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Let's talk about breasts (m/f). Or, if that's a bit too confrontational: the tendency of young up-and-coming acting talents to get naked on stage. And then do something with juice. Of fruit mostly, or just water, or oil and glitter. At Festival Boulevard yesterday, for the third time in a week, I had...
Being the best at your craft, and then not in one craft, but in three or so. That, too, is what makes an artist an artist. Ben Duke is a great artist. He is a gifted dancer, a phenomenal actor and a cum laude graduate in English literature. It is therefore logical that he wrote the greatest poem in British history, the...
Friday afternoon, 5 August 2016. The weather is nice. In the intercity to Den Bosch, I read a book I didn't manage to finish on holiday. I can't manage it this time either: Den Bosch is always closer than you think. Again, the walk from the station to the Joseph Quarter takes less time than Google Maps indicated to me. That came...
The world is changing quite a bit and it's nice when artists do something with it. Festival Boulevard gives Lizzy Timmers the opportunity to make an attempt. That attempt, performed in a somewhat run-down cultural centre in a real Bossche power district, is quite something. Backurk is the name of this semi-documentary performance. Timmers has immersed herself in young, well-educated, well-integrated Turks who have come to the Netherlands...
No, these sentences are not in Griet Op de Beeck's theatre monologue Mona, but nicely sum up the bestseller Come Here That I Kiss You (28 printings in just under two years). Op de Beeck adapted the first part into one of Festival Boulevard's most impressive performances. We do see nine-year-old Mona's sentence as a backdrop, complete...
Project Cloud, the latest experiential artwork by Bossche city artist Lucas de Man, may need a disclaimer. Anyone entering the seven-storey work had better not do so in the company of a solid existential crisis. The visitor before me did, and still needed a very good talk with a psychological counsellor afterwards. Who...
Once upon a time there was this film, Ladri di Biciclette, Bicycle Thieves in Dutch. Italian director Vittorio de Sica established a totally new film movement with it in 1948: neo-realism. Amateur actors pretty much played their own lives at the bottom of the social ladder. Engaging, inspired, raw and confrontational, especially at the time. Little people, caught in the spiral of social...
Sometimes, people are so angry politically that they furiously turn down the chance to become the country's boss themselves upon hearing the word 'prime minister'. Oscar Kocken, the cheerful host and creator, together with Daan Windhorst, of 'Het Torentje' noticed this last Friday. He was trying to warm up a passer-by to his performance, in a tent on the...
I experienced by far one of the most impressive theatre experiences of my life on Friday 5 August 2016. I was a guest at 'Zvizdal - Chernobyl so far, so close' by the Flemish company Berlin, in co-production with Het Zuidelijk Toneel. I saw this 'documentary installation' in an empty factory hall in Den Bosch, where the work is a beautiful resting point in...
Adding three tonnes a year is cause for celebration. But Viktorien van Hulst, at the helm of the Bossche Theatre Festival Boulevard for the second year, had to restrain herself in her opening speech. Because the subsidising Performing Arts Fund does not give money to a large number of well-performing fellow institutions despite a positive assessment, the suffering in the performing arts exceeds the joy. Torn is called that....
Boulevard flags fly everywhere in Den Bosch in the sunshine. The office of the 32-year-old Theatre Festival Boulevard on Sint Josephstraat is a jumble of people walking in and out. The beaming director, Viktorien van Hulst, has bags under her eyes like a festival director should have three days before the opening.
Festival Boulevard kicks off on 4 August. The traditional reason to come back from holiday in August has a fuller programme than ever this time. With lots of youth theatre. We'll help you get started in advance.
American-Dutch violinist Joseph Puglia is a passionate advocate of contemporary music. Last year he scored highly with his rendition of the Violin Concerto by Anders Hillborg, together with the young musicians of the NJO Symphony Orchestra. He is first violinist of Asko|Schönberg, with whom he presented the world premiere of the violin concerto composed especially for him earlier this year Roads to Everywhere By Joey Roukens.
There are many reasons not to go on holiday. It costs money, you come back more stressed than you went, the food is no good, it costs tons of CO2 and it doesn't increase mutual understanding between countries either. Reason enough, then, to just stay here and enjoy the free time given to you by the boss, or by yourself if you are self-employed. Without being barked at by airport staff.
Ruth Mackenzie has brought new impetus to the Holland Festival. Not that her predecessor Pierre Audi did badly, but the British organisational talent has brought topicality and urgency to the programme. When she devised her programme theme, she too will not have suspected that the concept of 'Edges of Europe' would take on such a charge. After all, simultaneously with the last weekend of the festival, the English people decided, against the wishes of everyone but the Welsh, to leave the European Union behind. The Netherlands suddenly found itself on the far edge of Europe, with only a view of distant Ireland.
As soon as you enter the Ketelhuis of Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek, a dark droning tone takes you into the misty, somewhat ominous atmosphere of 'Until the Lions' by Akram Khan Company. A huge disc from a tree trunk, with jagged annual rings and cracks, will become the scene of a mythical battle. At stake is the human body: weak, strong, male, female. Boundaries will perish.
A big band, a ticking clock, conspiracy theories and twelve-tonality. Mix that in a theatrical setting and it can go whooping out of control. Yet composer Darcy James Argue manages to make it a propulsive and energising whole, with help from director Isaac Butler and cinematographer Peter Nigrihi.
This year's Holland Festival spotlights Rotterdam-based theatre collective Wunderbaum with the revival of 'The Coming of Xia', premieres of 'Privacy' and 'The Future of Sex' and the film 'Stop acting now'. With this film, Wunderbaum concludes their four-year project 'The New Forest', a 'Platform for social change', according to Wunderbaum, "The New Forest depicts transition and casts a...
The smallest details speak for themselves. For the second time during this edition of the Holland Festival, the legendary BBC series This Life comes along. Richard Cant, who plays a flawless lead role in Neil Bartlett's play Stella, has previously appeared in This Life, the series that set the standard for the modern docusoap in 1996. So now live, up close, in De Brakke Grond's Red Hall, the man who also played a solid role in Midsomer Murders.
It is good that the Holland Festival dares to stick its neck out, by making Olga Neuwirth (1968), unknown here, its focus composer this year. On reflection, by the way, I would have preferred to hear her high-profile opera Bählamms Fest in a staged version once, rather than Le Encantadas. This piece composed last year did not quite manage to live up to the high expectations...
Bassoonist Pascal Gallois gets laughs when he tries in vain to insert the flowers he has just received into the tube of his instrument. Also in the now classic Dialogue de l'ombre double by Pierre Boulez, he manages to make the audience chuckle on Sunday 19 June, when he produces a kind of elephant-like trumpet with much misfiring. His performance is part of the action ''Save the bassoon', which will conclude on Sunday 25 June with a concert at the Holland Festival Proms at the Concertgebouw. For this hundreds of (amateur) bassoonists ON. Action successful, in other words.
Woody Allen made sure in 1972 that his fans could not watch Star Wars with dry eyes years later. The final scene of his film 'Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, But Were Afraid To Ask' shows us the male brain as the bridge of a Star Cruiser where the crew is hard at work to bring a date to a successful conclusion. The spermatozoa in the front are a squabbling gang of take-off runners, heading for an uncertain descent towards beating egg.
When we think of 'The Dark Ages', we think of the rough raw dark Middle Ages, with church and king and no hygiene. However, Swiss director Milo Rau's performance, now at the Holland Festival, refers to a much more recent piece of European history. In a recent interview With the Culture Press, he said:
This way from row nine, it is like being knee-deep in carnations yourself. The heads of the audience in front of me merge silently into a forest of stems crowned with pink, through which dancers carefully step back and forth like leggy chickens.
The find is great: Nelken by Pina Bausch depicts paradise as a place where you have to be careful or things will go wrong. The carnations force the dancers to be careful. As a spectator, you go along with them, without all the underlying thoughts immediately coming through to you.
There I am. Next to Holland Festival director Ruth Mackenzie, on a grave, as part of the installation Gardens Speak on the stage of the main hall of Theatre Bellevue in Amsterdam. There is nothing to see, little to hear. Tone lights suggest a rising sun after a few minutes. I get up together with the ten other visitors. Quite a shame, because I was actually quite comfortable lying there.
The programme booklet sounded promising:
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