Today we are talking about youth theatre. A genre I myself first encountered in 1994, thanks to 'Mirad, een jongen uit Bosnië' by Ad de Bont, performed by Theatergroep Wederzijds. Marijn Lems got his love for youth theatre from his mother, who, like his father, was a librarian in Tilburg. What we agree on, in this podcast, the...
I went to Rotterdam Zuid to see Shakespeare. The play was called Cleopatra and someone had tried to turn it into a feminist manifesto. That is something like making a rhinoceros jump through a hoop: the British bard relates to feminism as Thierry Baudet relates to Greta Thunberg. So it had not succeeded, and the reviewer of...
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...
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...
It is not easy to visit an opera presented as a stunning piece of contemporary social criticism without fear. Especially when it evokes such totally different reactions. Some call The New Prince 'an opera on the vein of our own time' (Mischa Spel, NRC), while others give it 'a fat fail' (Erik Voermans, Het Parool). Another needs more...
Champagne at BAK in Utrecht, deep disappointment at The New Institute in Rotterdam: the Council for Culture has spoken. Today, Thursday 19 May 2016, the first advice after the draconian art cuts by the first Rutte cabinet came out, and heads are rolling. Amsterdam loses prestigious presentation institution De Appel, in The Hague fellow institution Stroom has to redo its homework. The Orkest van het Oosten and the Gelders Orkest have to come up with merger plans within two years. In Utrecht, the city company Theater Utrecht will no longer receive funding despite artistic appreciation. Het Zuidelijk Toneel in Eindhoven Tilburg must make new plans and Opera Zuid must quickly raise its artistic quality. These are the main conclusions of the Culture Council's opinion.
As dramatic as some of this may sound, the advice is actually not, when you look over the whole battlefield. Thanks in part to
Time for our success list. In 2015, we attracted 60,000 more visitors than in 2014. That's something to be proud of. A website that focuses on the stories that existing media find the small, and then figures like that. That we attracted those 300,000 visitors is one, that they spent an average of 2 and a half minutes per story,...
As Big as the Sky I am looking forward to Arnoud Noordegraaf's new multimedia project, As Big as the Sky, with sets by Ai Wei Wei. Noordegraaf is a master at blurring the boundaries between film and reality. His music is elegant and appealing and serves the story. As Big as the Sky, op...
Last weekend, we thought we were on the safe side with our list of best-read stories on Culture Press. True to old media laws, we thought the days between Christmas and New Year's would be quiet. Aber nein. It turned out there was another list on the way, which turned the whole thing upside down. Instead of 235 thousand interested readers...
After the premiere of Puccini's perhaps most beloved opera La bohème at De Nationale Opera last Thursday, critics were divided in their reaction. Trouw praised conductor Roberto Palumbo, who 'can maximise Puccini's masterful effects', Place de l'Opéra chided the Italian for taking 'too much freedom in the phrasing of the melodies'. Culture Press colleague Henri Drost did not keep it dry
Holland Festival
Forget all the fuss about the first ever 3D film opera, forget all the fuss in British newspapers. Michel van der Aa himself sighed in interview that, on reflection, he would have loved to have made the second 3D film opera. And perhaps he had
Holland Festival
This month is all about the Holland Festival. Culture Press reports almost daily. What are we most looking forward to?
With paper, you never know ('0.3% of newspaper readers read the reviews on the art page'), and with TV it's always a bit of estimating and extrapolating too, but the internet is rock hard. We know how many times you read one of our pieces, and how long you lingered at our videos. Well: we were already proud last year, now we are well over 200,000
We are live, from half past 10. We talk about a full week of Holland Festival, during which some highs and lows passed by: John Cage, pole dancing, Marilyn Monroe, you name it. Check back here, or watch directly on our youtube channel. We try to include all reactions.
Update: the poem in question was not meant to convince Voltaire of the Prussian thrust, but an Italian, Francesco Alegerotti. A scrabeus poem by Frederick the Great has surfaced. A poem, whose existence but content was unknown. Until now, that is. Today, the German quality magazine Die Zeit comes out with the full text. And Bild Zeitung has...
The Dodo was busy, this third week of the Holland Festival. Thankfully, again with an exciting mix of beautiful, weird and extraordinary. As it should be, really. What makes the Holland Festival all the more exciting is that such extremes can sometimes take place within one programme, as with the National Ballet, or even within one performance, as with The Russians...
That the Off Broadway musical Fela! was a success, we could actually expect. For The Dodo, we therefore did not send anyone there either: there are already enough newspapers and other bloggers eager to have a front-row seat to the New York audience favourite. You can read that they had a good time elsewhere on this site, via the blogstream
This week the Holland Festival erupts and we are there. We are producing a Dodo Festival Day newspaper with a sizeable team of professional journalists, as we did before for Springdance and The International Choice of the Rotterdam Schouwburg, for example. We follow the festival closely to bring news as it happens. We go to see performances where others...
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