Jet fighters, drones, thunderstorms with accompanying flooding and lovely babbling brooks with the occasional bird in a pine tree. All of Austria descended on the Gashouder at Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek grounds this weekend and it is what it promised: spectacle as only Austrian music spectacle can be. Georg Friedrich Haas' work 11000 Saiten is a great superlative: surround with emdr and...
Future health minister and deputy prime minister Fleur Agema graduated as an architect early this century with a study on the ideal prison. Artist Jonas Staal re-examined her graduation design a few years ago. Agema appears to have an extremely dystopian vision of the world in which prisoners and guards must pass through a disorienting, inky-black, concrete hell to...
Live music in the theatre, I long for it more and more. Performances in which actors are accompanied by a soundtrack, amplified with or without transmitter microphones, always only half captivate. You soon find yourself watching a kind of live performed film. But without the comfort of a cinema and the technical capabilities of the camera.... Sunday 9 June sat in...
Jazz-Rock, it still exists. In all those years of sitting in the theatre, reading books or listening to David Bowie or Rufus Wainwright, I had kind of forgotten about it. Music by real men, Heavy Metal for people who have studied for it, Gothic but with several conservatory degrees under their belt. Subtle chopping where the drummer's left hand is a 17/23rd...
That's where Christiane Jatahy had me for a moment. When during her directed and devised story 'Despois do Silencio', one of the actresses falls into a Winti-like delirium, and her colleagues try to keep her from colliding unceremoniously with spectators in the front row, I briefly think it is real. That's how used to reality we are by now...
Twenty years from now, I can say that I saw Daniëlle Deddens play once before she was a world star. It was on a somewhat chilly Saturday in June 2024 in the storage attic of an old mill in the centre of Delft. I was with about 20 other citizens of Delft, who had paid a few euros...
Kinan Abuakel took his Syrian classical music with him when he fled the country. With his Saz, a Syrian stringed instrument similar to the Greek bouzouki, which in turn is derived from the Turkish Buzuk, he plays a mixture of new and classical Syrian music. I heard it by surprise at Amsterdam's Podium Mozaïek. That's how I discovered live what I...
Riet, Peer Wittenbols' mother, has been dead for a few years. She took a lot of stories with her in her grave from the time she was called Marietje. Playwright Peer Wittenbols sought out those stories, actress Juul Vrijdag tells them. And so, for an hour and a half, I experienced a small miracle, because Marietje was alive again. And so did Riet. It...
Tien jaar na de dood van de wereldberoemde schrijver Gabriel García Márquez verschijnt de roman waaraan hij werkte toen hij het leven verliet. In augustus zien we elkaar is onaf, maar zeer genietbaar. Gestorven in het harnas Hij stierf in het harnas, de Colombiaanse auteur Gabriel García Márquez. De beknopte roman In augustus zien we elkaar was het boek waaraan hij werkte toen hij…
After the self-inflicted death of his beloved, writer Matteo Bianchi struggles with his grief, his anger and guilt. With Those Who Are Left Behind, he reaches out to others who went through the same thing. Conflicting feelings 'I hate him. I hate him so much for what he did.' Sometimes Matteo screams at the walls that his beloved S. is an asshole. And an egotist. But...
Mountains, trees, solitary inhabitants... Down in the valley is another 'real' Paolo Cognetti. You could call him the chronicler of mountains and mountain life. Few writers tell so beautifully about life at altitude, in the middle of nature, far from the hustle and bustle of the city, as Italian author Paolo Cognetti. With his filmed bestseller The Eight Mountains, he conquered the...
Een gevoelige, ontroerende roman over natuur- en menselijk geweld: De nacht beeft van Nadia Terranova is een aanrader. De grote aardbevingen in Umbrië van 2016 staan veel mensen waarschijnlijk nog wel voor de geest. Maar wie weet nog dat het zuiden van Italië ruim honderd jaar geleden werd getroffen door een verwoestende aardbeving, de meest vernietigende zelfs van Europa in de twintigste…
Hidden treasures. Like other museums, the Groninger Museum houses many objects that deserve to be exhibited. Interesting paintings, sculptures or archaeological splendour of which visitors are unaware. Happy birthday is a treat. The Groninger Museum celebrates its hundred and fifty-year anniversary with - among other things - an exhibition in which you get a look behind the scenes. Objects...
Als vakantiebestemming zijn de groene, weidse Italiaanse valleien heerlijk, maar op een dergelijke plek léven is minder idyllisch, toont Ginevra Lamberti in haar roman Iedereen slaapt in de vallei. ‘De vallei is geen plek maar een tijd waar geen eind aan wil komen, het leven hier is geen tijd maar een plek waarvan de uitgang niet te vinden is.’ Die niet…
Een buitenstaander of een onverwachte gebeurtenis die personages een spiegel voorhoudt en de boel op scherp zet – het is een klassiek literair gegeven. In de handen van de Braziliaanse schrijver Autran Dourado leverde dat een fascinerende roman op waarin er vooral veel gebeurt in de hoofden van de hoofdpersonen. Ooit was Luzia het kindermeisje van Maria, nu past ze…
One of the most famous people to survive Auschwitz, writer Primo Levi, and a simple bricklayer who made sure that he survived - with such protagonists, an author has a strong subject on his hands. That can't go wrong, you would think. Norse bricklayer He had just graduated as a chemist when Primo Levi, twenty-four and Jewish, was rounded up and deported...
It seems that at the inset performances of Maas Theatre&Dans' latest, 'Stuntkont', a few schools have already complained. Classes even walked out. Logical perhaps, at least for adult school teachers who can't take poop-and-pee jokes. Children from 6 to 106 can only laugh really hard at them. So poop-and-pee jokes turn out to be more amusing than I myself expected. At least when they are made...
Na haar geprezen en bekroonde debuutroman De hemel is altijd paars imponeert Sholeh Rezazadeh met haar tweede boek opnieuw. Ik ken een berg die op me wacht is een tedere, fijngevoelige en weelderige roman. Verbluffend sensitief Het is haast niet te geloven dat de van origine Iraanse schrijfster en dichteres Sholeh Rezazadeh (1989) pas sinds 2015 in Nederland woont. Haar taalbeheersing en manier van…
In zijn bekroonde roman Niki vertelt de Griekse schrijver Christos Chomenidis het roerige verhaal van zijn moeder en haar familie. Maar bovenal vertelt hij de lezer over dertig jaar roerige Griekse geschiedenis. Familiekroniek Met de boeiende familiekroniek Niki, twee jaar geleden bekroond met de Prix du Livre Européen, vertelt de Griekse schrijver Christos Chomenidis (1966) twee geschiedenissen: die van zijn moeder Niki en…
In his new novel Twilight, Philippe Claudel dissects man's dark motives as usual. French author Philippe Claudel does not have an overly cheerful view of man, as his compellingly told novels show. Twilight is the latest shoot on the impressive tree of his oeuvre, and fits in seamlessly. As he did in previous novels such as Grey Souls (2003), The Report of Brodeck (2007)...
In The Plains by Argentine writer Federico Falco, a writer returns to life in the country after breaking up with his lover. This makes for a beautiful, wistful novel about grief, origins and the nature of life itself. 'No single word tames grief. No word dispels it. No word can truly express it.' Those thoughts...
"In America, when you put two guys on stage, the audience expects them to beat each other up, or fuck each other. In this play, neither happens, but in the theatre it's almost always about two men fighting or fucking." Legendary words from Samuel D. Hunter. He wrote the play 'A Case for the Existence...
Je zal maar witte man zijn van zekere leeftijd. Sommigen van ons zijn het zo zat overal de schuld van te krijgen dat ze uit pure wanhoop PVV of erger hebben gestemd bij de laatste verkiezingen. Daarom is het goed dat toneelschrijver Erik Snel, zelf witte man van zekere leeftijd, een stuk heeft geschreven over het archetype van de Nederlandse…
It is one of my worst guilty pleasures. Egg salad from the better-filled mayonnaise manufacturer from Twente, with a close second to their tuna salad. I can't get enough of those. And now let them have both of those on the table at Het Kerstdiner in Theater Kleine Willem in Enschede. Chic is different, but in the...
"Listening, not always understanding, but trying to go along with (the black) voices ensured that, in my opinion, there was a beautiful text at the heart of the performance Ik zeg toch sorry." If a short preface to a play has as much meaning as this quote by Raymi Sambo, the text itself must offer much more....
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