When you think of Carel Kraayenhof, you don't immediately think of a young squatter orating about Karl Marx in circle discussions. Yet protest resides in the musician, just like in the tango. This becomes apparent when the interview gets off to a brisk start.
An old man strolls into the infirmary with a transistor radio. 'Where did you go blind?' the already present blind ask the newcomer. 'In a museum,' he replies. A moving conversation then unfolds about what was the last painting he saw, and the possibilities are projected onto the wafer-thin canvas that separates the audience from the sick room. This tot...
Three Sisters by Chekhov directed by Theu Boermans is back with the Nationale Toneel. Two and a half years after its original performance, the play will play nine times exclusively at the Royal Theatre in The Hague. There is news about all three "sisters". Anniek Pheifer (Masja), Ariane Schluter (Olga) and Sallie Harmsen (Irina) talk about their careers and about Chekhov....
Dutch composer Theo Verbey (Delft 1959) writes music of lush tonal beauty, in which the achievements of centuries of musical tradition resound. He made his name with works such as Triad (1991) for orchestra and Expulsion (1988) for large ensemble, and with orchestrations of pieces by composers such as Modest Mussorgsky and Alban Berg. For the closing concert of De Vrijdag van Vredenburg, he wrote Traurig wie...
The 1970s have for some time been the target of what we shall conveniently call the up-and-coming generation. And so we are talking about the 1970s as the glory years of hippyism, the jubilant times of the left-wing church and everything else that, with the knowledge of today, is dirty and dirty. They were the years when...
Tonight, the Nederlandse Reisopera premieres a new staging of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, opera of all operas. With this masterpiece, the German composer put an end to Baroque malpractice in 1762. Not only were the libretti impossible to make sense of because of the endless series of subplots, but also the case was duly...
Museum Beelden aan Zee placed a concrete sculpture by 26-year-old artist Catinka Kersten on the patio at the end of March: 'And everyone held their breath during that fraction of centuries'. It consists of five concrete human figures stacked on top of each other, which appear to be made of fabric. Kersten completed her studies at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague in 2013 with a series of hunting animals in plaster and cotton. The museum, with associated scientific institute and plaster library, is considered one of the figureheads of sculpture in the Netherlands. How did this museum come to choose such a young artist and what does inclusion in its collection mean for her?
Adam and Eve. Noah. Babel. Joseph. An entire book of the Bible Johan Doesburg casts in his farewell performance with the Nationale Toneel. 'Genesis' lasts 6 hours including intermissions, has 65 speaking characters and plays with the space of Scheveningen's Zuiderstrandtheater. But above all, the outgoing director wants it to tell two stories. In conversation with Johan Doesburg and actor Dries Vanhegen, whose character Jacob plays a special role in the play.
Wednesday 8 April kicks off the fourth edition of the biennial World Minimal Festival at Amsterdam's Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ. For five days, the capital will be dominated by the immensely popular music movement, which invariably attracts packed halls. Several parts of this instalment are already sold out, including the opening concert with special guest Terry Riley. There are still...
The money at HET Symphony Orchestra has run out. Despite all the extra millions from the province and after years of writing off tons of general reserves, the end is in sight. And so the orchestra is scrapping concerts, will be seen less in theatres in Deventer and Zwolle, stops CD recordings and shuns any risky performances. To keep the...
Jazz musician and teacher Clark Terry died last month. Jazz journalist Jeroen de Valk looks back on a candid interview with one of the greatest trumpet players of all time. It was only on 21 February that he fell silent, Clark Terry. He was 94 and had been in the musician's business for at least 75 years. Go figure: he made his living as a trumpeter as a young teenager and...
Nathaniël Mellors is one of the funniest artists whose work is on show at Art Rotterdam. No moving painting, no coarse-grained fluid slides and no Arnoud Mik either: Mellors' latest work: The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview, is well-acted comedy about a serious intellectual subject: the art world. Building on the discovery that Neanderthals were not at all the primitive bat-wielding losers where...
Thijs Borsten blurs boundaries. Under the slogan 'The Challenge', he puts completely different artists on stage together. After years of struggling, the concept is now being embraced by media and audiences. Thijs has a chance of winning his 6 minutes of fame in DWDD in the near future. Bringing artists from different cultures together and labelling such a thing as a 'challenge';...
Today, the International Film Festival Rotterdam announced that director Rutger Wolfson is handing over the baton after the 2015 edition. About his decision, Wolfson says in the press release: "Eight years is a long time to lead an important film festival and with the 44th edition, which will be very strong, I have achieved everything I wanted to achieve. Together with my family, I have...
It gets crazier and crazier with The Interview, the US comedy in which the CIA wants to implicate two television journalists in an assassination attempt against the leader of North Korea.
You could almost say that film has once again been overtaken by reality.
5:Echo, choreographer Nicole Beutler's most recent production, is a curious show. All focus is on two famous pioneers of Dutch dance in the 60s and 70s: Ellen Edinoff and Bianca van Dillen. Yet Echo mainly shows how impossible (and perhaps undesirable) it is to want to revive past glories. Dancer Kelly...
We usually don't think about it, but marketing is all around us. And that while we can learn a lot from all those good examples. And certainly also from the not so good ones. Recently, I saw on TV an interview with the world star Stromae. This young Belgian rapper and musician has been very successful in recent years. Whether you...
After the world premiere of Words & Beyond II: Nan Sul Hun by Seung-Won Oh yesterday at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, the audience stood up as one to applaud Slagwerk Den Haag and the soloists. It was therefore a magical performance, which will be repeated at De Doelen in Rotterdam and at Theater aan de...
With a new government in Belgium, the debate on art subsidies has also erupted there. The issue there is only 0.7 per cent of the national budget. The cut of a mere 10% is less substantial than in the Netherlands under the PVV's noose, but the arguments are the same. Though they are often better articulated. Josse de Pauw, international...
"Theo van Gogh tried so hard to be an enfant terrible that we almost forgot that he was one of the Netherlands' most creative and productive filmmakers." I wrote this for the GPD papers on 2 November 2004, after an editor called me with the terrible news of the filmmaker's violent death. Soon, that murder was exactly ten...
This post should have been a video. I was planning to go into my garden with the ipad, to tell you, in the company of my dog Rufus, how important video is in contemporary art communication. And not a good, beautifully shot and rap edited video, but wonky, home-made, not very to-the-point video. Which is very personal though....
Wijbrand Schaap: 'The amateur arts. I experienced the cuts myself at the Utrecht Centre for the Arts in Utrecht. First, they were heavily cut back there back in 2001 under Leefbaar. They survived that, and now they were just recovering a bit...' Joop Daalmeijer: ' ...and now everything is going to the schools.' Wijbrand Schaap: 'There are...
Wijbrand Schaap: 'Just one more point. Then we're almost through.' Joop Daalmeijer: 'Continue quietly, we have until half past five.' Wijbrand Schaap: 'We have a problem with real estate. A lot of inner cities are empty. Shop premises are empty, downtown office buildings are unrentable. What do the municipalities say? Put artists in them. Cost nothing, because for free rent they do...
Wijbrand Schaap: 'The basic infrastructure was keelhauled by Zijlstra while it was not yet ripe. That, in its smaller version, now runs the risk of leading to further rigidity.' Joop Daalmeijer: 'That's a good observation. We are also working on that in our Culture Exploration. We are having a lot of discussions, which we are also taking out into the country. We are starting...
Wijbrand Schaap: 'Now on the role of cities. One of the reactions on our site is about the role of the randstad in cultural policy. Melle Daamen puts the primacy in the randstad, and goes further than the council in this.' Joop Daalmeijer: 'The council has no position yet.' Wijbrand Schaap: 'But there is something in the Culture Outlook. Cities form...
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