'At the beginning of March we were still having a bit of a laugh about the virus, but a week later it became clear to me that we would be in serious trouble this year.' Johan Gijsen, director and founder of the Utrecht-based festival that brings together the most surprising artists from all genres of the international music world every November, is still visibly...
'I have only met one person for more than 3 minutes in five weeks. I live alone, I see people at the groceries, I take walks and bike rides, but apart from that I don't see anyone live.' Rainer Hofmann, artistic director of Spring, is experiencing a very different spring than intended, thanks to Corona. This month, the major Utrecht festival of innovative art was supposed to...
It is 1895. Colonel Georges Picquart (Jean Dujardin) has just been promoted, to his own surprise, to head the French army's intelligence service. To get rid of the sewer smell there, literally and figuratively, he frantically yanks on the window in the musty office. It won't open. A touching image in J'Accuse, one of the most talked-about films of this...
An artists' protest in Albania deserves extra attention. Especially as EU accession negotiations resume. Indeed, the protest action is impressive and offers a view of EU accession from an interesting perspective. That of a people who are committed to democratic values, who value their own history and culture, who do not want to give way to...
Need to escape from all the misery in reality? Of course, you can binge-watch endless feel-good movies or exciting series, but opening a good book about a disaster in the outside world is at least as effective - look, it's actually not that bad with us! You might also pick up a few valuable do's and dont's for emergencies; a warned person counts....
With northern Italy cut off from the outside world because of corona and looking increasingly desolate, we are reminded of an interview we had a few years ago with writer Davide Longo about his book The Vertical Man. A book à la The Road by Cormac McCarthy, in which Longo outlines a desolate world that has changed dramatically as a result of...
I have often resisted thinking of the Netherlands as a business. After all, a country cannot lay off people, or divest unprofitable sectors to make more profit. So anyone who speaks of the BV Nederland has not understood it. There are no competitors that you can fight out of the market while being entrepreneurial on those few square kilometres of polder land,...
I had the chance to attend the 500th anniversary - it took place at the beautiful Teatro La Fenice - of the first Jewish ghetto during my visit to Venice in 2016. One of the speakers was historian Simon Schama. During his lecture, I was given a brief history of Jewish suffering in Italy. According to...
There are people who have a voice with which you can quiet a crowd in a whisper. Bill T Jones, choreographer and this year's associate artist of the Holland Festival, is one such person. Apart from that beautiful, heavy and full voice, he also has a presence with which he can quiet the cogs with a single hand movement. But all that would be nothing if...
Much has already been said about Almere, that it is ugly, for instance, or too car-oriented. There are also few cities in Europe where the four-lane roads extend as gloriously to the shopfront as in Almere. I'd like to add a note of praise. Coming from the station, walking across an artificial dune of car parks and fast-food chains, skimming past...
In the days when Europe was still a loose collection of city-states and duchies, where groups of men, for want of football, went on raids a few times a year to burn houses and rape women, a language emerged in the marshlands of the Rhine delta. We know this because plays were written in that language, which is among the earliest preserved...
What will shake up the cinema world the most in the coming years? The new James Bond film? Or a personal film tip tailored to your previous cinema visits that just pops up on your smartphone? Or perhaps a technical innovation that creates a whole new cinematic experience? Just a few things that loom around the topic of this week's New Cinema conference. A day and a half...
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....
'Nothing can make up for the past. But the real, enduring power of the past lies in how it affects our present and our future. What we can do is shape a future history in which we consciously and determinedly carry with us only the best of our past.' Not keep rooting, but cognitive behavioural therapy for the whole of Europe, you might...
Ensemble Modern presents world premieres by German-Dutch Iris ter Schiphorst and Turkish Zeynep Gedizlioğlu in November Music. And that is good news, because the female composer remains too often invisible even in 2019. In the brochures of any Dutch orchestra, you will find none, or only a single work by a woman. On the new Heart & Soul list of...
Members of the States General, This year about 72 years ago we had the first Holland Festival. After years of enslavement and tyranny, hope for a better future literally came from above, in the form of Maria Callas. Eyewitnesses who saw the lights in the Stadsschouwburg turn red that day would never forget that image. 72 years later, it seems...
Exactly 200 years ago, on 13 September 1819, Clara Schumann was born in Leipzig as Clara Wieck. She is among one of the greatest pianists of the nineteenth century. Against her father's wishes, she married Robert Schumann, whose work she fervently promoted. She also wrote well-received compositions of her own and was more famous than Robert. Yet after her...
It is actually a footnote in the press release that lobby organisation Kunsten '92 sent out into the world today. But, as always with footnotes, it did contain the most important news. Because Kunsten 92, the club in which organisations in the arts sector polder, is "exploring cooperation" with the Creative Industry Federation. The latter is the Arts '92 of everything that is also culture and creativity,...
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....
French is made for rap. Forget all that American-English mincing, listen to the rhythmic drone that good French-language rap offers. One of the possible benefits of a self-absorbed US and a post-Brexit Europe is that we might start hearing that beautiful language of our southern southern neighbours a bit more often. 'Speak French to me, darling!' Macron will be delighted. Wednesday...
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....
'We are on the brink of a new cultural revolution. We need to move away from our paradigm and art can play a role in this. Art can show us images of a different future, a different thought. Artists can help bring that realisation in.' Speaking is writer and journalist Philipp Blom. In 2017, his...
'I am not at all optimistic about the planet. Nor am I optimistic about the optimism with which the people in my show keep finding a solution to live on despite the calamity that befalls them.' Philippe Quesne has turned that despair into a beautiful play. Full of non-cynical survivors who turn everything into an adventure. How he does that...
In 2014, Morgan Knibbe (1989) made the short film Shipwreck, about the aftermath of a horrific shipwreck on the coast of Lampedusa in which 350 refugees drowned. Shortly afterwards, he made his first feature-length documentary, also about refugee issues: 'Those Who Feel the Burning'. This very impressive, original and visually strong film was one of the best Dutch films of the last...
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