In Joy, the sequel to Manuel Vila's bestseller Ordesa, the protagonist is searching for himself and for little sparks of joy. In his rather barren and difficult existence, this is not yet easy. It must have been a double feeling. With his personal novel Ordesa (published in 2018, a story about the death of his parents and the existential emptiness...
So it wasn't really that long ago that a world-famous composer could tell his 20-year-old lover to stop composing because he couldn't stand competition. And for her to do just that. It is a detail in the history of Gustav and Alma Mahler, long known to insiders, but which...
Someday, the diversity of theatre and the audiences it attracts will be fine. On Thursday, 16 February, I sat in The Hague's Theater aan het Spui in an auditorium that was on average 50 years younger than the average theatre audience and also had all the colours of the rainbow. You guessed it: youth theatre. The theatre where...
Renée Steenbergen has made a name for herself through her expertise of private cultural finance and art collections1 . She recently received a lot of space in the NRC and attention from Culture Press for her latest publication The Art of Different. It made me curious. In her booklet, she makes some good proposals and offers useful suggestions for a healthier art business. For example: that both...
Last May, I expressed my concerns about the restructuring at IFFR and wondered whether the festival would remain as quirky as it always was. The dismissal of a number of programmers and the departure of other staff members laid a grey veil over the past edition beforehand. Was that justified? Had the festival lost its luster? Or did...
Thanks to Bas Hoeflaak, the recorder is back in the spotlight for a while. The laugh-out-loud scene is now going around the world, partly due to the far from virtuoso flute playing of the steel-faced amateur flautist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIkVov28ePo Thanks to an equally funny twist of fate, on Wednesday afternoon I was at a 'friends' rehearsal' of Amsterdam Sinfonietta, busy with the upcoming tour with...
There is quite a stir among mostly people of certain (white) colour and age about a documentary now playing in movie houses. In White Balls on Walls, maker Sarah Vos shows how the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam has to get used to a new era in which old self-evidences are shaking to their foundations. The uproar revolves mainly around the artworks created by established...
At the end of the premiere at Haarlem's Stadsschouwburg, actor Huub Stapel (68) fills up several times as he talks about his parents. Silence falls. The performance Only Family is mainly a tribute to Stapel's parents from memories and reflections, but also personal confessions. The most prominent being his urinary problem due to a too-small bladder; many...
Assault and finally rape of a 14-year-old girl by a bonkers vet. An enjoyable evening at the theatre is different, until the applause of this arguably (once again) best Dutch theatre production of the year relieves you of the harsh struggle. Author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and director Ivo van Hove emphasise that both 49-year-old vet Kurt and his minion, the farmer's daughter, are heavily traumatised...
Sometimes you suddenly discover a gem of culture, banished from playlists by the tough theatre market. Like Wil van der Meer with his French chanson programme of translated songs by Annie Schmidt. As an actor, singer, director and teacher, Wil van der Meer is not first rate, but equally indispensable to Dutch culture. The countless, indispensable roles...
IFFR 2023 is not only a platform for filmmakers with their own voice, but also makes cross-connections with other arts. What else can cinema be?
With The river is a wound full of fish, Colombian Lorena Salazar Masso makes a powerful literary debut. What does it mean to be a mother, when do you actually BE a mother? Can you be a mother even if you did not give birth to your child yourself? As a mother without a child, are you still a mother? That is the theme of the...
Jacqueline Blom and Mark Rietman immediately arouse laughter and sadness as desperate children of divorced parents at the beginning of Family Game. However, the sharp tragicomedy gradually becomes more of a farce good for an evening of laughter. In Family Play, Jacqueline Blom, Bas Hoeflaak and Annick Boer show their best side as actors, and I enjoyed the...
A story about love, but above all an ode to imagination. Perfect Days by Spanish writer Jacobo Bergareche is a passionate novel. Deadly marriage With the excuse that it is necessary for his work, Spanish journalist Luis visits a conference in Austin, Texas. But actually, the trip is mostly an excuse for his dead-blooded marriage to Paula...
What do you hold on to when not only the world is tottering, but also your own life? Where then can you find a safe place, a future? That is what Tasmania, Paolo Giordano's new book, is about. Crisis What came first: the worries about climate change and other world crises, or the crisis in his own life? The first-person narrator in Tasmania, a...
Since Roberto Saviano published his book Gomorrah and incurred the hatred of the Italian mafia, he has been living in hiding. What that is like, the graphic novel I'm still alive shows and feels razor-sharp. Roberto Saviano is 12 when he witnesses at first hand the murder of a man in his neighbourhood by the mafia. Fifteen years later,...
Why is the largest retrospective on Italian designer Gianni Versace yet on show in Groningen? "Why not?" jokes Andreas Blühm, general director of the Groninger Museum. Indeed, it seems like a bizarre choice, but if you look a little closer, you will discover a few commonalities between the museum in the down-to-earth north and the maximalism of Gianni Versace, who on 2...
Grieving well for the loss of a loved one does not lead to Prozac or a shrink. On the contrary, a little life skill helps, as in 'Grief is the thing with feathers' by Max Porter, Jacob Derwig and Erik Whien. Once, after tragedy struck my family, I used to console myself by reading aloud the picture book Frog and the Little Bird by Max...
'See Naples and then die' were Goethe's famous words. If the German philosopher was as surrounded by beauty as I was during the new exhibition Dying in Beauty - The World of Pompeii and Herculaneum, I can understand his statement. For the Drents Museum, it is a peculiar choice: an exhibition on an already much-discussed period and society....
Before, when I used to write about theatre for a national morning paper, my travel schedule was partly determined by the reach the paper had in a particular region. So, if I necessarily wanted to write about a theatre performance in Enschede, about Enschedean states, my chief's question was: how many subscribers do we have in Twente? So usually it didn't get there
For Melle Daamen I cherish sympathy. And for a long time: from the time he visited me as a young VPRO director on his round of people from the world of culture. He came to ask for advice: how could he enter the sector? Because a job in culture was his ambition. So many years later, he passed me in the proceedings
Marietje d'Hane Scheltema, her name be praised. How corny I used to think she was with her neat little rhymes with which she managed to transform classical Greek and Roman drinking bouts into Kralings-judged bake sale parties. And how wrong I could be. Because how well her translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses works in the hands of the people at Alum. Yesterday was the premiere...
A trombone blaring like an elephant, violins like imploring songbirds and an oboe rippling a scale like a brook: so opens A Skin of Sound, a performance featuring winds, string instruments, percussion, a South African poet and a pop singer. With bated breath, dozens of visitors in the Great Hall of the Bossche Verkadefabriek listened to the premiere of this shimmering piece....
Not everyone thinks music is also something to look at. Not a crazy idea, considering that some music is so layered and complex that you need all your attention for listening. So modern electronic music largely takes place in the dark, I experienced during two evenings of FAQ Festival in Den Bosch. There, I discovered that I...
Squeezing village society and family, escape with harsh deflowering, student pleasures crushed by bloody abortion, inescapable marriage and childbearing, scorching relationships with men, fierce longing with loneliness, and finally resignation with grandchild; against the backdrop of war, reconstruction, stifled revolution, years of hope and finally in prosperity and cynicism extinguished idealism. Time flows through Annie, Annie flows through the...
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