The 1970s have for some time been the target of what we shall conveniently call the up-and-coming generation. And so we are talking about the 1970s as the glory years of hippy-dom, the jubilant times of the left-wing church and everything else that, with today's knowledge, is dirty and dirty. They were the years when...
With its latest retrospective If We Ever Get To Heaven, EYE again convincingly and confidently presents itself as a museum that looks beyond film history. Previous exhibitions such as Expanded Cinema, which showcased visual artists working at the intersection of film and art, already demonstrated this. Now William Kentridge has been given the honour of...
He is the last surviving avant-gardist, and it will not have escaped new-music lovers that he turned 90 on Thursday, 26 March. I mean, of course, Pierre Boulez, the composer and conductor who once declared Schoenberg dead and suggested that maybe opera houses should be blown up because of their moldy programming. The same man then tirelessly broke a lance for the music of Arnold Schoenberg ...
In June, Boris Charmatz comes to the Holland Festival with manger. He introduced the theme of adults touching children at the former papal palace in 2011. A statement on a tricky current issue. Why don't choreographers speak out more often on poignant topical issues? Pass by new works from recent months and it strikes you that there are hardly any choreographers among them who...
The Netherlands is one of the few countries where Science Fiction plays no role in mainstream media, let alone in the arts. If we look upwards at all, it is through Govert Schilling's disarming Duplo bricks, or Vincent Icke's mildly ironic commentary in DWDD. Or turning 'Mission Earth', a failing soap opera with bickering comedians, into...
Just over a month earlier than usual, the Holland Festival is presenting its new programme this season. There is every reason for this. With the arrival of Ruth Mackenzie as artistic director, a fresh wind is blowing through the festival. Annet Lekkerkerker talks about the changes in the video below. The presentation of the brochure - finally readable thanks to a new design - shows...
The Holland Festival got a completely unknown new director in the person of Britain's Ruth Mackenzie. At least, to us. The flamboyant, artistically exceptional opera director Pierre Audi makes way for a woman who has presented herself mainly as a manager of festivals and cultural institutions, but whose ideas are anyone's guess. When she was presented, none of the...
23,000 signatures and a host of public meetings have caused Brett Bailey's impressive Exhibit B in London to be cancelled. The show, or rather, the event, has previously been seen with great success in the Netherlands, and garnered nothing but praise in Edinburgh too. We too went to see it, and we were impressed. In...
Declining visitor numbers, shrinking subsidies, impoverished programming: most Dutch theatres are struggling, research by NRC Handelsblad recently showed. Theatres welcomed 12 million visitors in 2012, according to NRC figures, a quarter less than in 2008. Festivals, on the other hand, are on the rise. More and more are being organised, and they are attracting more and more people - in total...
There is a world outside Amsterdam. There is culture there too. High-quality even. And of course, Amsterdammers know that too. After all, that whole world comes to Amsterdam every year for the Holland Festival, and if it were up to the director of the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg Melle Daamen, a lot more would come from abroad. Ballet, for example. Our national...
Because of my fascination with the complex relationship between listening and watching, I decided to visit three performances at the recent Holland Festival and experience what happened when I tried to pay equal attention to ears and eyes. The first was "Delusion of the Fury" (1966) by American composer Harry Partch, the second a concert performance of Philip Glass's opera "The CIVIL warS" (1983), the third a performance of Franz Schubert's "Die Winterreise" (1827) in which twenty-four short films by South African artist William Kentridge were shown.
Prinses Beatrix kan wel tegen een stootje hedendaags theater. Twee jaar geleden zat ze nog (als koningin) in de zaal bij The Life & Death of Marina Abramovic, en dit jaar bij The Crimson House van Lemi Ponifasio / MAU. Zo ongeveer één van de meest radicale – want luid, rauw en tamelijk ondoorgrondelijke – voorstellingen van deze editie van het Holland Festival. We kwamen er overigens niet helemaal uit, maar
Ivo van Hove heeft niet alleen een toneelstuk gemaakt op basis van Ayn Rands ideeënroman The Fountainhead. In 2006 wilde de artistiek leider van Toneelgroep Amsterdam er zelfs een heel nieuwe inrichting van het toneelbestel op baseren. 8 jaar later kunnen we constateren dat alleen de negatieve kanten van Van Hove’s visioen zijn gerealiseerd.
When someone speaks in sentences with words that repeatedly rhyme with 'art' or in which the syllable 'art' keeps popping up, you have to adjust to a different logic than that of everyday communication. If it is also a woman dressed in bright red who pronounces those words eloquently and with many mannerisms, suggesting that she is hyper-sensitive to anything to do with art, your thoughts balance between:
In Rome, they have known what good food is for 20 centuries or so. Bloodletting is everything. Seneca, a Roman of the better sort, wrote plays that elevated bloodshed to an art. Audiences feasted on them, just as they feasted on Seneca's recipes in Shakespeare's time, 1,500 years later, and as we feast on Game of Thrones on TV now. It can't be gory, can't be cruel enough. We like that.
Vanaf 2007 werkten videokunstenaar Matthew Barney (The Cremaster Cycle) en componist Jonathan Bepler aan een vrije bewerking van Norman Mailers meest verguisde boek Ancient Evenings. Aan Mailers mythologie uit het oude Egypte voegden zij de even mythische Amerikaanse auto-industrie toe in een ambitieus en operatesk filmproject met een veeleisende lengte van 5 uur 11 minuten.
Vanaf februari is River of Fundament op wereldtournee en het Holland Festival
After impressive retrospectives dedicated to John Cage (2012) and Edgard Varèse (2009), the Holland Festival this year put Venetian composer Luigi Nono in the spotlight. Under the title 'Trilogy of the sublime', the imposing Gashouder was the epicentre of three full-length concerts, short 'Nono interventions' sounded in the Rijksmuseum's subway, a two-day symposium was organised around Nono, and his widow Nuria set up an exhibition entitled 'Maestro di suoni i silenzi'.
Ieder Holland Festival is er minstens 1 voorstelling waarvan heel veel mensen zich afvragen waarom die geprogrammeerd is. Dit jaar valt die eer te beurt aan ‘Bestiaire d’Amour’ van en met Isabella Rosselini. We zoeken even naar antwoorden.
Weer actueel, nu Toneelgroep Amsterdam de voorstelling herneemt, mijn recensie uit 2014. Deze week ging de toneelbewerking van The Fountainhead in première. Het boek is verschrikkelijk, de voorstelling rammelt, de acteurs winnen maar nipt. De inhoud schept echter nog meer verwarring en dat is de reden waarom ik u niet zal tegenhouden om te gaan kijken. En Hans Kesting natuurlijk. Ik zet het even op een rijtje.
Bezoekers van de film Napoleon, afgelopen zondag in Ziggo Dome, die bedacht hadden een diner te reserveren in een van de pauzes, krijgen hun geld terug. Dit heeft het Holland Festival besloten nadat op internet, en daarbuiten, commotie was ontstaan over de belabberde service van de cateraar, en over de nogal magere kwaliteit van het gebodene. Bezoeker Marc Veerkamp zei er op facebook het volgende over:
To make it 450e birth anniversary of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Krzysztof Pastor created a full-length choreography for the National Ballet, loosely based on The Tempest (1611). The performance is part of the Holland Festival. Dramaturge Willem Bruls adapted Shakespeare's last play about the island exiled prince Prospero and his daughter Miranda into a script in which the story is told four times, from as many perspectives. The result is enchanting.
Lekker ‘ouderwets’ Holland Festival: een bijzondere opstelling die het publiek confronteert met de implicaties van heur eigen positie en kijkgedrag. En dat mag ook wel bij Fassbinder’s ‘Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant’. Melodrama was de Duitse theater- en filmgeweldenaar niet vreemd. De bittere tranen zijn van een modekoningin en haar entourage, klinisch is de setting, flinterdun het verhaal, en toch ongemeen spannend hoe dit damestoneel zich ontwikkelt.
Taal is muziek. Soms vergeten we dat. Dan denken we dat taal een manier is om objectieve betekenissen over te brengen. Beetje dom. Taal is voedsel voor alle zintuigen. Daar hoeft geen getokkel onder. Dat is pure opera zonder opsmuk. De Engelstalige voorstelling ’tis Pity she’s a whore’ die ik gisteren in het Holland Festival zag, bewijst dat. Zelfs als je geen moer verstaat van de zeventiende-eeuwse zinnen is het een genot om naar te luisteren.
Saturday, June 14, went off in a flood of evening gowns, dinner jackets, Dutch celebrities and Gooische Tanks War Horse premiered. A play about a war in which the Netherlands was neutral, and of which there are memorial stones in every village in the rest of the world. You can go and see it. Or not. We have listed six arguments.
"You know ma'am, that big red painting? Turn right before that". A young attendant shows us the way. At first glance, it's nothing. A man in semi-uniform, black trousers, white shirt, slowly turns on his axis. Sol Lewitt's mural, number 1084 from 2003, lends him the necessary decorum. Around the corner hang Barnett Newman and Andy Warhol. Would the man care? In this 'hall of fame' of conceptual art, the man's spinning stands out a little timidly. Some visitors remain standing, leaning against white walls or sinking down on the polished wooden floor. Those who take their time watch the spinning of the man and his fellow dervishes slowly take possession of the Stedelijk.
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