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The Style

Joost Galema on writing as a marine and opera singer Bastiaan Everink

by Ewa Maria Wagner
18 May 201629 March 2022
6 min read
ACTUAL, For members only, LITERARY, OPERA

Joost Galema, journalist and programme maker, was called one day by Bastiaan Everink. The baritone and ex-marine wanted to make a book about his personal struggles and how music changed his life. Not being a writer, he started looking for a ghostwriter. Joost was third on his list. A few days later, Bastiaan was standing in Joost's Hilversum living room telling his story. The singer talked about marines, survival, violence, Iraq, Wagner's music and a quest. Not a one-dimensional chronicle, Joost thought, and he decided to start working with Bastiaan. After three years

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Bep Rietveld could do at least 1 thing better than her father

by Wijbrand Schaap
1 March 201618 August 2020
3 min read
VISUAL, THEATER, APPRECIATE & DONATE!

The great thing about visiting openings is that sometimes you get to experience something that no one expected. Like at the mini-exhibition 'Bep Rietveld, daughter of...' at Kunstruimte Kuub in Utrecht. It features 72 paintings by the daughter of Gerrit Rietveld, the man who gave De Stijl its furniture and houses. This Bep, not without merit with the paintbrush, created a...

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Ursula Mamlok: atonal music with heart

by Thea Derks
10 January 20166 May 2016
6 min read
ACTUAL, MUSIC

With the death of Pierre Boulez on 5 January, modernism seemingly came to an end, but the two-year-old Ursula Mamlok (1923) is still alive and kicking. Although the German-American Mamlok hopes to turn 93 on 1 February, she is steadily composing.# In 2009, she wrote Aphorisms II for two clarinets, in which, as in all her pieces, she manages to couple atonality with a warm-blooded...

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'So Anyway'. A political Christmas column

by Giep Hagoort
19 December 201530 May 2022
15 min read
For members only, PERSONAL

But then. A day before Christmas, the prime minister experiences a sleepless night. He has no appetite for the Glühwein provided by the housekeeping service. The Christmas pastry, delivered by a friendly VVD baker, remains untouched. The security guards see their object sitting upright in his bed... Read and shudder That summer evening, Michelle de Kat sits smugly in a corner of the blood-hot studio

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Museum The Ship sticks its neck out financially

by Maarten Baanders
15 September 2015
8 min read
ACTUAL, VISUAL

'We are already working on the restoration of museum The Ship. But it still takes a lot to get the funding. That's something that could give you nightmares, though.' Museum director Ton Heijdra of Museum Het Schip exudes no stress at these words. He and his staff are driven by idealism. The Amsterdam municipality...

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How do you listen to a minor Nobel laureate? The Speech Doctor reviews: Malala

by Hannah Roelofs
21 October 201429 March 2022
3 min read
ACTUAL, For members only

This month marks two years since 14-year-old schoolgirl Malala was gunned down by a Taliban fighter in Pakistan for standing up for her right to education. Two years later, 10 October 2014, Malala, now a 16-year-old schoolgirl, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It was not her first award, nor was it her first (thank you) speech. All...

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Hunting for art in the Bijlmer with Google Maps

by Daniel Bertina
14 June 201430 March 2022
4 min read
ACTUAL, For members only, VISUAL

After co-organising FATFORM, a radical series of art events in Amsterdam Southeast - with furious crossover exhibitions and performances on the roofs of an abandoned shopping centre and a car park, the collective around creative production agency Vinger.nl has thrown itself into the new edition of the Open Art Route 2014. And it will be something.

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4 reasons why De Stijl is handicapped without Hendrik Valk

by Maarten Baanders
13 May 201429 March 2022
3 min read
ACTUAL, For members only

Straight lines, single-coloured surfaces. Red, yellow, blue and white. Representing the essence of reality. That was the aim of the painters of De Stijl in the first half of the last century. At the same time, Hendrik Valk also had this ideal.

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Pure camp with tremendous theatrical intelligence in (M)IMOSA, in which four flamboyant drag queens vie for attention

by Daniel Bertina
22 April 20128 July 2016
3 min read
ACTUAL

Maniacally, she gallops across the stage, stomping like Michael Flatley on crack. Gravely thin and bare-chested, Marlene Monteiro Freitas tap-dances around. She squeezes her tits and pulls handfuls of (fake) hair from her scalp. "My name is Mimosa Ferrara," she panted menacingly, as her black leggings sag off her ass and linger just above the pubic area....

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#HF11: With The School for Scandal, Deborah Warner gives a gleeful kick to an arch-conservative theatre tradition. The British are not amused.

by Daniel Bertina
2 June 201113 February 2019
6 min read
Holland Festival, SPECIALS

The School for Scandal_8 © Neil Libbert — Photo: Neil Libbert

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 Theatre In 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."

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Raw 'Hard to be a God' by Mundruczó lingers on the surface #dekeuze

by one of our members
23 September 201030 March 2022
4 min read
ACTUAL, For members only

Things happen in places like this that cannot bear the light of day. We are deep in Rotterdam's container port, among the neon-lit transhipment yards and dark warehouses. In one of those raw warehouses are two truck trailers. One is set up as an illegal sewing workshop, the other is filled with earth and rubber tyres. They form the backdrop for Hungarian theatre-maker Kornél Mundruczó's performance 'Hard to be a god'.

The show tells the fairly inimitable story of Karoly, who wants to make symbolic torture porn to blackmail his father with it. That father once raped his sister and is now an MEP. Three women are lured to this sewing studio under false pretences to participate in those videos. Things do not end well for them, partly because the foreign film director has rather sadistic tendencies, damaging the ladies to the point of rendering them useless.

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