Some writers are at the forefront, others write their novels in the lee. Richard Osinga (51) belongs to the latter category. With each book, he gains in eloquence. Mint is the new shoot on the stem of his increasingly interesting oeuvre. At one point, Richard Osinga himself was a little too lazy. After his novel...
A sleek, snow-white art temple in the middle of the Congolese interior. What does that mean? Renzo Martens talks about his new documentary White Cube, and the art project that allows plantation workers to buy back their land. Premiering at IDFA and in Lusanga, Congo.
Artist/filmmaker Johannes Hogebrink likes weird films. Is he really trying to teach a dog to delta-fly?
With the Movies That Matter award-winning Stop Filming Us, Joris Postema examines the tension between Western imagery and Congolese reality. And does not remain out of touch himself.
The Cinekid youth film festival opens this week with Binti, a catchy, highly topical youth film brimming with optimism. That sounds good, because optimism is what the Dutch youth film can use right now. Too bad, then, that Binti, about a girl from Congo who does everything in her power to be allowed to stay in Belgium with her father, is a largely Belgian production....
Post-colonial criticism and reflection ran like a thread through this year's Holland Festival programme. Not only William Kentrigde and Faustin Linyekula, the associate artists with whom the festival's programmers collaborated, their work addresses the devastating effects of centuries of Western European trade and commerce. In reframing political and social history and reclaiming...
'I think they understood.' Faustin Linyekula says it, very quietly, a little apologetically almost, to his fellow actor at the end of the performance Congo. A slightly relieved laugh can be heard in the main auditorium of Frascati, where Princess Beatrix is also seated. Shortly before, Daddy Moanda Kamono had erupted in an increasingly desperate tirade against our shared past....
Hlengiwe Lushaba, remember that name. This South African singer sings the paving stones out of the street during Sur lessons traces the Dinozord. She does so with a voice that goes from gritty falsetto to full Wagner soprano, though that term will again be resented by classical sharpshooters. But what would it be? Hlengiwe Lushaba will care little, because...
Djino Alolo Sabin (1990) sits there, relaxed, in the morning at the hotel in Brussels. The night before, he has danced his solo Piki Piki for the first time, which will also be shown at Theater Frascati during the Holland Festival. The performance touches on many intense themes, but is anything but melodramatic. Rather, it expresses a relentless optimism....
'Aid workers come to my city to leave again. I come there to stay.' You cannot get Faustin Linyekula any more concise. 'Aid workers do not create a bond with the people they want to help. Their work is gone as soon as they leave. I don't come to help, but because I want to be there. If that makes me a few...
About 18 years ago, while on holiday in the Auvergne region, my wife and I picked up a paraglider that had ended up rather unhappily in a meadow full of indignant cows. We were happy to do something. The paraglider looked grateful, although he was a little worried about the car in which we were going to take him back to...
The book may be called 'Black', but the stories collected in it make it clear that there are as many shades of black, as white and everything in between. We, and by that I mean myself and my largely white network, just need to look more closely. And listen. Take Olave Nduwanje's story, titled Imana Ikurinde (God save you), in the middle of the book. The...
Calm has returned to the North Brabant Museum in 's-Hertogenbosch. After more than 400,000 people saw the successful and widely acclaimed Hieronymus Bosch exhibition, the halls are now light and quiet again. No more opening hours from early morning to midnight. Just, peace and quiet. Although the Jan Fabre mosaics hanging there now are disturbing. Mosaic Panels 2016 is...
Brazil's Christiane Jatahy was already with the play last year What If they went to Moscow at the Holland Festival. She came, saw and conquered. This year, she comes with the final part in the trilogy of stage adaptations, The Walking Forest. The title refers to the three witches in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, who foretell his rise and fall. The play was the starting point for a performance with four video screens, a bar, an actress, a dead fish and, oh yes, an audience.
Today, imagine a small, strikingly dressed man flying through Paris in a hot-air balloon, or a circling the Eiffel Tower. Aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont did it, dreaming that one day everyone would have their own hot-air balloon. In his new historical novel The Winged, Arthur Japin reawakens the colourful Brazilian inventor...
2014 was the year of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, award-winning stage adaptation by Ivo van Hove. This year, that performance has been outstripped by 'Passions Humaines', written by Erwin Mortier, magisterially designed by Guy Cassiers. Again at the Holland Festival, confirming its place as a stage for the great debate on art. Two plays in which architecture, artistry and...
In the end, homo calculus - and who isn't, a "calculating man" - turns out to be primarily concerned with the monetary value of art objects, and only then - sometimes a long time later - with their beauty, artistic value or rarity. Every episode of the television programme Between Art and Kitsch demonstrates this. It also applies...
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 start to 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.
Sometimes a Writers Unlimited programme can catch you off guard. Last year, the late-night talk show on literary sex was a hilarious highlight - pun intended - of the festival. This time, the programme dropped Let's talk about sex bar little to laugh at.
Forget the connotations with Salt N Pepa. Indonesian Linda Christanty writes not about 'happy sex, but about bitter sex as a means of power, as a form of coercion and violence.' That made us quiet for a moment.
Holland Festival
A sociable group of ladies who came in laughing and chatting, leave the room bewildered and tearful. Upset, embarrassed, this is how I see all visitors coming out. What is difficult to describe in words is written on their faces. Exhibit B by Brett Bailey is more than impressive. It is an exhibition that confronts and touches.
Holland Festival
If after only the first 15 minutes, half of the middle row flees the auditorium, and you look at your watch, thinking, my god we still have over five hours to go, there is something thoroughly wrong with the performance. 'Shéda', by Congolese playwright Dieudonné Niangouna, is an insane tub of chaos of incoherent tirades. Declaimed screaming at a stretch by 12 hyperactive African and European actors, each with a fixed character, returning as gods to apocalyptic worlds, à la Mad Max, beating each other up with bizarre lyrics. Goodness, it is impossible to make sense of it all. Yet it continues to fascinate. Why?
This week, the curtain officially fell on the Theatre Emabassy, a club of inspired people who had Dutch artists collaborate with artists in developing countries such as Honduras, Bhutan and Congo. The resulting performances were only sporadically seen in the Netherlands, but every now and then a project made a broad impression here too, such as a 'On Hope of Blessing', played by real fishermen, but from Mali.
The 1923 Afro-Cubist dance classic can be seen at Music Theatre today and tomorrow, commented on by Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula. "Europeans have no idea that they are denying the shared history of Africa and Europe. Belgium is part of everyday life in Congo, but Belgians hardly know anything about Congo, or it is the clichés about poverty
It is incredible what an energy the men of Manar can generate. These six - dressed in djellabas - percussionists play Dekka al Marrakchia: an insanely rousing form of traditional Moroccan drum 'n bass party music and religious Gnawa. After a solemn, almost ritualistic beginning - in which the band comes jogging onto the stage of the Theater aan het Spui in a goose-step, accompanied by the menacing sounds of two huge horns - the drums erupt and the dance floor is full of swinging visitors.
There was a time, when art did not have to draw full theatres to be accepted by the population. After all, out of the total budget of a municipality, something like art costs no more than a penny, so you don't get worse, while at best you can only get better. So is...
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