It did not require a manifesto, nor a fist-thick art-critical treatise in which a learned committee arrives at an all-defining verdict. No, it was a slip of the tongue by an artist, this time defining a new art movement. Olaffur Eliasson, the architect/artist rapidly gaining popularity in the world of design and architecture in recent years, says it in a...
"In the Netherlands, we are actually on holiday," say Daphne (40) and Ilja (26), laughing. They are travel experts, with Japan as their core destination. "I visit a few festivals every summer, but whether I'm really a festival-goer? Not so much, I think." Seven years ago, Daphne was last to Lakedance, now she is "getting up to age" and got to go for...
Because Evening, Anna Enquist's new novel, is a book full of pent-up exasperation and anger. Never before has she written so freely as with this book, without knowing where the story was going. "I would like to be able to be a bit angrier myself." After the poetry collection Hoor de staden and her memories of Gerrit Kouwenaar, A Garden in the...
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...
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...
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...
She is young, beautiful and well-spoken. Writer Silvia Avallone, known for her bestseller Staal, does not shy away from sensitive themes in her compelling new novel Levenslichtde either, such as the economic crisis, infertility and unevenly divided parenthood. 'Claiming freedom for yourself is something terrifying for an Italian woman.' Rough edges Poverty, economic malaise, gender inequality......
Thursday 17 May opens SPRING Performing Arts Festival in Utrecht with, among others, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi by Dries Verhoeven and to come (extended) by Mette Ingvartsen. Over ten days, over twenty-five international dance and theatre productions, installations and performance works will be on show in public spaces and urban environments. A week earlier, festival director Rainer Hofmann looks relaxed. 'Until now...
Classical music matters again. - At least if we judge by the protests against the Stockhausen project and the fierce polemics about opera directors' interventions. Teodor Currentzis and Peter Sellars' La clemenza Di Tito, for instance, caused controversy even before its Dutch premiere. They deleted the interminable recitatives and added music from Mozart's Mass in...
The trigger for this story is that relatively recently, the Council for Culture published its sector foresight. The summary opens with the words that 'Culture moves'. A rather euphemistic statement in my view. In this case, it means that the making, spreading and experiencing of culture is constantly changing. The second very obvious observation of...
Poets Danez Smith and Patricia Lockwood once broke the internet with their virtuoso wordplay. Smith with a frothy tirade about ineradicable racism and police brutality in America (Dear White America) and Lockwood with a heartbreaking/funny poem about her rape (Rape Joke). Both have outgrown their hypes. They have secretly been doing a fantastic job for years, using Twitter, YouTube, paper and stage...
Fifty-three 'ultras' from a football club in an art theatre. That might be asking for trouble. Especially if they were the hard core of, say, Ajax, FC Den Haag or FC Utrecht. But this is France. There are no hooligans in France. The 'ultra's' of Racing Club de Lens, for example: they are bound to throw a punch somewhere, but in...
Listen to an atmospheric impression and the full interview with Stef Aerts here. Children have the ability to turn adults' worlds upside down. Eleven-year-old JR is really getting into it. On a school trip, he learns how the stock market works and then turns it to his will. In doing so, unhampered by a prefrontal cortex, that part of the brain...
'I once performed in front of a hall somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with a lot of old people. The performance was announced as cabaret. But my work does not fall within one particular genre. Because of the designation 'cabaret', the audience had expectations that I did not meet. People wanted a fun, entertaining evening. My performance was rebellious, energetic. I jumped all...
Sofia Gubaidoelina has become a true audience favourite in our country. She is also a welcome guest in broadcasting series. The AVROTROS Friday Concert, for instance, brought the Dutch premieres of Glorious Percussion (2011) and O Komm, Heiliger Geist (2016). Friday 23 March will see the first Dutch performance of her Triple Concerto for bayan, violin and cello. The piece is dedicated to...
With her new novel, Esther Gerritsen takes a surprising path. De trooster is more serious in tone than we have come to expect from her in recent years. "In the past, I would not have dared to do this, write about religion and then also without it being very funny." Uncanny "Beautiful isn't it, the cover? Esther Gerritsen is delighted with the cover
Cinedans has been around since 2003. Back then, it was a single evening, part of Amsterdam's Julidans festival. Pretty soon, it grew into something bigger. According to Martine Dekker, involved with the festival since the 2011 edition, this was due to the overwhelming supply of dance films: 'From the second edition, filmmakers were invited to submit films,...
Culture minister van Engelshoven says it is inevitable that the number of productions in the arts sector will go down. This is necessary to make the labour market for the arts sector healthy. She stated this in an interview after the presentation of her vision letter at Rotterdam's Maaspodium. 'You see that a lot has been produced in recent years to...
In the early 1990s, I am sitting in a small auditorium at The National Theatre in London. Before the performance starts, someone on stage asks if you want to greet the visitors next to you. This immediately creates a different, more intimate dynamic in the auditorium. On a tight stage with only a few props are four actors and an Arab musician. Yoshi Oida...
Platonov, Theater Utrecht's latest show, premiered on 2 March and is an instant hit: rave reviews in all major newspapers. Artistic director and director Thibaud Delpeut bases his version of this archetypal Chekhov play on the translation made by actor Jacob Derwig in 2000 for 't Barre Land. This equally legendary play fitted...
Wolf is Kristien Hemmerechts' first novel since her non-fiction book about breast cancer, and it is about rage. What it's like to be furious, the Belgian writer knows all about that. "When I had breast cancer, I experienced intense feelings of aggression." Why is it that some people who have experienced trauma or tragedy can give it a place,...
It all starts at Orange College, of course. A fictional school with very real problems. For Sadettin Kırmızıyüz, the place where he commissions the opening part of Metropolis, a series that should eventually count four episodes. It is one of Het Nationale Theater's biggest projects over the next four years, in close cooperation with Kırmızıyüz's own company:...
Is she on a podium of honour or a scaffold? Joan of Arc holds a monologue. She shouts out her words. The beat of the music propels an ominous atmosphere into the room. On the floor, five dancers make resolute movements. In a long series of statements and confessions, Jeanne speaks out what moved her to seek the battlefield. And.
This young writer from Hengelo - she turns 32 in January - sold over a quarter of a million copies of her debut novel This Is Where It Ends in the United States. It spent 64 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. So Hengelo-based Young Adult writer Marieke Nijkamp did feel slight pressure while writing her second book, Before I...
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français
You must be logged in to post a comment.