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Topical again, now that Toneelgroep Amsterdam is reprising the show, my review from 2014. This week, the stage adaptation of The Fountainhead premiered. The book is terrible, the performance rattles, the actors win only narrowly. The content, however, creates even more confusion, which is why I won't stop you from going to see it. And Hans Kesting, of course. I put it this way.
Visitors to the film Napoleon, last Sunday at Ziggo Dome, who had thought of booking dinner in one of the intermissions, will get their money back. This was decided by the Holland Festival after a commotion arose on the internet, and beyond, about the caterer's lousy service, and the rather poor quality of what was on offer. Visitor Marc Veerkamp said the following on facebook:
Talent alone won't get you there. You also need a bit of luck. That luck happened to Alain Platel so often by now that you almost doubt your own wickedness. Still. Those who not only count a composer like Fabrizio Cassol among their friends, but who also gave singing prodigy Serge Kakudji a chance, deserve a bit of luck. What the trio has now achieved with 13 musicians from Kinshasa is downright revolutionary. And a death knell for those who believe that north and south can never really meet. I experienced it on Monday, 16 June. And it still echoes.
Nice 'old-fashioned' Holland Festival: a special line-up that confronts the audience with the implications of their own position and viewing behaviour. And that's just as well with Fassbinder's 'Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant'. Melodrama was no stranger to the German theatre and film wizard. The bitter tears are of a fashion queen and her entourage, clinical is the setting, wafer-thin the story, and yet unusually exciting how this lady drama develops.
Language is music. Sometimes we forget that. Then we think language is a way of conveying objective meanings. Bit silly. Language is food for all the senses. No strumming is needed under that. That's pure opera without frills. The English-language performance 'tis Pity she's a whore' I saw at the Holland Festival yesterday proves that. Even if you don't understand the seventeenth-century phrases, it is a joy to listen to.
Saturday, June 14, went off in a flood of evening gowns, dinner jackets, Dutch celebrities and Gooische Tanks War Horse premiered. A play about a war in which the Netherlands was neutral, and of which there are memorial stones in every village in the rest of the world. You can go and see it. Or not. We have listed six arguments.
One of the rules of thumb of contemporary theatre art reads as follows: There is no middle ground in a production with an insanely long title. Such a production is either fantastic or dies of its own pretensions. At Judson church is ringing in Harlem (made to measure) / twenty looks of paris is burning at the judson church (m2m) is the latter.
"You know ma'am, that big red painting? Turn right before that". A young attendant shows us the way. At first glance, it's nothing. A man in semi-uniform, black trousers, white shirt, slowly turns on his axis. Sol Lewitt's mural, number 1084 from 2003, lends him the necessary decorum. Around the corner hang Barnett Newman and Andy Warhol. Would the man care? In this 'hall of fame' of conceptual art, the man's spinning stands out a little timidly. Some visitors remain standing, leaning against white walls or sinking down on the polished wooden floor. Those who take their time watch the spinning of the man and his fellow dervishes slowly take possession of the Stedelijk.
This year's trip will go to India and Nepal. Because that seemed nice to him. Visitors to the Dutch premiere of Jelinek's Die Schutzbefohlene were looking forward to the summer. Next year they would visit a friend in Vietnam. Little hassle to get a visa. As a white European, the whole world is yours. You can go anywhere. The man did not realise how privileged he was.
Even before the Holland Festival had begun properly, all tickets for the three performances of Handel's Orlando sold. What a crisis. However, it is not hard to guess why.
The Holland Festival presents Abel Gance's restored film epic on Sunday Napoleon, with live orchestra. A rare event, for the first time in this form on mainland Europe. In 1927, Gance had performed with Napoleon delivered a groundbreaking and monumental piece of work that made unusual demands on the projection (three canvases) and went out into the world in a variety of severely shortened versions after the first performances.
Napoleon at Ziggo Dome promises to be spectacular, but who was That ambitious loner Abel Gance?
After partially or even completely failed productions of Falstaff The National Opera now does everything right. Twenty years after the previous attempt in the Holland Festival, Verdi's last opera gets a dream performance that could only just become audience favourite of the entire festival.
Like many of my contemporaries, I have played Jeff Buckley's CDs grey, but know next to nothing about Pakistani Sufi music. Except that it's great. And that Abida Parveen is the queen of that genre. Tonight, this Voice of God and her ensemble are on stage at the National Opera & Ballet.
Breaking new ground in theatre is the aim of Canadian director Robert Lepage and his group Ex Machina. It seems like everything is unusual about 'Playing Cards: Spades': playing floor, lighting, seating around the stage, the stories, the acting and the surprising denouement.
It seems like a statement, opening the latest Holland Festival under Pierre Audi's direction with 'Vortex Temporum'. The collaboration between the two top Belgian ensembles Rosas and Ictus does everything that is scarce in the present day.
The Valley of Astonishment. Titles don't come much prettier than that of 'The Valley of Astonishment'. Theatre legend Peter Brook's tentative last play is coming to Amsterdam. The Holland Festival gave me and two journalists from Parool and NRC, respectively, the opportunity to talk to the already legendary director when he was alive. Pretty special, because the man who enchanted an entire generation of theatre-makers and audiences with performances such as the nine-hour Mahabharata in Avignon, is considered a deity among theatre connoisseurs and enthusiasts.
The Holland Festival, we have been doing that for years. It is definitely the highlight of the cultural season. At the Holland Festival, you see how the international art world hangs out. In recent years, under the skilful leadership of Pierre Audi, the whole thing has become a lot less elitist and pompous than it used to be. A ticket often costs a lot less than An evening of André Rieu in Maastricht, to say the least.
'Harry Partch knew exactly what he was doing. He chose very specific bourbon bottles to fill in those 43 steps in the octave. So he made music that is very accessible, but also very elusive. And that's what good art should do.'
"The only one who still dares to go for the elite". On his way to the car park under the Passengers Terminal Amsterdam, the retired newspaper reviewer who once had a page on music sighed at the feeling of his part of society. It was after the press conference where the programme of Holland Festival 2014 was presented. He was talking, as we sank deeper and deeper, about Pierre Audi, the artistic director of that Holland Festival, who this year announced his last - and most glorious - programme ever.
Because Writers Unlimited collaborates with one of the last literary magazines in the Netherlands, and because that magazine is called 'Tirade', the last festival in The Hague included a place for tirades. And what might those be? The online dictionary says:
During Writers Unlimited, writers often mingle clandestinely among the common folk. And especially younger, international authors, unlike the Adriaan van Dissen of this world who cannot take a step without being buried in a scrum of literary groupies. So it can happen that you find yourself drinking beer several times with someone who suddenly, completely unexpectedly, turns out to be a genius author. Like Andrès Neuman.
"A good book is a man seducing me is like sex with a stranger." Anne Provoost, the securely Flemish-talking essayist managed to shake P.F. Thomése and Hermamn Koch for a moment. In a debate at Writers Unlimited, she made a plea for the not-true story, and did so in a metaphor that rather stirred the imagination. She quoted her own work "Fiction and Power" in which reading indeed becomes a rather physical affair:
"Of course she can write!" seems the mother of the award-winning South African poet Antjie Krog ever having exclaimed. "Because I can do it too, right? There's nothing special about that."
Blood creeps, even for Krog. After a ten-year career as a successful architect - and secretly grinding on words - her own son debuted Andries Samuel with the crushing, heartbreaking collection of poetry Wanpraktyk (2011).
Writers Unlimited brought mother and son together on stage. Late at night. For the first time ever. And Wende sang to them. And god almighty how beautiful that was. By the way, you have to take it from us, because on pain of caning, pitch & feathers and fines from here to Siberia, it turned out that it was forbidden to film Wende singing (but we did, and the video was online for a while, but has now been removed from the internet).
It's because of Facebook. Says Ton van de Langkruis, artistic director of writers' festival Writers Unlimited: "You can no longer be that anonymous figure bombarding the world with hermetic texts from a locked attic room. The market is no longer for it. Your main means of communication is facebook. There you have to be open to questions, you communicate with your readers. We are back in the village square where the first stories were once told."
The latenight closures of Winternachten at Writers Unlimited are always upbeat. That's because the poets have already loosened up and the audience has drunk a bit more. And this time it was also because of mega-audience favourite (on other occasions) Arie Boomsma. Out of wantonness, the cheerful ratings canon smashed poetry books of the guests of his programme section.
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