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The last bit is always the most exciting. After a nice conversation with festival presenter Francis Broekhuizen, chief guest Susan Neiman suddenly joined us. It was nearing twelve, quite a bit of wine had actually already been poured into presenter and guest, but still. Suddenly you find yourself talking to a great philosopher and writer about David Bowie. This was the last session at Winternachten....
Next time, there will be 10 people queuing for a hotseat, 100 online viewers and dozens of live spectators in the foyer. At least I hope so, because only then will experimenting with new forms, apps and devices make sense, of course. At the second Winternachten night, Saturday 16 January at the Theater aan het Spui, we had slightly fewer viewers than...
Lots of audience and wonderful stories made the Saturday of the literary festival Winternachten a party. For the visit of Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård in the afternoon, queues stretched from the auditorium to the front door of the Theater aan het Spui. The festival's evening programming was also well attended. While American-German philosopher Susan Neiman spoke in...
On Friday 15 January, we conducted a first experiment with the platform 'blab.im'. During festival Winternachten, we reported live, via the internet. We did so in English, because most of the viewers we had were English-speaking. We could see that. That is already the most striking difference between something like Blab.im, and ordinary television. Blab.im in the Netherlands is still...
Literature is not a means to bring about political change, but to change people. That is exactly what he aims for with his books, Egyptian writer Alaa al Aswani said yesterday at Winternachten, where his new novel The Automobile Club of Cairo was presented. That is probably how visitors to the literary festival at the end of the evening also came to...
Three and a half hours of streaming video from a seating area at The Hague's Winternachten festival. I won't blame you if you didn't follow everything. I wasn't quite there myself at the end. Still, it was a success. If only because it hasn't been done here in the country before. Blab is so new that...
From around 19:30 on this page and via blab: Winternachten Live from The Hague. Drop by the Theater aan het Spui, or chat along via blab.
The annual presentation of the International PEN Awards during the opening of Winternachten in The Hague is never a truly convivial affair. After all, every year at least one of the awardees is unable to receive the prize herself. Because she has been captured, because he is missing, or ill. This year, Thursday 14 January at the Theater aan het Spui, could...
Hello Darkness is the theme of the international literary festival Winternachten, this coming weekend in The Hague. It takes guts, in a time when everything has to be fun and cosy and we prefer not to spend our free time dealing with misery or 'heavy topics'. That is why we love Winternachten, because that festival really goes...
Propaganda is not just something that occurs in, say, Russia, but also in the West - more so than we ourselves realise. For example, is it widely believed today that the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force Japan to capitulate and thus end World War II, nothing could be further from the truth. In that respect, Germany goes...
I hesitated for a while whether to report on the theatre workshop offered to Syrian refugees by Koon Theatre on Monday 9 November, as part of Dancing on the Edge. During the workshop, the refugees prepared a short presentation to be shown in Stadsschouwburg Utrecht on Friday 13 November, prior to the theatre performance Above Zero. The reason...
No war scares or torturous refugee issues tonight 5 November, but getting unexpectedly intimate on stage with a strange woman. That could happen to you during Dancing on the Edge. The congenial, biennial festival featuring artists from the Middle East and North Africa can be seen in several cities until 14 November. Once started by race entrepreneur and dancer Gary Feingold, the...
At Amsterdam's Brakke Grond, the Dancing on the Edge festival (DOTE) opened yesterday with an evening that immediately showed what the span is all about. The first performance, Blank, engaged directly with the audience. The second, and official opening performance, Plastic, was more about the dynamics between the performers themselves and with the soundscape. With her opening speech
Unemployment is rife in Tunisia. Young men there now clean plastic from the streets and beaches, as a heavily underpaid job. It led theatre-maker Meher Debbich to a surprising insight: 'Old ideas are like plastic. They don't decay. They have to be disposed of, for recycling. Otherwise we will perish in them.' He tells me about this in the interview below
Next week sees the start of festival Dancing on the Edge. Unlike its name suggests, this festival, with performances in The Hague, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Rotterdam, is not only about dance, but also about film, theatre and politics. The 'Edge' it is about, the festival looks for in its theme: an urgent artistic dialogue with the Middle East. More needed now than...
It was cold in Den Bosch on Sunday 16 August and it rained as if it were not August but November. Not the ideal weather for the closing night of festival Boulevard. It was, however, an atmospheric setting for some installations and the performance 'Hello fear' that were on my programme. The installations were hidden behind the Mariapavilion (Tramkade's emergency location) and despite the...
Theatre festival Boulevard has a theme. This is new, and actually unusual for a large-scale festival like the one in Den Bosch. After all, how do you find so many performances for those claimed 120,000 spectators that are all about that same theme? The solution is simple: you don't have to. You can also attach a theme to a few appealing performances and a single part...
Last year, theatre festival Boulevard ran a competition giving young creators the chance to create a performance. Requirements: the target audience (young people aged six and over), the length of the performance (roughly 20 minutes) and the theme (Vincent Van Gogh). This weekend the first two winners could be seen, next weekend the other two. Above all, the first performances showed the two faces ...
Whether a TED talk catches on is often largely down to the speaker. This global craze of pimped-up powerpoints could become a global craze because these 'talks' are delivered by heart in front of an audience. So they are theatrical things, these TED Talks, and that makes them interesting to watch even on a screen. Lucas De Man, director,...
Some say there is a tunnel of light you pass through when you die. Could be, there are people with near-death experiences who describe such a thing. Personally, I find the paintings depicting such tunnels of light rather kitschy. Clouds with a scary eye or a man with a beard at the end.... But now sculpture-dance-design artist...
That you wake up at night and there is a full-blooded hipster sitting at the foot of your bed. One of those whose beard has two ragged tips, whose hair is in a messy bun and whose right ear has a tuft of hair bulging out of it. This pretty much sums up my worst nightmare. Well struck, then, by Lisah makes Roozemoes, to...
Festival Boulevard in Den Bosch, which started on 6 August, has a new boss. This woman, Viktorien van Hulst, had a hard time even before the start of her first festival. Someone had suddenly found a tiny asbestos fibre in a drainpipe at the special new festival site on the Bossche Tramkade, a day before the opening, and so had to...
From today, it is not Leeuwarden, Amsterdam, Utrecht or The Hague that is our country's cultural capital, but Den Bosch. For eleven days during Theatre Festival Boulevard, there will be more to see in that city than all to follow. Lots of new and unique work for Den Bosch, but also some performances that have already played in other places. Herewith our five recommendations. Have...
Three days of classical music among the trees and cows. Festival Wonderfeel presented a unique classical music festival last weekend from 24 to 26 July, under the smoke of 's-Graveland. Top musicians from home and abroad gave dozens of concerts. Lectures were given and, as befits a festival, there was also plenty to eat, drink and...
In the midst of all the Greek calamity, something beautiful has blossomed: a new inspired cinema that makes us blink.
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