Some critics thought the opening performance of Festival Noorderzon in Groningen was so bad it made you cry. Others were less negative. Those certainly have a point. But then you have to look beyond what you are used to. When Bear, the hero of Noorderzon 2019's opening show, is imprisoned in a tower, he laments his fate through an eloquent yet sad...
Armed only with instructions, consisting of a short scenario and witness accounts from previous participants, you and up to 11 others carry out a number of sneaky tasks. On the street. Exactly what these subtle disruptions of the everyday are will remain a secret until the performance begins. It promises to be one of the most special projects at Festival Noorderzon, which runs from 15 to...
The central character in theatre-maker Marijn Graven's Lo Lie Taa was there early. At least, so he tells the mirrored floor and the audience in his monologue Lo Lie Taa. As a nine-year-old, he was already madly in love with his mother and not long after, his life was defined by pursuing as many splashy results of his...
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 Theater aan de Parade is slowly but surely starting to become the blot of cultural politics in Den Bosch. The outdated theatre has too low ceilings, too much plush, asbestos and past to still be a credit to the Brabant provincial capital. Viktorien van Hulst, director of the now 35-year-old Theatre Festival Boulevard, made a point of saying during her opening speech on 1 August that the...
'As programmers, we are more often in Ghent than in Amsterdam,' says Viktorien van Hulst, director of Theatre Festival Boulevard. The Bossche arts festival, which this year takes place from 1 to 11 August under the Sint Jan and at unexpected locations around the North Brabant capital, has for years stood out for its close ties with our southern neighbours. 'The Dionysian artists are sitting...
Post-colonial criticism and reflection ran like a thread through this year's Holland Festival programme. Not only William Kentrigde and Faustin Linyekula, the associate artists with whom the festival's programmers collaborated, their work addresses the devastating effects of centuries of Western European trade and commerce. In reframing political and social history and reclaiming...
'I think they understood.' Faustin Linyekula says it, very quietly, a little apologetically almost, to his fellow actor at the end of the performance Congo. A slightly relieved laugh can be heard in the main auditorium of Frascati, where Princess Beatrix is also seated. Shortly before, Daddy Moanda Kamono had erupted in an increasingly desperate tirade against our shared past....
Crash Park - La vie d'une île (2018) by French director Philippe Quesne performs 19th-century values in their 21st-century elaboration. The elitist explorer has become a modal tourist, moving in well-organised groups to every corner of the world in search of ultimate experiences, provided they don't get in the way of a return ticket western...
Anthony and Cleopatra is exactly the kind of repertory piece that people look forward to during the Holland Festival, or any other prestigious stage. Director and writer Tiago Rodrigues manages not so much to deflate that grandiose expectation as to reduce it to the intimacy of a duet and a play with extremely basic theatrical gestures. His two actors are dancers, an experienced choreographer duo
That you cannot shamelessly treat a black man as a rutting primal beast and a faceless object for your unlimited lust fantasy as a white woman? Seems logical to me, but for Angélica Liddell, world-renowned performance artist, it is typical of the new puritanism that threatens free art. She now brings The Scarlet Letter to the Netherlands, a theatrical performance that is rather...
'We are on the brink of a new cultural revolution. We need to move away from our paradigm and art can play a role in this. Art can show us images of a different future, a different thought. Artists can help bring that realisation in.' Speaking is writer and journalist Philipp Blom. In 2017, his...
On 11 April 2019, the Council for Culture put a shovel in the dykes of the polder that is the Dutch cultural system. After all, the basic infrastructure, established in 2009 to finally bake renewal and flow into the system, is dead. The structure carefully conceived over years has been turned into a ruin by 10 years of cultural policy in which the...
Learning is less about what you learn than from whom you learn it. Not that what you learn doesn't matter, but you simply learn more from an inspired person than from a teacher who completes his list. Fortunately, I have had many good teachers. Some of them are now demented or dead, with almost all of them...
Water and dance have agility in common. Yet there is much more to be gained from this interface. Two choreographies in the New Adventures series give audiences a water experience that is both playful and reflective. Under the title New Adventures, Dansmakers Amsterdam presents work by selected dancers and choreographers that they created during a four-week study residency at the production house,...
There is an artist café in Utrecht that few Utrechters know about. And I don't mean Theatercafé De Bastaard, where by now a whole generation of actors, filmmakers and writers come from, but the artists' foyer of TivoliVredenburg. I've eaten and hung out there a few times, as an embedded reporter of De Nacht van de Poëzie, when it's very late into...
'I work five nights a week and so I have to find out specifically when I can go to a concert. Sometimes I take time off for it. And then they do say, "hey, are you going to a concert again already?", and I say, "of course I'm going to a concert again". But I don't think it's extreme either.' Petra Gerritsen is process expert
'When I look in the auditorium at a classical concert now, I do think: it's full now, but in 20 years eighty per cent will be dead. So the bottom has to be fed, and TivoliVredenburg does that well. They do it, for example, with Out of the Blue, which is a programme where you get great food and by a special host
As part of "Hi, Figures!", Statistics Netherlands today released updated figures on the performing arts in the Netherlands. These show a cautious recovery, although the consequences of the 2011 interventions by the VVD and PVV are still painfully visible. The figures show that theatre in particular is struggling. There, the...
A thousand schoolchildren a day in the House of Representatives. No less than that. That's what Culture Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven wants. Costs 4.8 million. Money that you will actually pay through your theatre ticket, the library book, the museum ticket. Because real art could have been made from that 4.8 million. It is a big question why the compulsory Second Chamber visit has to be paid for from...
Dutch theatre is remembering less and less. This was evident last Friday during two meetings at ITA, the building that once housed the Stadsschouwburg. During Nieuwe Grond, part of the Dutch Theatre Festival, the topic was heritage. One meeting will possibly be remembered by the six attendees: the two guests plus presenter, and their three audience members. The other...
The hip-hop festival Woo Hah! nearly burst at the seams at its fourth edition last year. For its fifth edition, it diverted to the Beekse Bergen in Hilvarenbeek. We walked around there for a day. 'Make that circle bigger, make it bigger! Grooooter!' Speaking is Dutch chart topper Ronnie Flex. If you don't know him from his gigantic hits, then...
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...
Of course, we have Chriet Titulaer. But it kind of ends there. And to say we took those very seriously, back in the day? No. The future, and fantasising about it, is not really a thing in the Netherlands, at least not with the big publishers and broadcasters. A writer dealing with science fiction will never join a big...
Alí Calderón has written quite a body of work, but I didn't hear much of it during my stay at Poetry International. However, the poem 'Democracia Mexicana' did come along three times. A formidable poem, as it ends with a rotting baby corpse, so not for the soft-hearted among us. Democracia Mexicana is Calderon's hit poem. Like pop singers can make a hit...
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