News about events and festivals, backed by the industry but independent in content. Find out more: info@cultureelpersbureau.nl
No love without power relations. And certainly not when that love takes place in a royal bedroom. That bedchamber is now the setting for a tragic love triangle between a king, his lover and his wife in Lessons in Love and Violence, the third opera by English composer Georges Benjamin and playwright Martin Crimp. The Elizabethan drama Edward II...
It feels like a variation on a scene from a farce. On stage: Birmingham REP's public relations officer, a journalist flown in from the Netherlands for the premiere and the director's assistant rushed in. Location: an upmarket hotel in the heart of Birmingham. Time: Sunday morning a little after ten o'clock. The subject: sex and the all-encompassing concept of anxiety. Go! The big absentee is director Calixto...
Danez Smith is quite something. Or rather two, because the American poet likes to be addressed in the gender-neutral, or rather gender-plural plural form. A form of address not yet very common in Dutch, and thus avoided by everyone. Thursday night, 31 May at the former ro theatre, now Theater Rotterdam - Witte de With, fell around the...
You must be a serious misanthrope not to have a good time in Stadspark Maastricht that Friday. The sun is shining. It is subtropical warm with a light spring breeze. The location, next to a pond embraced by ramparts and turrets, is perfect. Under the ancient oaks, some 40 food trucks and bars with simmering kitchens await you. Oh...
The lectern. The lectern. The paper holder, if possible with its own light, which, shining upwards, draws stern shadows of the reading glasses on the poet's face. It is the kind of necessary evil that every poetry or literature festival has to deal with. Only the powerpoint is missing to make it a boring seed onion conference. Poetry International Festival Rotterdam has in...
Say 'Carlo Gesualdo' and you say 'heavenly music', and 'cruel disposition'. This Renaissance composer's name is inextricably linked to the gruesome double murder he committed on his wife and lover when he found them in flagrante delicto. Who else but The Warm Shop could make an appealing performance of this thought Tido Visser, artistic director of the Netherlands Chamber Choir. So.
When you first see Lenny Oosterwijk, you don't think: ha, a gallery owner. Somehow, you expect a more posh look with that. But the man who founded Galerie Untitled in 2011 in Rotterdam Noord comes from a different background. He is a photographer and art director and worked for a time at the most stolen magazine....
What lies on the ground, spread over a white sheet? Hard to determine. Shrapnel? Aircraft parts? Battered remains? Upon entering A Tale of a Tub, the impression is unsettling, and slightly overwhelming. A crime scene, but unclear who, what or where it is about. They appear to be plants, but magnified and cast in bronze. But that see...
Germans and humour. I have a bad experience with that. Will largely be because I don't get the finer nuances of the language, especially if it is meant for laughter. So it's not that the German sense of humour is wrong. In fact, sometimes something can just happen in German theatre that makes you laugh. I want...
Jan Baeke has been associated with Poetry International as a programmer for many years. In this podcast, I talk to him about the programme and the theme of this 49th edition: The Nation of Poetry. It's about nationalism, of course, but also about identity. And about what role poetry plays in that. And then, of course, it's not primarily about folk songs. We...
The Drenthe village of Erica was rocked on the last weekend of April by the cosy noise festival Pitfest. And that attracted a motley mix of people. I walked around there for a day. A golf cart zooms across the roundabout of the 4-star resort in the outskirts of the Drenthe town of Erica. To the right of the tarmac are tightly mowed golf courses, to the left is a plot of land...
'Never, never would I make a performance about my mother, or about myself. Jamais.' Caroline Guiela Nguyen, child of 'a marriage between a Vietnamese mother and a 'pied-noir' (Algerian colonial) is not into personal stories. The theatre-maker captured audiences' hearts at last year's Avignon Festival with the play Saigon. This moving, deeply human play...
Performing arts policy greatly determines what can be seen and heard on Dutch stages. It underpins government funding of theatre and music. This policy pays a lot of attention to the quality of performances, but it hardly discusses the choice of pieces played, let alone what kind of repertoire landscape...
On Tuesday 17 April, Gerard Alderliefste performed at TivoliVredenburg. This time, the interpreter of French chansons had left his guitar and piano at home. This evening he was there in his capacity as an addiction doctor. On behalf of the Landelijk Medisch Spreekuur Partydrugs, he talked about the long-term consequences of party drugs such as XTC, MDMA, GHB and Cannabis. He was there at the invitation of Unity.nl, a voluntary organisation...
Poets Danez Smith and Patricia Lockwood once broke the internet with their virtuoso wordplay. Smith with a frothy tirade about ineradicable racism and police brutality in America (Dear White America) and Lockwood with a heartbreaking/funny poem about her rape (Rape Joke). Both have outgrown their hypes. They have secretly been doing a fantastic job for years, using Twitter, YouTube, paper and stage...
Fifty-three 'ultras' from a football club in an art theatre. That might be asking for trouble. Especially if they were the hard core of, say, Ajax, FC Den Haag or FC Utrecht. But this is France. There are no hooligans in France. The 'ultra's' of Racing Club de Lens, for example: they are bound to throw a punch somewhere, but in...
Where can you indulge as a film lover in the Netherlands? With 54 festival editions in 2017, North Holland appears to be the province where you can enjoy film festivals most often. Amsterdam takes the crown with a whopping 47 film festival editions, according to a study by the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA). Lecturer Harry van Vliet of the Crossmedia lectureship of the HvA faculty,...
'There would be a difference between paper poems and poems that only fit into a recitation. I don't think it's a good poem in either case then. A good poem you can read well, and also reread, but it also fits very well in a performance.' Poet Anne van Winkelhof has clear views on what makes poetry good poetry....
Listen to an atmospheric impression and the full interview with Stef Aerts here. Children have the ability to turn adults' worlds upside down. Eleven-year-old JR is really getting into it. On a school trip, he learns how the stock market works and then turns it to his will. In doing so, unhampered by a prefrontal cortex, that part of the brain...
Rather listen than read? Listen to the podcast here! (With lots of extra quotes from Ab Dijksterhuis) Money makes horribly happy. And that doesn't stop at 1 tonne. Those who earn half a million are considerably happier than those who earn 2 tonnes. The ING boss who would get 60 per cent more salary would also have become very much happier as a result. This...
Subscribe to our free newsletter. Because you can! Here's why. Holland Festival, Poetry International, a summer full of art. And meanwhile, a whole new arts system is being put together. The Netherlands is eager to get outside, experience music, experience art and eat food trucks empty. And flipping the subsidy system. It is a...
Cinedans has been around since 2003. Back then, it was a single evening, part of Amsterdam's Julidans festival. Pretty soon, it grew into something bigger. According to Martine Dekker, involved with the festival since the 2011 edition, this was due to the overwhelming supply of dance films: 'From the second edition, filmmakers were invited to submit films,...
Apart from a lot of confusion, the advisory referendum law has also created a new category of festivals. The 'Ukraine referendum' spawned at least one festival (at Amsterdam's De Balie debating centre) and the dragnet referendum on 21 March 2018 prompted the 'Niks te Verbergen' dragnet festival in Nijmegen. Prominent member of the organising team is Viola van Alphen. With her foundation Violavirus...
Museums often manage more art objects than they can display. What they cannot display in the museum galleries they keep safely in the depot. Collections with motley collections of objects from different periods are a growing problem for museums. Marketers stress the need for focus, a clear story and strong branding. Objects that no longer fit the new vision...
In the early 1990s, I am sitting in a small auditorium at The National Theatre in London. Before the performance starts, someone on stage asks if you want to greet the visitors next to you. This immediately creates a different, more intimate dynamic in the auditorium. On a tight stage with only a few props are four actors and an Arab musician. Yoshi Oida...
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