First of all, the chairs have to leave the auditorium of the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ. Then some discomfort, those two hours that Octavia E. Butler's The Parable of The Sower lasts. At least it would make for some shared sorrow, and possibly some awkward swinging. Because the way things were going, that first night of Toshi Reagon's debut at the Holland...
The Association of Theatre and Concert Hall Directors and Festival de Nederlandse Dansdagen announce the annual nominations for the VSCD Dance Awards (the Swans). Nominated for the Swan 'most impressive dance production' are: Rule of Three, choreography: Jan Martens, by GRIP The hidden floor, choreography: Franck Chartier, by Nederlands Dans Theater We Are Nowhere Else But Here, choreography: Stephen Shropshire, by Stephen Shropshire Foundation,...
Nothing defines us like our taste. And especially taste in music. We find that music taste defines exactly who we are and can easily distinguish us from people who have distinctly different, and therefore lesser, tastes. Pinkpop, a pop festival with several world-famous headliners, experienced this. Each world star plays to their own audience, which schi...
Neues Stück 1 Seit sie - Ein Stück von Dimitris Papaioannou is a long title for an overwhelming piece, which Tanztheater Wuppertal is bringing to the Holland Festival this year. Nine years ago, on 30 June 2009, a month before she was to turn sixty-nine, Pina Bausch died suddenly. The world-famous and highly influential choreographer of experimental, haunting and unparalleled dance theatre left behind a...
It is the spatial arrangement that immediately impresses in The Way You Sound Tonight, choreographer Arno Schuitemaker's ninth performance. There are roughly 25 seats too few. The last Holland Festival visitors to walk onto the Rabozaal stage during the premiere have to find their own place on the still-scented wooden floor. Pijpela Schuitemaker has, to my...
Of course, we have Chriet Titulaer. But it kind of ends there. And to say we took those very seriously, back in the day? No. The future, and fantasising about it, is not really a thing in the Netherlands, at least not with the big publishers and broadcasters. A writer dealing with science fiction will never join a big...
The Holland festival has a tradition of combining film with live music. Whether it's the post-punk band Mogwai at Mark Cousins' Atomic Cinema or a live accompaniment to a silent film, something magical usually happens. That was certainly the case at the screening of Fritz Lang's Der Müde Tod (1921), accompanied by composer in...
Menno Pols, reporter for De Gelderlander, was denied accreditation (free ticket and other benefits) for the three-day Manana Manana festival in Vorden this year. Reason: an article he wrote last year about the money flows within the club behind the festival. That club earns millions mainly from Zwarte Cross, the biggest festival in the Netherlands with 220,000 tickets sold. The accreditation...
Panic. On the tram between Leidseplein and Amsterdam Centraal, I suddenly lost the Dutch translation of 'string quartet'. So I typed 'violin quartet' into my facebook update, trying to make a connection between a blow job and Ligeti. Joking, perhaps, but there was something much deeper behind it, in that tram, after the music and theatre event 'The String Quartet's...
Our Thea Derks sat watching a traffic light for a few hours on Thursday 7 June and observed that the music was better. It happened during the opening of the 2018 Holland Festival. In the tradition of Ruth Mackenzie, the opening was of mixed reception, and that is actually a good thing. Even at a time when the Amsterdam Arts Council is in a...
The Holland Festival presents Hyena, in which Mollena Lee Williams-Haas recounts how she kicked her alcohol addiction. Her husband Georg Friedrich Haas wrote the music to accompany her blood-curdling account. She is accompanied by Klangforum Wien and conductor Bas Wiegers, who also performed the world premiere two years ago. Hyena can be heard once at Muziekgebouw aan het IJ on Wednesday 13 June....
What a grandiose invention to think of breakdance as martial arts dance! In a sense, of course, it has been so from the beginning. Young people in New York's poor neighbourhoods developed their spectacular dance techniques in the 1980s. These were a means for them to express themselves in their own unique way. This was a necessity of life in a society that...
Steve McQueen is an artist who narrates big and difficult subjects in a physically tangible way. Hunger strike, sex addiction and our discomfort with male sexuality, slavery. These are the things we would rather not see anymore, not want to discuss and certainly not want to feel. In his feature films, McQueen manages to strike a balance between the aesthetic and the physical ...
Music and images, it remains a tricky combination. Do you see a picture with music, or do you hear music with a picture? That question was not answered unequivocally at the opening concert of the Holland Festival. The slowly changing colours of Gerhard Richter's canvases were matched by Marcus Schmickler's slowly fading sounds. While Richter's Patterns soon became boring,...
At the film sector's traditional Spring Consultation, the panel at the Ketelhuis shed its light on the video on demand explosion, among other things, and on the advice of the Council for Culture. Will operators support the film sector with levies on sales?
Grandpa tells. In 1989, a committee of experts chose a different theatre course in my city, Utrecht. The just-risen festival Theater aan de Werf would get more money, the marching theatre would disappear from 't Hoogt and the rest would have to take care of the newcomer with fewer days of programming. Then we took to the streets against the so-called 'festivalisation',...
Here it is. The one and only interactive Culture Press Holland Festival Special. A special that has already been deployed over the past few months, and will be added to in the coming month. During the festival, we have regular reviews and reports, and podcasts. A new edition of this Special will appear every week. On Mondays. And then you can also subscribe via...
With 'The Way You Sound Tonight', which will have its world premiere at Holland Festival 2018, choreographer Arno Schuitemaker takes the next step in his creative development. He describes his performance as an 'acoustic ballroom'. I speak to the 1976-born dance maker, who once studied at Delft University of Technology, about his work and his motives. 'In the trilogy 'WHILE...
In Kata, the latest work by French breaker and choreographer Anne Nguyen, hip-hop men transcend the clichés of hip-hop. Toughness, untouchability and the usual frontal relationship with the audience are exchanged for indirect gestures, delayed effects, diagonals and laterals, double entendres and irony. Nguyen, herself an adept practitioner of capoeira, ming chun and breakdance, challenges her dancers to show their...
Alí Calderón has written quite a body of work, but I didn't hear much of it during my stay at Poetry International. However, the poem 'Democracia Mexicana' did come along three times. A formidable poem, as it ends with a rotting baby corpse, so not for the soft-hearted among us. Democracia Mexicana is Calderon's hit poem. Like pop singers can make a hit...
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...
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