Composer Wolfgang Rihm and choreographer Sasha Waltz, two familiar faces at the Holland Festival and big names in European performing arts, released a performance together in 2008 that could not be missing from a Holland festival programme this year. The festival not only has a focus on some great contemporary composers (Xenakis, Rihm), but is also making considerable headway on the...
”Alifib” van de Britseprogrocker Robert Wyatt (1945) is een liedje dat onder de huid kruipt. De bijnabrekende stem van Wyatt klinkt zo oprecht triest dat het je de adem beneemt. Het lijkt een onmogelijke opgave om ”Alifib” overtuigend te brengen zonder de meester zelf. Toch krijgt het Franse Orchestre National de Jazz het voor elkaar. Waar Wyatt in het origineel…
Dat de Off Broadway-musical Fela! Een succes was, konden we eigenlijk wel verwachten. Voor De Dodo hebben we er daarom ook niemand heen gestuurd: er zijn al genoeg kranten en andere bloggers die graag bij de New Yorkse publiekslievelingen op de eerste rang willen zitten. Dat ze een goede tijd hadden, leest u elders op deze site, via de blogstream…
Op heel verschillende plekken kunnen mensen soms hetzelfde idee hebben. En nog somser leiden die gelijke ideeën allebei tot iets prachtigs. Een paar jaar geleden speelde mimegezelschap Kassys dankzij het Brabantse theater Bis de prachtig droevige tragedie ‘Kommer’, waarin collega’s zinloze tijd doorbrachten in een rouwkamer vol leaseplanten. Ieder gratuit zinnetje werd uitvergroot door machtig hulpeloze gebaren tot in het…
Firs heet hij. En hij komt altijd te laat. Vanwege de jicht. Arme huisknecht. Firs werd geschapen door Anton Tsjechov. In zijn meesterwerk De Kersentuin gaat het over de verveling en lamlendigheid van de oude rijken, en Firs is de huisknecht die het allemaal ziet gebeuren. Tsjechov laat hem sterven, aan het eind, wanneer de vertrekkende huiseigenaren hem totaal vergeten…
Papageno pronkte gisteravond zonder zijn verenpracht. Sterker nog, de hele regie van Une flûte enchantée was een onopgesmukt genoegen. Sober. Integer. Je kunt een Nederlands publiek niet wilder krijgen dan met een dergelijke aanpak. Complimenten dus, voor Peter Brook. In het Muziekgebouw aan het IJ was de Nederlandse première van Brooks bewerking van Die Zauberflöte van Mozart. De productie draaide…
An opera based on texts by Nietzsche, and then start with loud laughter and main character N trying to catch two water nymphs. Wait a minute, that's Wagner! Well, at Wagner's Rheingold involves three Rhine daughters, but the similarity is too great to be coincidental. And neither is this one, but in the first minutes of Wolfgang Rihm's Dionysos is much more going on. Here is a composer at work who not only plays with text and music, but also with centuries of cultural history and knows how to add jokes to it. It is to get intoxicated.
Actors wearing sort of harem trousers and bamboo sticks on a nondescript playing surface. Some of you may think back nostalgically or with trepidation to the days when there were 'Akademies voor Ekspressie' in the Netherlands. Summits of socio-art. Sometime deep in the 1970s, that is. Maladype Theatre, from Hungary, fits seamlessly into that picture, which...
With the battle between Titans and gods on Mount Olympus, Xenakis opens 1234, a mini-festival in the great Holland Festival. In four concerts, spread over two days, it features Iannis Xenakis central. There is also an extensive exhibition dedicated to the Greek composer, who was a mathematician and architect by birth.
You can hardly take your eyes off the feet. The dancers make busy, fast steps and yet their bodies seem to glide across the stage. It exudes something of perfection. In 'Birds with Skymirrors', you constantly get the feeling that the bird world has been the model for the movements. Trembling hands are reminiscent of wingtips, vulnerably scanning the skies....
They say of Isabelle Huppert, for years the most beautiful and mysterious appearance on the cinema screen, that she has the look of a dead zebra finch live. I had at least heard about that, but had never experienced it in real life. Until Friday night 3 June at Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg at Un Tramway in the Holland Festival. And it's true...
Dying young turns out to be advantageous not only for skywalkers like Buddy Holly, Sam Cooke or Jesus. Even in a rather elitist world like that of German theatre, you can achieve star status through an early death. At least that happened to Christoph Schlingensief, the man who died of lung cancer in 2010. The man had already achieved stardom throughout the German-speaking world,...
That was a bit of a grind for British theatre critics. The celebrated director Deborah Warner (1959) recently pulled Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal out of the closet. A play from 1777, and an untouchable part of the British theatre canon. Building on the style of her earlier production Mother Courage(2009) Warner also indicated The School for Scandal - goddamn - a quirky, contemporary twist.
"With many video, light, music and noise - like a rock concert, " grins Warner in the office of the Barbican TheatreIn London. "Mother Courage had an incredibly populist, exciting atmosphere. I love that arrogant theatricality immensely, and I wanted to continue that style in The School for Scandal. For me, the big challenge was to explore the Brechtian theatre style of Weimar - which I got through Mother Courage had discovered again - to collide with an eighteenth-century theatre text."
Two boys beat a guitar with a baseball bat, which was hanging on a rope in the air. Moments before, they also battered the instrument in a strange game of tug-of-war, during which the guitar regularly hit the ground. Both times, shrill, nasty sounds fill the room. The games are played with a deadly serious face, so they seem to be telling something to the visitors. But what actually? That question keeps spinning through your head with almost every theatrical moment in The Long Count. The project by twin brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner of indie rock band The National sounds rather exciting. For instance, the announcement calls it a multimedia concert, with a song cycle that is supposed to focus on the time before our world began. The musicians created it with video artist Matthew Ritchie and used the Popol Vuh, a historical-mythological text by a Mayan people from Guatemala about those early days, as inspiration. In the show, they aim to make connections between Mayan myth and their own lives.
Deze week barst het Holland Festival los en wij zijn erbij. We maken met een flink team professionele journalisten een Dodo Festivaldagkrant, zoals we dat eerder ook deden voor bijvoorbeeld Springdance en De Internationale Keuze van de Rotterdamse Schouwburg. We volgen het festival op de voet om nieuws te brengen wanneer het zich voordoet. We gaan voorstellingen zien waar anderen…
The lung cancer survivor who died last year KünstlerChristoph Schlingensief - all-rounder, provocateur, director, life artist - gets on the Holland Festival an extended tribute: the opening performance Mea Culpa, a programme of seven feature films, and Schlingensief's swan song Via Intolleranza II.
Deathly ill caught Christoph Schlingensief up the wild plan to move into Burkina Faso an opera village from the ground up, Remdoogo. A self-sufficient sanctuary where people from different cultures could meet, and to make art together there for an extended period of time. This follows similar initiatives such as the Avenida Theatre in Mozambique, set up by author Henning Mankell. Schlingensief sought to merge art and life. Driven by a long-standing fascination with the rich African culture, and inspired by the ideals of his great hero Joseph Beuys.
Via Intolleranza II is Schlingensief's attempt to capture, in a maelstrom of documentary, music, visual art, film, performance art, lecture, opera and theatre, the early process of becoming Remdoogo. A performance about a process. At the same time, Schlingensief also seems to question his own motives. Via Intolleranza II was his swan song - he died three months after the premiere. The show will have its Dutch premiere on Saturday 4 June.
'Your audience will love it.' That was the last thing Liz Lecompte of the Wooster Group heard from the heirs of playwright Tennessee Williams shortly before the premiere of Vieux Carré. Since then, the trustees of the estate of this American monument have been keeping quiet about the performance Lecompte created. It was the end of a long period in which...
Cover of Spalding Gray At the Holland Festival, two minds wander. The loudest is that of Christoph Schlingensief, Germany's most independent filmmaker, theatre-maker, activist and enfant terrible, always good for controversy. After being diagnosed with lung cancer in 2008, he processed his anger and fear in Eine Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir, presented in 2009 at...
This year, the Holland Festival brings the extraordinary French-Algerian co-production Nya, which combines achievements of modern and classical dance with hip-hop and, in addition, Ravel's Bolero sounds alongside Houria Aïchi's Algerian evergreens.
Toegegeven, onze methode van recenseren (zie onze bijdragen over Springdance en De Internationale Keuze) is voor Nederland nieuw, maar in de States deed een enkeling het al. Zo zijn de twee lekkere jongens Andrew en Andrew goed bezig met hun iPhone, en doen zo het zelfde als de Dodo met de Kodak Zi8 (geen aandelen, al zouden we dolgraag gesponsord…
Zijn Nederlands is nooit zijn sterkste punt geweest, en hij houdt ook al niet van speechen. Toch is een persconferentie van het Holland Festival iets om bij te zijn, dus nemen we Pierre Audi’s mindere performerskwaliteiten voor lief. in februari presenteerde hij het programma van de editie 2011, die een hele mooie belooft te worden, en die hopelijk niet de…
Annet Lekkerkerker is zakelijk directeur van het Holland Festival. Ze zet met een subsidie van ruim vier miljoen euro een festival van zes miljoen neer.
The International Film Festival Rotterdam celebrates its fortieth edition with a fitting XL programme. That Roman numeral XL not only indicates respectable age. It also says something about size: this fortieth also bursts with the intiguing programme, with screenings at no less than forty locations throughout the inner city of Rotterdam. Inside the festival walls is...
Wonderful though theatre is. The closing night of the Autumn Collection festival made me realise once again that the best actors do not always make the best performance. Expressiveness depends on more than acting talent and a proven literary text.
Het viel op: wat een hoop leuke meisjes in Theater Kikker. Zou het door de programmering komen? Nu waren er een hoop leuke mannen om uit te kiezen op zaterdagavond. De stoere acteerbeesten van FC Bergman bijvoorbeeld, of de androgyne Nik van den Berg, of misschien de ogenschijnlijk lieve Bert Hana. En anders was er altijd nog DJ Oscar Kocken,…
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