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Nude is main theme at 33rd edition Netherlands Film Festival, Hoe Duur was de Suiker opening film

Paul Verhoeven, Dick Maas, Katja Schuurman, Monique van de Ven and Kim van Kooten are all special guests at the upcoming edition of the Dutch Film Festival. Nothing special, you might think, but if you see them on the festival posters you probably won't recognise them. After all, they are namesakes of well-known film personalities who this year

10 per cent less ticket sales, but Festival Boulevard is still satisfied.

Festival Boulevard in Den Bosch sold 55,000 tickets this year, 5,000 less than in 2012. The festival, which this year was held from 1 to 11 August, did attract more crowds for the free offerings on the festival square. This brought the total number of visitors to the festival this year to 145,000, 5,000 more than in 2012. As the venue occupancy is still nice at 85%, the drop in ticket sales will mainly be due to a smaller offer of performances.
In 2012 kromp het fe...

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I Like To Watch Too is a must for keeping the performing arts in the Netherlands young and fresh

A man and a woman dance passionately in the hall of Paradiso. Such an experimental dance performance is unusual for the Amsterdam pop palace. Yet the festival I Like To Watch Too right here. Many people feel a barrier towards this kind of performance, but here there is just the right 'in and out' atmosphere to make avant-garde art something you can just look at and that always triggers something in you.

'This was the site of the Cold War' Dennis Meyer on Festival The Base

"I am very curious about the audience's reactions. People always have an image at a festival. They come, expecting to experience all sorts of things. What you get here is the terrain, an exploration and a story that emerges as a result. The main energy that exists on and around this terrain is, "I get to go on it, and what's there? On that energy, I want to build on."

I Like To Watch Too throws open doors to experimental dance

Is avant garde dans niet te hoogdrempelig? Is het nog wel levensvatbaar in deze barre culturele tijd? I Like To Watch Too wil dit misverstand uit de weg ruimen. Het festival brengt experimentele dans dichter bij het publiek dan ooit.

Suzy Blok stelde I Like To Watch Too al voor de zevende keer samen. Het hele jaar heeft ze voorstellingen van jonge dansmakers gescout. ‘Behalve hoge dans-kwaliteit was mijn criterium dat het fysieke voorstellingen met een hoge performance-kwaliteit moeten zijn. Ik...

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Shirokuro © Anja Beutler

Unmercifully gracious, 'Shirokuro' builds on hammered Ustvolskaya @HollandFestival

Holland Festival

The collaboration between pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama and choreographer Nicole Beutler in the performance 'Shirokuro', seen last week at the Holland Festival, provides a beautiful perspective on two piano sonatas by Galina Ustvolskaya. 'Shirokuro' means black and white in Japanese. Despite strong visuals and impressive co-protagonists on stage, the Russian composer's absolute music is never explained and therefore retains its sheer power.

Russian flowers and Beatrix @HollandFestival

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Gorgeous dresses, big sunglasses and high heels. It is clear that the performance by the famous Moscow theatre company Theatre of Nations also attracted a large Russian audience. Men in suits occasionally talking to their sleeves seem to testify to Russian billionaires present. But nothing could be further from the truth when suddenly Princess Beatrix and her entourage enter the auditorium. 

Fewer audiences, but fuller halls for @hollandfestival 2013

69,500 visitors, at least 5,000 fewer than previous editions, but the halls were fuller. With 82% audience occupancy, the Holland Festival organisers are satisfied with the 2013 festival. Whether that higher occupancy rate, apart from the smaller number of performances (14 fewer than last year) is also due to smaller halls, is impossible to find out from here, but the fact that the large Theater Carré, with its many unsellable low-visibility seats, was also hardly used this year will certainly have helped.

Franui provides the most fun Mahler evening in years at @HollandFestival

Holland Festival

What to expect from a 'musicabanda' from East Tyrol? Gemütliche folk music? Yodelling? Dance music for weddings and parties? An evening in a beer pub? Either way: definitely not Mahler. But why not, thought the Franui from the village of Innervillgraten. Result: an enervating performance around orchestral songs. We have never heard Mahler like this before.

Nowhere does the sun set so functionally as on Terschelling

Oerol, the festival with Terschelling as its stage, has had two wet, cold and windy days. The streets are coloured yellow, red, blue and black by rain suits. Actors play in transparent rain suits, to make costumes still come into their own. Or have someone standing behind them with umbrella to protect them from the rain.
De hele tribune zit vol met mensen in poncho of regenpak. En daaronder minstens drie lagen kleding. Want het is koud, het waait en de kans op een bui is g...

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Martin Wuttke makes Berlin museum night worthwhile at @hollandfestival

Holland Festival

There are those who spend nights queuing for a ticket. After all, the Berliner Ensemble is mythologically big. As big as the Royal Shakespeare Company in England, or La Comédie Française in France. Monuments to cultural history, dedicated to one writer, like Brecht or Shakespeare, or to an entire history, as the French are used to. We Dutch have

Photo: Anne Bonthuis

Exhibit B confronts with probing looks @hollandfestival

Holland Festival
Een gezellig groepje dames dat lachend en kletsend binnenkwam, verlaat beduusd en betraand de zaal. Van slag, beschaamd, zo zie ik alle bezoekers naar buiten komen. Wat met woorden moeilijk te omschrijven is, staat op hun gezicht geschreven. Exhibit B van Brett Bailey is meer dan indrukwekkend. Het is een expositie die confronteert en raakt.
Slavin Saartjie Baartman werd vanaf 1810 naakt tentoongesteld als uitwas van de natuur. Na haar dood werden haar skelet en geprepareerde g...

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Chris Marclay enchants @hollandfestival with his found footage collages

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Multidisciplinary jack-of-all-trades Chris Marclay has broken through with his film project The Clock: every second of the day represented with found footage. It took him five years to make the 24-hour work. That says something about the way he makes his art. The incredible precision with which he edits makes his work so convincing that the viewer almost falls into a trance.

The Holland Festival presented three of his works at EYE, the new film museum, in which he collaborated with MAZE, a descendant of the Maarten Altena Ensemble.

The Pyre: taut, disruptive performance by Gisele Vienne @HollandFestival

Holland Festival
Anyone suffering from the misconception that dance is about beauty is mercilessly disabused of the dream by Gisele Vienne. Her pieces are about pain. Sometimes gory and explicit, sometimes sublimated but no less powerful. The Pyre is an overwhelming piece that leaves the audience dizzy.
In een duister decor, een tunnel van buizen met LED-lampen, begint danseres Anja Röttgerkamp aan haar performance: op de grond, haar voor het gezicht, moelijk zichtbaar maar met een inten...

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Two concentrated chickens and something with Chekhov at @hollandfestival

Holland Festival
Seagull, an early play by Anton Chekhov, is about drama in the same way that his equally famous play Cherry Garden is about cherry growing or real estate fraud. Not so. It seems to be a mistake that stage artists often make and that Chekhov cites in his 115-year-old play: thinking that everything is always about you. Which is why Thomas Ostermeier, lauded German director, cannot be blamed for the fact that his direction of The Seagull at Toneelgroep Amsterdam is about theatre.
Die keu...

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Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo disappoints with storm painting at @hollandfestival

Er bestaat dus figuratieve muziek. Muziek die, net als een figuratief schilderij, een tamelijk accurate afbeelding van de werkelijkheid biedt. De compositie 'Hurricane Transcriptions' van Sonic Youth-gitarist Lee Ranaldo is zo'n plaatje: 17 strijkers van het tamelijk weergaloze ensemble Kaleidoskop doen een aardige impressie van de orkaan Sandy die New York vorig jaar trof, en Lee Ranaldo zingt daar een liedje bij.
Teleurstellend? Best wel. Eigenlijk net zo teleurstellend als het optreden van Gr...

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Community art of 'Hidden War' forges bond between Dutch and Guatemalans

Vrede van Utrecht Het is er koud, kil en donker. Maar ook stil, groen en ruim. Bezoekers werden hier tot voor kort niet geduld. En nu opent Fort Nieuwersluis, vlakbij Breukelen, de deuren. Van 20 tot en met 23 juni is er de voorstelling ‘Verborgen oorlog’ te zien. Guatemalteekse spelers laten hierin zien hoe het is om in een gewelddadig land te leven. En Nederlandse spelers voegen daar hun ervaringen aan toe over hoe het is om uit een vrij land naar een land als Guatemala te gaan.

Het Waterlin...

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Marie on a string: Anja Röttgerkamp stars as an unknown soldier in Gisèle Vienne's The Pyre @HollandFestival

Holland Festival
'The Pyre', de nieuwste voorstelling van de internationaal rijzende ster Gisèle Vienne, lijkt aanvankelijk minder verontrustend dan haar eerdere werk. Stukken als 'Jerk' (2008), gebaseerd op het waar-gebeurde verhaal van een jonge seriemoordenaar, en 'This is how you will disappear' (2010), met een donker bos in de hoofdrol, waren slechts op enkele plekken in Nederland te zien. Hopelijk brengt dit optreden tijdens het Holland Festival daar verandering in. Gisèle Vienne studeerd...

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Zimmermann & De Perrot give circus genre creative tap at @hollandfestival

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Circus, tricks, clownery, spectacle: it has been a party for centuries. But roughly the same party every time.

Zimmermann & De Perrot, originally clown and DJ respectively, found each other in the brilliant insight that circus could be turned into beautifully absurd modern theatre.

'El Djoudour' is interesting as a cultural-political project, but does not convince artistically @Holland Festival

Holland Festival
Mannnen en vrouwen samen op de dansvloer, het is in grote delen van de moslimwereld nog steeds verboden. Twee jaar geleden stond de dansvoorstelling 'Nya' op het Holland Festival, een stuk geschreven op de huid van negen Algerijnse dansers, merendeels B-Boyz van de straat, maar ook de zoon van een balletlerares uit Algiers deed mee. Dit jaar keerden de Franse choreograaf Abou Lagraa, zijn vrouw Nawal Ait Benalla en een groot deel van de Algerijnse cast terug in het Holland Fest...

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Desdemona in black and white

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Is the kingdom of the dead in the opera Sunken Garden by Michel van der Aa a 3D garden full of brilliant colour, director Peter Sellars chooses in Desdemona by Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré for sober black and white. On the stage of a sold-out Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ are glass bottles and jars, sometimes lit from below, sometimes from above, with hanging light bulbs like flickering candles. On the left are a number of ngonis (Malian lute) and two koras (Malian harp lute), played by black musicians.

Chilean IK generation seeks revolutionary art at @hollandfestival

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Six actors, four years in a bunker. One is dead. Those are the details we have to make do with in Tratando de hacer una obra que cambie el mundo. According to this title, the actors are trying to create a play that will change the world. The characters have locked themselves away in an underground bunker and receive occasional provisions via a packet.

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