Marieke Rijneveld: 'Success is the neighbour's rabbit. Before you know it, you put your fork in it.' #PIFR
On Thursday 9 June 2016, Marieke Rijneveld received the Netherlands' highest poetry prize: the C. Buddingh Prize.
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Now Live: Aase Berg, Luis Chaves, Sinéad Morrissey at Poetry International
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...
Is stage poetry inferior, or do we then exclude large groups? #pifr
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.
Secrets of Karbala: The Crusades in oriental light and glass marionettes #hf16
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...
The Walking Forest is performance you definitely want to watch twice (HF16)
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.
Opening night Poetry International showcases sprightly poetry #PIFR
Perhaps the first words man ever uttered were poems. In any case, man will have sung first, before using words. At least if we can 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?
Holland Festival goes Nuclear: Atomic by Mark Cousins
Iedereen die zich de val van de muur kan herinneren is opgegroeid met de dreiging van een nucleaire aanval. En daarbij horen de idiote adviezen van overheidswege om in geval van een atoomexplosie onder de tafel te gaan zitten, liefst met een vergiet op het hoofd. En om genoeg blikvoer en water achter de hand te houden.
And the C. Buddingh' Prize goes to... (#PIFR)
Wie gaat vanavond naar huis met de C. Buddingh’-Prijs, de bekroning voor het beste Nederlandstalige dichtdebuut van het afgelopen jaar? Dat wordt vanavond bekendgemaakt op Poetry International. A Quattro Mani doet een voorspelling.
Documentary on Remco Campert gets preview at Poetry (PI16)
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.'
Meg Stuart's 'Sketches/Notebook' frees us from dogged individualism (HF16)
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.
Harrison Birtwistle: from shocking to guttural musical theatre
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,...
This is more than a review of the opening of the Holland Festival
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 sows beautiful doubt in Mijke de Jong's 'Stop Acting Now' (HF16)
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 the wings of 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.
This is not a review of the opening of the Holland Festival (HF16)
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.
Louis Andriessen: 'I've never found a new sound'
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.
'Poetry is always political'. Poetry International explores 'framing'
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.
Meg Stuart at Holland Festival: 'The sacred theatre is gone, but the expectations remain.'(HF16)
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
Joel Pommerat: 'History does not repeat itself. Instead, we can learn from it.' (HF16)
One of the special performances at this year's Holland Festival is 'Ça Ira (1): Fin de Louis' by French company Compagnie Louis Brouillard. I visited the performance earlier in Luxembourg and spoke to the director and writer of this over four-hour marathon about the French Revolution. It seems quite something: 40 actors on stage...
Figures don't lie: Dutch venues are doing badly
It must have been down to my indestructible mood, and the deep need to finally deliver some good news about the cultural sector, but I was so wrong. Tuesday I reported that the performing arts were recovering after Halbe Zijlstra's draconian cuts, but that is so not the case. As much as the sector itself would like it to do well, the figures contradict it time and again.
Surely the Association of Theatre and Concert Hall Directors has taken us all for a ride again. With a real infographic still do. But, as it is with infographics: you can put in all the bright colours and shouts, and even shout 'Bravo!' and 'Applause!'at the bottom, the numbers themselves don't lie, even if you present them slightly differently than last year.
Audio, the new video (II): Syrian dead speak at Gardens Speak (HF16)
'This regime also rules over you after you die. The regime steals your story. They use you to tell their own story. Relatives are forced to sign statements that the dead were killed by the opposition. The regime uses the dead to oppress the living.' Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury made a statement: Gardens Speak (Gardens Speak). An installation, an immersive[hints]definition: immersive, making you forget the real world around you[/hints] performance, in which the spectators themselves are actors. A performance that consists of a mountain of earth from which soft voices sound from beneath tombstones. That performance comes in June to Amsterdam, as one of the examples of the new Holland Festival programming by festival director Ruth MacKenzie.
The pile of earth in and on which the installation takes place represents the many thousands of anonymous backyard graves in Syria. At the beginning of the Syrian civil war, the struggle was still mainly between opponents of President Assad's dictatorship and his (secret) police. The first victims were often still just students taking part in peaceful demonstrations, handing out pamphlets, or attending the funeral of a friend. After all: bombing funerals was and is a proven method of murderous regimes and crime syndicates to eliminate insurgent networks.
Tania El Khoury heard of the Syrian alternative in 2013: the private burial in one's own backyard, or failing that, in an anonymous city park, with no headstone or memorial. Such an action is both an expression of fear and an act of resistance: these are deaths that the government can no longer abuse. 'The play was not originally intended for European audiences either. It was made in Lebanon and the text was also in Arabic. The last thing I thought about was the European audience. The idea was
Audio is the new video (I): McBurney's theatrical podcast on #HF16
Simon McBurney is a real theatre nerd. Exceedingly interested in mathematics and physics, he enjoys nothing more in the theatre than building technical illusions. He is also an in-demand actor and director, who, when he has a performance at London's Barbican Centre, gets a visit from Kate Bush, who humbly comes to congratulate him on his work. This year, he is,...
The Linda. but about beheadings and suicide bombings
That there is an extremist magazine about burnings and beheadings, and that rich Britons have four-storey basements built under their houses for a private cinema or bowling alley - we learned a lot last night at the International Literature Festival Utrecht (ILFU). The programme of the Saturday night of the ILFU was as richly varied as that of the first evening. The...
Filter Translation Award 2016 to translator Günter Grass
Jan Gielkens has won the Filter Translation Prize 2016 for his translation of The Words of Grimm by Günter Grass. The prize of ten thousand euros rewards the most exceptional translation achievement of the past year. Grass's novel, published last year by Meulenhoff, places high demands on the reader and the translator, the jury felt. 'Deftly navigates Gielkens'...
Harvey's hand only half full
Visitors either thought it was 'very cool' or they thought it was 'absolutely nothing' - PJ Harvey's reading, the opening act at tonight's International Literature Festival Utrecht, evoked totally opposite reactions. Rock diva PJ Harvey is not only a musician, but also a visual artist and poet. At ILFU, as the festival has been called since this year, she read from her...
Down with the novel pessimism
In times of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, what power does the novel still have? Every so often, fiction is declared dead, but the International Literature Fesitval Utrecht (formerly City2Cities), which takes place this coming weekend in the former post office on the Neude, wants to show that novel pessimists are completely wrong. Nine highlights from the programme. PJ Harvey The Literature House, like last...
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