It takes guts: walking down Rotterdam's Kruiskade with a big wooden cross and shouting "Mason was a fish!" shouting. The drug-addicted residents of St Paul's Church, the dishwashers at Chinese restaurants and waiting passengers at the tram stop look on in bewilderment. Sandro Lima shouts lyrics about Mason the saviour like a possessed religious maniac. Moments before, we are at...
On Sunday evening 11 September, the VSCD Drama Awards, the VSCD Mime Prize, the VSCD Youth Theatre Awards and the AVRO Toneel Publieksprijs 2011 were presented at the Gala van het Nederlands Theater. And that you then know that VSCD stands for the Association of Theatre and Concert Hall Directors and AVRO for General Free Radio Broadcasting. The award for the best male lead of the past...
Amsterdam, 1999. Studying Theatre Science, first-year theatre analysis class. I sit with notepad and pen clutched in fingers, making indecipherable notes. Halfway through the lecture, Sjaron Minailo (Tel Aviv, 1979) saunters in, dressed in a huge fur coat, with big Gucci sunglasses and dreadlocks. With a sigh, he plops into the back lecture bench, hears three sentences of the disrupted lecturer's speech
Holland Festival, Julidans, IT's, Over 't IJ. End-of-season theatre is always strewn across Amsterdam. Between April and September, international performance offerings migrate from Utrecht (Springdance and Festival aan de Werf) via Amsterdam to Rotterdam (Internationale Keuze). If you want to experience something of contemporary, international dance, Springdance, HF and Julidans are the places to be. [For...
Firs heet hij. En hij komt altijd te laat. Vanwege de jicht. Arme huisknecht. Firs werd geschapen door Anton Tsjechov. In zijn meesterwerk De Kersentuin gaat het over de verveling en lamlendigheid van de oude rijken, en Firs is de huisknecht die het allemaal ziet gebeuren. Tsjechov laat hem sterven, aan het eind, wanneer de vertrekkende huiseigenaren hem totaal vergeten…
They say of Isabelle Huppert, for years the most beautiful and mysterious appearance on the cinema screen, that she has the look of a dead zebra finch live. I had at least heard about that, but had never experienced it in real life. Until Friday night 3 June at Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg at Un Tramway in the Holland Festival. And it's true...
Dying young turns out to be advantageous not only for skywalkers like Buddy Holly, Sam Cooke or Jesus. Even in a rather elitist world like that of German theatre, you can achieve star status through an early death. At least that happened to Christoph Schlingensief, the man who died of lung cancer in 2010. The man had already achieved stardom throughout the German-speaking world,...
That was a bit of a grind for British theatre critics. The celebrated director Deborah Warner (1959) recently pulled Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal out of the closet. A play from 1777, and an untouchable part of the British theatre canon. Building on the style of her earlier production Mother Courage (2009) Warner also indicated The School for Scandal - goddamn - a quirky, contemporary twist.
"With many video, light, music and noise - like a rock concert, " grins Warner in the office of the Barbican Theatre In London. "Mother Courage had an incredibly populist, exciting atmosphere. I love that arrogant theatricality immensely, and I wanted to continue that style in The School for Scandal. For me, the big challenge was to explore the Brechtian theatre style of Weimar - which I got through Mother Courage had discovered again - to collide with an eighteenth-century theatre text."
This year, the Holland Festival brings the extraordinary French-Algerian co-production Nya, which combines achievements of modern and classical dance with hip-hop and, in addition, Ravel's Bolero sounds alongside Houria Aïchi's Algerian evergreens.
Of course, you were all lining up for that legendary Richard III by Orkater with music by Tom Waits. Or you had locked yourself in for Oostpool's small-room gem 'Till the fat lady sings', or you just didn't want to miss an episode of O O Cherso and The Voice of Holland. Anyway: now you know what you...
Ongeveer tien jaar geleden stond er op het grote podium van de Rotterdamse concertzaal De Doelen een frêle en nog zoekende jonge vrouw, een singer-songwriter in een andere taal dan Engels. Soms in het Portugees maar meestal in het criollo van de Kaapverdische eilanden presenteerde deze Sara Tavares met minimale begeleiding haar cd ‘Mi ma bô’ die haar later internationale…
Jens van Daele concludes his series of choreographies on the seven deadly sins with the performance Brides for Peace. The piece is based on the art performance Brides on Tour by Italian artists Pippa Bacca and Silvia Moro. Hitchhiking and dressed in wedding dresses, with a text 'Peace' on their chests, they travelled from Milan to Jerusalem in 2008. The journey went...
Ik ben geen kenner van de uitvoeringspraktijk van Bachs Johannes Passion en ken dat andere stuk, de Mattaheus Passion, vooral van een paar tv-fragmenten en verregaande bewerkingen zoals die bij Platels Pitié. Verwacht van mij dus geen oordeel over hoe goed de versie was, die op 5 april 2011 in het Concertgebouw te zien en te horen was, in verhouding…
Amsterdam-based company Dood Paard itself translated Shakespeare's 'Othello' and waves goodbye to the bard with 'Bye Bye'. The quirky collective performs a one-and-a-half-hour topical comedy of manners and soul mirror, in which pointing at 'The Other' is central. Shakespeare's plays are quite often performed quite reverently. . Moreover, the adored 'bard' from Stratford-upon-Avon has bestowed on the English language countless expressions that have come to...
"That looks like a book series!" my wife spoke with some horror upon seeing the cover of 'The Revenge of Iphigenia'. And yes, it has to be said: in book format, the poster of Theatre Group Alum's latest theatre production is a bit too much of a stretch. From the A0 poster, you would never have thought so. Indeed: those posters of Alum, which...
Of course, we sometimes miss one. And of course Caro Emerald is cool and Graffity 6 is new. But there is more culture in the Netherlands than many users of mainstream media realise. Deep into the 1980s, sports halls were already full for Rai musicians, and that was years before Cheb Khaled penetrated the charts with Aïsha. The Cape Verdean community in Rotterdam...
In november verwijderde de door het Smithonian-mecenaat gefinancierde National Portait Gallery het werk nog, na protesten van Amerikaanse katholieken en Republikeinen. Zij vonden de video, getiteld ‘A fire in my belly’ van de in 1992 overleden New Yorkse kunstenaar David Wojnarowicz aanstootgevend. Gisteren maakte het Metroplitan Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York bekend het werk dat ze het…
According to the Dutch film press, the French prison drama Un Prophète and the Pixar animated film Toy Story 3 were the best films shown in Dutch cinemas this year. Dutch winner is Hanro Smitsman's grim teen drama Schemer, the Kring van Nederlandse Filmjournalisten announced. This result is the result of a survey of 54 film journalists who each...
Timothy Leary is niet dood. Het stoffelijk omhulsel van deze kleurrijke goeroe van de tegencultuur uit de jaren zestig mag dan op 31 mei 1996 zijn bewoner in de steek hebben gelaten, Leary’s asdeeltjes cirkelen in een baan om de aarde, zijn geestelijke erfenis wordt bewaard op internet en als het gerucht waar is reist een bandopname van hem aan…
Bloody and hard to burn out of your memory are the police photographs Walter Stokman has incorporated into Scena del crimine about Naples and the mafia. What makes those images so unforgettable is not only the gruesomeness, but also the unreality that clings to them. Razor-sharp, brightly lit, as if it was all staged. As if that girl in that immaculate...
Anyone who walks into the venue where choreographer/visual artist Piet Rogie's performance 'Stardust' is to take place is immediately astonished. In the vacant exhibition hall of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, ropes are stretched, it is teeming with seemingly carelessly scattered props and four cement mixers stand along the side like implacable sentinels. The whole space radiates that things are getting exciting. And the viewer is not disappointed with that.
Op het Gala van het Nederlands Theater in de Amsterdamse Stadsschouwburg zijn gisteravond de belangrijkste toneelprijzen uitgereikt. Kees Hulst won de Louis d’Or voor de meest indrukwekkende mannelijke hoofdrol, de rol van Jörgen Hofmeester in’ Tirza’ bij het Nationale Toneel. Maria Kraakman won de Theo d’Or voor de meest indrukwekkende vrouwelijke dragende rol, Orlando in de gelijknamige productie van Toneelgroep Oostpool. Het stuk ‘Oog om Oog’, met onder meer Linda van Dyck en Victor Löw, won de AVRO Toneel Publieksprijs.
Een rode loper, veel champagne en nog veel meer geknuffel. Het is een warm weerzien voor theaterland, het Gala van het Nederlands Theater in de Amsterdamse Stadsschouwburg. Een spannend weerzien ook, want de belangrijkste Nederlandse toneelprijzen worden vanavond uitgereikt.
Snow has fallen, a thick layer of fresh snow. Fake snow admittedly, but real enough to imagine yourself in the middle of Russia. There, in the city of Sverdlovsk, or Yekaterinburg, once lived the man about whom the show 'Poets and bandits' is about. Boris Ryzhy (1974-2001) turned the raw realities of his hometown into poems. He left more than a thousand poems to the world. His breakthrough came at the Poetry International festival in Rotterdam, in the year 2000. A year later, he was dead. Boris Ryzhy, 26, had hanged himself.
Theatre group De Warme Winkel makes that link with Rotterdam if only because 'Poëten en bandieten' is played there. An old factory hall serves as a backdrop for the run-down working-class neighbourhood in which Ryzhy grew up. From behind a work table, actress Mara van Vlijmen calls Rotterdam residents. None of them are at home. But on their answering machine is now one of Ryzhy's poems, which must be a wondrous experience for the listeners. The Warm Shop does not show how the professor's son Boris ended up in that poor neighbourhood. Whereas he himself talks about an environment full of drab flats in his poems, the stage setting is more reminiscent of the outdoors, with all that vast snow. The atmosphere is cosy and warm. On a float decorated with candles, a folk ensemble comes on, singing Russian songs. Old-fashioned songs, and nothing pop or punk.
By Willem Jan Keizer
Rotterdam - Thanks to conductor Valeri Gergyev, we get more insight into the huge reservoir of Russian composers. Rodion Shchedrin for example. Last year a piano concerto of his was performed, Sunday night in de Doelen it was his opera for the concert stage 'The Enchanted Wanderer', after the book 'The Enchanted Wanderer' by Nikolai Leskov. The opera is dedicated to conductor Lorin Maazel, who also conducted the premiere in New York in 2002.
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