We have been sitting on the edge of our seats here at home for several days watching Thomas Vinterberg's latest television drama. In Families Like Ours, the maker of Festen and Jagten describes how Denmark is being dissolved due to climate change. To do so, he uses no spectacular special effects, no CGI of tidal waves, no huge mass scenes. The world that goes down in Families Like Ours...
There is nothing wrong with just being really good at what you do. Nothing more beautiful than a single artist on an empty floor with nothing but their music, body and voice. The top three of my legendary art moments: All old-school stuff, I admit, but that's it with top moments: once established, it's...
When your evening starts with a stripping festival director and ends with pole dancing, you know you are not in a regular theatre. True, I was at the opening of the Queering Puppets Festival at Amsterdam's Plein Theater and it was a party. The Plein Theatre largely owes that to that stripping director Berith Danse, who was in...
VMBO schoolchildren in Flevopolder gained confidence from their teachers. They were allowed to figure out for themselves how to make a guided tour of world heritage site Schokland more fun and educational. So the third-year students set to work on a project to offer the second-year students something more fun than the pre-chewed programme they had been following. They did so through the rules
Floris Kortie has come of age. The classical-music industry's merriest curmudgeon has proved in 2024 that he can carry Podium Klassiek on his own. That he managed to get the continuation of Podium Witteman, where he was allowed to freewheel as the insightful nephew, through a deep crisis is to his credit. After the departure of Mike Boddé, who he says is more...
Major Eddy Posthuma de Boer exhibition at Berlin's Museum für Kommunikation proves major crowd puller
The art world owes much more to women than museums, galleries, magazines and other institutions portrayed for decades. The Arp Museum in Rolandseck is now making a splash with an exhibition that seeks to equalise the roles of women and men in the Dada movement.
Arrive in Groningen like a Van Gogh. Start at the monumental main train station and prepare for what awaits you at the Groninger Museum. A wonderful exhibition that is more than just Van Gogh and his art; it's a story about history, science and Groningen students' fascination with the tragic painter who changed the art culture...
The Amsterdam Museum is using the 750th anniversary of the capital to tell stories about unknown women. The museum juxtaposes photographs and objects from its collection and asks artists of today to react to them. This provides a picture of the city's past, but especially about the women who live and work there now.
In the first version of Explore The North's new website, the builders had forgotten to mention in which city the festival would take place. This has since been remedied with a beautiful 'about us' page, so that even non-Leeuwaars know where to go. The production house cum festival is in the Basic Cultural Infrastructure from the next edition. That means that...
Heartbreaking diary entries from the Ukraine war formed the basis for Nora Krug's new book. 'The drawn image has the power to provide a different perspective on reality.'
When I think of new music, I have never thought of fun. Rather, you think of seriousness, subtlety, taste to be acquired and listening experiences that you might later find ordinary. But not yet. So this year during November Music, I did laugh a lot. Not roaring (an occasional one), but simply, with happiness. While in the world...
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is becoming increasingly pervasive. Artists are also making use of it, as seen in this 18th edition of IDFA's DocLab.
With Ben Okri, the Internationales Literatur Festival Berlin (ILB) has brought in the grand master of contemporary literary storytelling. 'See the magic of things around you.'
Large spinning steel behemoths, mowing blades or relentless hands of a clock, which grind you as a human being if you don't duck, or jump, or roll away in time. There were two of them during Festival Circolo in Tilburg, this year, and it always impresses. It happened at Un Loup pour l'homme in the Spoorpark and at La Chute des Anges in...
Biogas. It works. In Tilburg, they have taken a big step in making circus romance more sustainable. The campfires, from the first edition the anchor of Circus Festival Circolo, have been modified. No longer fuelled by increasingly soggy firewood, beautiful yellow flames now play around glowing chunks. The wood fire became a gas fire, but designed by a pyrotechnician with circus experience. The flames...
Quantum entanglement, supersymmetry. The nerd in me could not get around the mystery of cosmic twins, which hundreds of billions of light years apart yet simultaneously take over each other's state when one of them is seen. Or something like that. In Blood Sister, Matzer's latest play, it's not billions of parsecs, it's an Atlantic Ocean and 17 years of life that those two identical sisters...
Eye Filmmuseum turns the spotlight on the American avant-garde film of the 1960s this autumn. An explosion of form experiments in a turbulent era. A movement that still inspires.
On Friday 20 September, Grammy-nominated composer Miho Hazama led the Royal Conservatory of Music's big band at the Conservatory Hall in Amare. And how. Dancer in nowhere A leap. A plié on one leg. A relevé on the toes. A plié on two legs. The head to the side and rhythmically to the other side and back like clockwork. A half arabesque...
On Saturday, I caught myself having a wonderfully sexist thought. Not surprising, probably, as sexist thoughts appear to be in the standard package of the product 'man'. But there I was, sitting in a not so very full auditorium during the Gaudeamus Festival at For Real by Andrea Voets. There, the idea struck me that it was pretty weird to see a woman concentrated...
'Plattenbau,' the driver says with some horror as we pass some boarded-up concrete porch flats. The GDR-built flats are in Alt Schöndorf, two kilometres outside Weimar's historic centre. Nailed shut for years, and squatters didn't look after them either. A hated legacy, but more by the West than the East. The...
You tell the best story by putting your audience on the edge of their seats right from the start. Using well-chosen fragments, Liesbeth Zegveld managed to build a story in which the climax stunned everyone. Even the excellently prepared Margriet van der Linden sat at the moment suprême with eyes like saucers and chin on...
Going over the edge, exploring and pushing boundaries, pushing the limits of bystanders' comprehension, performing feats no one expects. And seeing gnomes walking through a forest. Or reading things in water. Seeing half a boy save the world. The first 11 days of August 2024 were legendary, never to be forgotten. And all in the...
"How nice it would have been if, as a (male) viewer, I had really been taken out of my comfort zone by the fact that the anger was not so obviously played and commented on. How thought-provoking I would have been when they weren't making goofy faces at their Rudi Carell-German that - if implemented consistently - would have made me laugh....
We had barely recovered from the rebirth of Celine Dion. The traditionally long-winded and kitschy 'Son et Lumière' with which France had this time made the opening of the Olympics a quintessentially French event had also unleashed a storm of protests with a tableau vivant after the sadly just short of famous painting 'The Feast...
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