Of the 122 stage texts read by the jury of the Dutch Toneelschrijfprijs, just under 30 were written by female authors. In a field where the number of female workers is huge, this is striking. Because, the jury rightly stated, in written Dutch theatre, the male gaze is still dominant. While the theatre audience percentage-wise more women...
It could be because of the weather, or my mood, but 2022 was one of the best editions of Theatre Festival Boulevard I have experienced in decades. From the interesting, and also a little disruptive opening to the final night, which I experienced yesterday, I saw guts, passion and pushed boundaries. Not everywhere all at once, but...
Mahat Arab (born 1996) is the winner of the second edition of ILFU's Storytelling Competition. He won with a spoken word recording titled 'Part-time fathers'. During festival day Exploring Stories, he received the grand prize of five thousand euros, from the hands of ILFU's organisation. More than 700 people participated in the ILFU Stories Competition; 723 stories were entered in five categories. Apart from Mahat...
For a year and a half, there was hardly any playing, festival tents remained in mothballs and artists were busy doing living room concerts or attic sessions on Zoom. Now everything is allowed out again and the discharge is just barely there. Unaccustomedness characterises the fresh start of Theatre Festival Boulevard, which has moved to a park south of downtown Bossche for the next few years,...
Over the past year, the global pandemic and reignited Black Lives Matter protests have had a huge impact on our daily reality. A Funeral for Street Culture seeks to explore and make visible the sense of loss and other consequences of these events within art and culture. The group project, curated and initiated by Metro54 and curator Rita Ouédraogo,...
ILFU (International Literary Festival Utrecht) is launching a national storytelling competition for the second time - in which stories in all possible forms are welcome. The ILFU Verhalenwedstrijd is the first interdisciplinary story contest in the Netherlands, organised on the belief that good stories can and should be told in all conceivable forms. The theme of this year's contest is What matters...
Something about roots, and that they are cut off and that this is inconvenient. Or not, because it gives freedom. Something about men and women, but what exactly didn't quite become clear in Mailles, which I got to experience at the Holland Festival on Thursday 10 June, after another curious test-for-access episode. The great hall of the building that I just don't...
The busiest year ever in the career of word artist Babs Gons (49) gets its crowning moment with the publication of her first book of poetry, Do it anyway. A debut that, for Gons herself, feels more like a farewell than a beginning. 'For a performer like me, paper as a form is very definitive.' Erosion and sprawl Do it anyway is called
The art of slowing down in times of pandemic. Aceleratio is an interdisciplinary performance installation that aims to confront online and offline audiences with struggle, freedom, courage and comfort, from the need to embody these times. Artistic directors Dayna Martinez Morales & Vincent Verburg are the initiators of Movement Expo Aceleratio. Ten experienced and very different performers in...
Stage poetry is usually held in lower esteem than written poetry. While stage poets can touch so powerfully. Only during the Night of Poetry, every year in Utrecht, do we honour the performers among the poets. Then it's back to the 'jokers' who can rhyme, as was recently written about Ingmar Heytze in a podcast announcement. Spoken Word, the...
The other day I read how a millennial called cartoonist Peter de Wit (born 1958) a "dinosaur" because of a joke he didn't like. The joke goes like this: a woman happily enters psychiatrist Sigmund's office and tells him that she can translate the poem The hill we climb because she is a woman, black, young ánd a spoken word artist. Sigmund congratulates her and...
A good friend calls me, sounding like he wants to share and check something important. He was talking to his sister this week about the Nieuwsuur headline: Black Lives Matter: Was it a turning point or a hype? His sister stumbles over the title and notices that important parties are left out of this item and that stings. On the...
Did you know that one in 10 Dutch people suffer from severe loneliness? The subject is more topical than ever due to the corona crisis and yet we find it hard to talk about it with each other. On Wednesday 31 March at 8pm, TivoliVredenburg and city lab RAUM present a candid interview with Flemish psychiatrist Dirk de Wachter by Rachel Rosier....
Movementalist and Plein Theatre present 25, 26 and 27 February Aceleratio Sneak Peek Streams as a sneak peek of the performance installation Aceleratio that will be on show at the NDSM Fuse in May 2021. In the last three of the series of six 'sneak peek' live streams from the Plein Theatre, viewers get a look 'under the skin' of the performers. Intimate, fragile...
It is stupid and pointless to start comparing suffering. There is always someone who had it shittier than you, usually even closer than you thought. But reinforcing the delusion that writers and poets can live off their royalties, when that is literally true for less than one per cent of professional literary authors, shows little empathy.
Insayno was city poet for two days - you involuntarily think of that commercial in which a temp says at his grand farewell party, "It was two fantastic days" - and in doing so probably set a record as the shortest-serving city poet in history, with one city poem to his name ("sister of the capital"). What was the problem?
The Holland Festival 2020 had an exceptional year; due to the corona pandemic, it did not physically go ahead for the first time in its history. Instead, it was given an online programme as its fulfilment. Holland Festival online programme 2.0-2.0 was the 73rd edition of the festival and the second to work with an associate artist. This year, that was choreographer, director,...
From 11 to 21 June, the Holland Festival will present an online programme as close as possible to the core and essence of the original programme, which was cancelled due to the corona crisis. Together with artists from around the world who were due to perform in the 2020 festival, an alternative online programme has been put together. The festival theme, suggested by...
From 4 to 28 June 2020, Amsterdam will host the 73rd edition of the Holland Festival. Associate Artist this year is American choreographer, director, writer and dancer Bill T. Jones. His work will include the new show Deep Blue Sea, in which Jones himself dances and, assisted by a hundred mostly local...
One of the benefits of advancing secularisation is that beautiful buildings are becoming vacant in more and more places. You can do things with those buildings. With art, for example. So this week, Studio Orka from Belgium did something beautiful in the Maria Church in Vught. They turned the empty neo-Romanesque building into, yes, an empty church....
The Bijlmermeerpolder is still known as a district where you don't go unless something or someone forces you to. A stigma the apartment neighbourhood acquired in the 1980s when it served as a drain on society. And still its reputation is bad. A single incident of violence repeatedly damages the entire district, though that is...
When the Council for Culture released its long-awaited musical advice a month ago, its president Marijke van Hees was remarkably nervous. This was particularly evident in her choice to act as moderator at her own presentation. When there, at Amsterdam's Allard Pierson Museum, came (very mild) criticism of the advice, she shot to the defence. That became...
Jan Baeke has been associated with Poetry International as a programmer for many years. In this podcast, I talk to him about the programme and the theme of this 49th edition: The Nation of Poetry. It's about nationalism, of course, but also about identity. And about what role poetry plays in that. And then, of course, it's not primarily about folk songs. We...
The Drenthe village of Erica was rocked on the last weekend of April by the cosy noise festival Pitfest. And that attracted a motley mix of people. I walked around there for a day. A golf cart zooms across the roundabout of the 4-star resort in the outskirts of the Drenthe town of Erica. To the right of the tarmac are tightly mowed golf courses, to the left is a plot of land...
In the week when defenders of the Dutch language are flying into each other's hair over whether or not a schoolgirl should read Multatuli in the original language, the Council for Culture comes out with its advice for the literary sector. Already in the first chapter, it reads: 'those who start reading at a young age become more language literate, start liking reading more....
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