowded market square claimed 24 lives, including seven children. When the village commemorates that tragedy a year later, a little boy falls out of a window and a girl disappears before
Holland Festival
Holland Festival
,,The special thing about Quartett is that an intimate story between two people is blown up to impressive proportions. The characters find themselves in a room, which seems to float. In this seclusion, an isolated game between a man and a woman plays out. Giant video projections
Holland Festival
Holland Festival
Simon Stone (28) wrote a new play based on Henrik Ibsen's 1884 stage classic The Wild Duck. The Swiss-born Australian provided the Norwegian play with entirely contemporary language and dressing. The actors sit
Holland Festival
In 'Cineastas', the Argentine director shows Mariano Pensotti (1972) a multi-layered story about four Buenos Aires filmmakers, each struggling with their new films. It is partly a portrait of the city, through the eyes of four Argentine filmmakers, says
Thirty-eight singing Slovenian girls. We might expect something with colourful costumes against a backdrop of a sunny village scene. Instead
Holland Festival ,,I like to use the word 'Gesamtkunstwerk'. Light, space, matter, body, sound: it all belongs together. Each aspect forms an essential part of the whole."
Choreographer Nicole Beutler prepares with pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama and
With Tragedy of a Friendship commemorates Flanders Opera the bicentenary of Richard Wagner's birth. It is a production by controversial artist Jan Fabre, author Stefan Hertmans and composer Moritz Eggert. When I approach the German tone poet to talk about this opera, he reacts with shock: there is ab-so-lutely no question of an opera! Could I please clear up this misunderstanding once and for all?
Radiant faces and swinging bodies filled the rehearsal room of the Utrecht-based Stut Choir in Overvecht. For the first time, the members collaborated with Irish singer Lorna McLaughlin of The Henry Girls and conductors Neil Burns and Anna Nolan of the Inishowen Gospel Choir. On 21 June, the two choirs will join the three Henry Girls sisters on stage at the Stadsschouwburg Utrecht.
Rokia Traoré, Dieudonné Niangouna, Brett Bailey, Compagnie La Baraka by choreographer Abou Lagraa, El Gusto with Kashba Blues: there is a lot of Africa in the Holland Festival 2013. Performances that
Treaty of UtrechtMarjolein Jegerings (21) is studying cultural anthropology at Utrecht University and went to Guatemala last year for her undergraduate research on conflict mediation. When she had just returned, she called
200 military personnel and JunkieXL are expected to cause a spectacle on the A2 motorway near Utrecht on 13 April. The roof of the new tunnel trench will be the stage for a battle of medieval proportions, in which peace will be conquered by our army over something with a wall and 'war' on it.
Writers like to talk, and people like to talk about, with and through writers. As much as that may be reason to organise a literature festival, it is also why
At 1 strip or 1,000 words blogger and columnist Peter Breedveld spoke to three influential illustrators, Barbara Stok, Peter van Dongen and Thé Tjong-Khing using projected images from their beautiful work. The relaxed conversation was a breath of fresh air among the other ferocious debating violence at the festival.
Whether Tahmina Akefi is a good writer, I dare not say. The Afghan beauty can at least glue sentences together, and knows how to add an erotic layer on top. But whether this means she surpasses the average penny novel, or whether she has nothing to offer but oriental soft porn anyway? Tricky.
"We don't use social media because it's cool," says Tunisian internet activist Sami Ben Gharbia. "But in a dictatorship, it is the only way to inform people about what is really going on. To fight the demons in society. I am not a techny Became because it's fun. I just needed useful knowledge about internet codes, to improve my civic activism possible."
We spoke briefly at Writers Unlimited 2013 with the woman who has been giving workshops in poetry to schoolchildren for a few years now. And we wondered again if rap wasn't enough for them, those kids. No. So it turns out. And she explains it clearly.
John de Mol is doing good business in the Arab world. He acts rather dismissively about this, according to Hassnae Bouazza. According to her, the television producer talks publicly mainly about the many restrictions on his formats because of Islam and the sentimentalism of TV in the Middle East in general. That De Mol's success number The Voice of Arabia during the final in
With a jam-packed programme like Writers Unlimited 2013, it sometimes happens that, even as a professional journalist, despite everything, you end up dropping in somewhere too late, and then just catching a glimpse of something really great. In this case, after the tour de force of Amos Oz and Adriaan van Dis, was that Kenyan Ngwatilo Mawiyoo's spoken word performance. Mea culpa for that.
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