The SER report published on Friday 21 April rubs it in nicely: the cultural sector is on the verge of collapse. It is even worse than a year ago. This shows that the patience of a PvdA culture minister over the past four years has not helped. Indeed: Halbe Zijlstra's multiplier of misery is doing its job entirely as expected....
While Jan Martens' latest work, The Common People (2016), was at Amsterdam's Stadschouwburg last weekend, Utrecht's Theater Kikker is showing two older hits this week: Sweat Baby Sweat (2011) and The dog days are over (2014). Sweat and Dogdays are blockbusters and have already toured the world. At Kikker, they can now be seen as part of a...
The video artwork 'Ascent' is one of Fiona Tan's most recent works. Ascent is a feature-length video artwork: 1 hour and 17 minutes[ref]A work resulting from a special commission from the Izu Photo Museum in Japan[/ref]. You may already be familiar with this artist's work[ref]The now 50-year-old Fiona Tan is "no ordinary Indian girl", born in Pekan...
Maybe God is dead, but His church is alive. At least in Denmark. This has to do with what you might call the Danish paradox of faith: a highly secularised society with a Lutheran Folkekirke (=Volkskerk) supported by a large majority of the population [hints]The American sociologist Phil Zuckerman has commented on this aspect of Denmark (and also a little...
Op Art (optical art) is less well known than Pop Art. Until you see the works in question. There may be no Op Art stars of Andy Warhol status, but their creations directly resonate with images you know from art history. On Saturday 25 February, a major exhibition[hints]In collaboration with the Louisiana Museum in Denmark[/hints] opened at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam about these...
Dance artist Amos Ben-Tal and songwriter Spinvis put together an intriguing talk show. And it does not go at all as you expect. Because what happens when you get a very Dutch songwriter and an Israeli choreographer with a ballet past to produce a joint performance? Right. The talk show The light in the room stays on. We the audience, are a talk show audience. Also on stage are...
'Many people find contemporary dance difficult. Especially performances by young makers who experiment and seek new ways. At the Moving Futures festival, everyone can discover how dance can touch you. We do this not only by showing good performances by young makers. We also offer activities around it, context programmes. By doing so, we give the audience tools to make a connection with...
Sustainability, diversity and democracy. These are the core values of the European Capital of Culture, which Aarhus aspires to be this year. Mayor Jacob Bundsgaard says it. Rebecca Matthews, the CEO of Aarhus 2017 says it. If those values are also reflected in the programme, Juliana Engberg, programme director for Aarhus 2017, has done her job well. Other speakers' speeches follow
Het Veem is a small but important theatre and unofficial production house overlooking the Houthavens in Amsterdam. The house has long been home to internationally operating contemporary performing arts. A place where the artist and his or her experimental work are still central. Since Anne Breure became director in 2014, it bears the addition House of Performance. With...
Meg Stuart's two-hour heroic epic Until Our Hearts Stop, showing at the Rotterdam Schouwburg this week, does not engage in dramatic construction according to the rules of Aristotle's Poetics. We don't know who those people are there on stage. Nor do they seem to have been given any special assignment, although they are clearly being...
I wrote this story in 2003, following the publication of a major historical study on theatre attendance. I return to it often, this research. Because it keeps me with both feet on the ground while screaming for culture. And because it underlines the need to overhaul the system anyway. 'Nothing so constant...
Theatre group Aluin celebrates its 25th anniversary. The company, which originated at the Utrecht acting school, celebrated at the place where it all started: Utrecht's Theatercafé De Bastaard. On Sunday 23 October, they reprised their first ever performance, a play entitled 'It', based on the novella The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James. About a man who thinks he is destined...
This play is going to cost me a lot of friends, but it needs to get out. After all, the theatre industry is doing badly. And I can see more and more clearly where that is due to. And for once it's not Halbe Zijlstra. Or the VVD, or the population, or the Netherlands in general, or the zeitgeist. And it's not because of Netflix either...
A wonderful performance full of hilarity, excitement and lightness, yet it sent me out into the world with a sad feeling. It seems as if the four women in D3US/X\M4CHIN4 by choreographer/director Fernando Belfiore are in the land of infinite possibilities. Anything they can do. Do they also want everything? Are they still themselves when they can do everything? How does it feel when the earth...
Jetse Batelaan is one of the greatest theatre innovators of this still young century. His star rose in 2003, with a show in which five unique actors made reality theatre, and vice versa. Now, 13 years later, Batelaan has been the boss of one of the country's best youth theatre companies for some time, pushing the boundaries of that industry once again. And that...
Being the best at your craft, and then not in one craft, but in three or so. That, too, is what makes an artist an artist. Ben Duke is a great artist. He is a gifted dancer, a phenomenal actor and a cum laude graduate in English literature. It is therefore logical that he wrote the greatest poem in British history, the...
Amazing how more than a thousand performers at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival are willing to try their hand at the most difficult genre: comedy
The smallest details speak for themselves. For the second time during this edition of the Holland Festival, the legendary BBC series This Life comes along. Richard Cant, who plays a flawless lead role in Neil Bartlett's play Stella, was previously seen in This Life, the series that set the standard for the modern docusoap in 1996. So now live, up close, in De Brakke Grond's Red Hall, the man who also played a solid role in Midsomer Murders.
There I am. Next to Holland Festival director Ruth Mackenzie, on a grave, as part of the installation Gardens Speak on the stage of the main hall of Theatre Bellevue in Amsterdam. There is nothing to see, little to hear. Tone lights suggest a rising sun after a few minutes. I get up together with the ten other visitors. Quite a shame, because I was actually quite comfortable lying there.
The programme booklet sounded promising:
There are countries in the world, where the boundaries between art disciplines are not as sharply drawn as they are here. The Holland Festival, under the new leadership of Ruth MacKenzie, is catching us up. She is bringing events here where the boundaries between visual art, performance, video, film and performing arts can no longer be drawn. Events that generate meaning in ways that are quite new to us, such as The Encounter, last week, and Gardens Speak, later this week.
From scene 1, 'Sketches/Notebook' by Meg Stuart and her group Damaged Goods engulfs the audience in a plethora of experiences. Bending over and making quick spins. Swinging a lamp and putting some fellow performers in a circle of light. Making figures with your hands. Laying stones on the floor and walking intently around them. Choosing from richly stocked clothes racks to make a colourful, bizarre creation of yourself. Put up a wall around yourself and then watch what the other does with it: imitate, move, break down, dissolve in space. Playing with beams of light and rope. Running around. Jumping in place. Rattling wildly on and drum kit. Lingering musical motifs.
From choreographer Meg Stuart has shown work at the Holland Festival before: 'Alibi' (2002) and 'Forgeries, Love and Other Matters' (2004). This year, 'Sketches/Notebook' surprises, being more playful and lighter than her previous work.
On Saturday 4 June 2016, I attended the royal opening of the Holland Festival and was able to attend no review write about, because I was sitting in the front row of the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg. As the stage was elevated, I was looking against a black wall, above which only the front actors were visible. The back and lower half of the stage were completely eluding me.
Me wrote that on, and the Holland Festival generously offered me the opportunity to go and see the performance again, from a better seat. At the same time, the organisers told me that the first three rows of the Stadsschouwburg would be compensated at this performance. So I went to Amsterdam one more time, on Monday 6 June.
Before the performance, while not eating a blackened hamburger in theatre restaurant Stanislavski, I heard from the neat people at the little table next to me that the front seats were offered at a sharply reduced rate, and that people like them who had already bought tickets had the choice of thus getting a partial refund or going on the waiting list for a seat with better sightlines. Whether they eventually managed to get one of the spots with better visibility, I don't know. The performance
Wunderbaum. Among lovers of fresh and young theatre, this collective of creators stirred something up at the beginning of this century. They were born and bred under Johan Simons, where they formed the youth team of his legendary theatre group Hollandia. And because back then, every young maker really had to do something with the world, JongHollandia, later Wunderbaum, wanted the same. But because they lived in the post-ideological era and saw every day how the ideals of their teachers, parents and mentors came to nothing, it mainly became a club of doubters. And they were very good at that.
The show Sketches/Notebook (2013), which has its Dutch premiere at the Holland Festival on 6 June, is virtuosic, radical and extremely gentle. Choreographer Meg Stuart loves small scale, even when she occupies the biggest stages with partners like the Volksbühne (Berlin), Théâtre de la Ville (Paris) or the Münchner Kammerspiele. Details win out over big lines and often play a leading role in pieces that scrutinise human behaviour incredulously.
Sketches/Notebook stands out
'This regime also rules over you after you die. The regime steals your story. They use you to tell their own story. Relatives are forced to sign statements that the dead were killed by the opposition. The regime uses the dead to oppress the living.' Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury made a statement: Gardens Speak (Gardens Speak). An installation, an immersive[hints]definition: immersive, making you forget the real world around you[/hints] performance, in which the spectators themselves are actors. A performance that consists of a mountain of earth from which soft voices sound from beneath tombstones. That performance comes in June to Amsterdam, as one of the examples of the new Holland Festival programming by festival director Ruth MacKenzie.
The pile of earth in and on which the installation takes place represents the many thousands of anonymous backyard graves in Syria. At the beginning of the Syrian civil war, the struggle was still mainly between opponents of President Assad's dictatorship and his (secret) police. The first victims were often still just students taking part in peaceful demonstrations, handing out pamphlets, or attending the funeral of a friend. After all: bombing funerals was and is a proven method of murderous regimes and crime syndicates to eliminate insurgent networks.
Tania El Khoury heard of the Syrian alternative in 2013: the private burial in one's own backyard, or failing that, in an anonymous city park, with no headstone or memorial. Such an action is both an expression of fear and an act of resistance: these are deaths that the government can no longer abuse. 'The play was not originally intended for European audiences either. It was made in Lebanon and the text was also in Arabic. The last thing I thought about was the European audience. The idea was
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