With an average of two novels a year, the Flemish writer has built a huge and unique body of work in over thirty-five years - he turns 63 this week, but the number of books he has written far exceeds that number. Interview with the man who writes faster than his shadow, in ten quiz questions. 'Well, I don't appear to be a connoisseur of my own work, do I?'
Recently, Lidy Blijdorp (* 1986) took over the cello of well-known cellist Anner Bijlsma (* 1934). It was his wish for the instrument to be played by her from now on. Via the Netherlands Music Instruments Fund (NMF), the instrument came to her. The maker of this cello is not known. However, it is certain that it originated from...
The summer period is a fine time for catch-up reading - books from recent times that you still wanted to read but didn't get around to before - but we also got a glimpse of a few upcoming titles. That made for a fine, varied crop this month. Eifel adventures Since The Detour, there hasn't been a new novel...
Tim Honnef is one of the few Dutch with a performance at the Fringe. How did he end up here?
Jetse Batelaan is one of the greatest theatre innovators of this still young century. His star rose in 2003, with a show in which five unique actors made reality theatre, and vice versa. Now, 13 years later, Batelaan has been the boss of one of the country's best youth theatre companies for some time, pushing the boundaries of that industry once again. And that...
How to avoid choice stress at the Edinburgh Fringe bursting at the seams on all sides? We do an experiment: a day on the flow of flyers.
Being the best at your craft, and then not in one craft, but in three or so. That, too, is what makes an artist an artist. Ben Duke is a great artist. He is a gifted dancer, a phenomenal actor and a cum laude graduate in English literature. It is therefore logical that he wrote the greatest poem in British history, the...
No, these sentences are not in Griet Op de Beeck's theatre monologue Mona, but nicely sum up the bestseller Come Here That I Kiss You (28 printings in just under two years). Op de Beeck adapted the first part into one of Festival Boulevard's most impressive performances. We do see nine-year-old Mona's sentence as a backdrop, complete...
Once upon a time there was this film, Ladri di Biciclette, Bicycle Thieves in Dutch. Italian director Vittorio de Sica established a totally new film movement with it in 1948: neo-realism. Amateur actors pretty much played their own lives at the bottom of the social ladder. Engaging, inspired, raw and confrontational, especially at the time. Little people, caught in the spiral of social...
Adding three tonnes a year is cause for celebration. But Viktorien van Hulst, at the helm of the Bossche Theatre Festival Boulevard for the second year, had to restrain herself in her opening speech. Because the subsidising Performing Arts Fund does not give money to a large number of well-performing fellow institutions despite a positive assessment, the suffering in the performing arts exceeds the joy. Torn is called that....
"Things happen, and then they happen again, but not the same way, not quite; such is the logic of the biennial. And then there are things which have never happened before, and which happen now and in a time that seems somehow out of time, or takes our 'now' out with it." [hints]"Things happen, and then they happen again, but not....
The Netherlands is commemorating the MH17 disaster this month. Two years on, the question of guilt is still not unequivocally answered. The protagonist of Pieter Waterdrinker's novel Poubelle has less trouble with that: who holds himself mostly responsible. A conversation with correspondent novelist Waterdrinker: on modern European history, the Russian mentality, Great Literature and the shit of contemporary Europe.
As soon as you enter the Ketelhuis of Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek, a dark droning tone takes you into the misty, somewhat ominous atmosphere of 'Until the Lions' by Akram Khan Company. A huge disc from a tree trunk, with jagged annual rings and cracks, will become the scene of a mythical battle. At stake is the human body: weak, strong, male, female. Boundaries will perish.
A big band, a ticking clock, conspiracy theories and twelve-tonality. Mix that in a theatrical setting and it can go whooping out of control. Yet composer Darcy James Argue manages to make it a propulsive and energising whole, with help from director Isaac Butler and cinematographer Peter Nigrihi.
This year's Holland Festival spotlights Rotterdam-based theatre collective Wunderbaum with the revival of 'The Coming of Xia', premieres of 'Privacy' and 'The Future of Sex' and the film 'Stop acting now'. With this film, Wunderbaum concludes their four-year project 'The New Forest', a 'Platform for social change', according to Wunderbaum, "The New Forest depicts transition and casts a...
It came anything but naturally, writing his collection of short stories The Pier Collapses. Mark Haddon, made famous with The Miraculous Incident with the Dog in the Night, novels come a lot easier. 'I've been trying to write short stories for a long time, and I knew I should be able to do it, but I never succeeded. It was like a...
You don't have to go to Terschelling at all for an atmospheric location performance. COURAGE by Conny Janssen Danst is an exciting experience on a totally, totally neglected place.
In the 1980s, she started choreographing with Djazzex, years later she performed for Obama. Now Conny Janssen (interview here) with her ensemble at the Ferro Dome. A dilapidated venue you wouldn't expect much from the outside. Plans to turn it into a Rotterdam Heineken Music Hall are according to the AD cancelled. It's as if the city of Rotterdam said to Conny: here's a place we can't do anything with, you do something with it. Dut succeeded her wonderfully: thanks to a creative approach, the entire industrial entourage has a underground-appearance.
This way from row nine, it is like being knee-deep in carnations yourself. The heads of the audience in front of me merge silently into a forest of stems crowned with pink, through which dancers carefully step back and forth like leggy chickens.
The find is great: Nelken by Pina Bausch depicts paradise as a place where you have to be careful or things will go wrong. The carnations force the dancers to be careful. As a spectator, you go along with them, without all the underlying thoughts immediately coming through to you.
We are all going to die! We already have that certainty in. And since the dawn of mankind, every new generation invariably knows that it is going to happen to them now. After all: their successors have never prospered anywhere like today's youth. Nice premise for a concert, thought German director Sebastian Nübling[hints]Nuling was a guest at the Holland Festival last year with an adaptation of Hebbel's play Nibelungen, read the review and a interview.[/hints], good idea to programme, thought the Holland Festival. I seriously wonder why.
Maarten Baanders saw an opera that remained an island. An omnivore was Athanasius Kircher (1602 - 1680). No phenomenon in the universe could escape his urge to investigate. A universal scholar he was, but also a fantasist. Hence, he did not count in science. But for a grotesque opera, you can hardly imagine a more attractive protagonist. Louis...
On Saturday 4 June 2016, I attended the royal opening of the Holland Festival and was able to attend no review write about, because I was sitting in the front row of the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg. As the stage was elevated, I was looking against a black wall, above which only the front actors were visible. The back and lower half of the stage were completely eluding me.
Me wrote that on, and the Holland Festival generously offered me the opportunity to go and see the performance again, from a better seat. At the same time, the organisers told me that the first three rows of the Stadsschouwburg would be compensated at this performance. So I went to Amsterdam one more time, on Monday 6 June.
Before the performance, while not eating a blackened hamburger in theatre restaurant Stanislavski, I heard from the neat people at the little table next to me that the front seats were offered at a sharply reduced rate, and that people like them who had already bought tickets had the choice of thus getting a partial refund or going on the waiting list for a seat with better sightlines. Whether they eventually managed to get one of the spots with better visibility, I don't know. The performance
So you can get too close to a work of art. I don't even know if it really applies to paintings, that toxic fumes can rise from them, as some claim, but it certainly applies to theatre art. During the opening of the Holland Festival 2016, I was sitting in the front row of the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg. Normally already not the best place for those who want to keep a bit of an overview of what is happening on stage. For the occasion of 'Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wussten', the stage had also been raised by half a metre, which meant I spent about four-fifths of the time watching actors' heads bounce over a light rail.
For Theatre of the World, his fifth full-length opera, Louis Andriessen (1939) drew inspiration from the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680). He was the last Renaissance man, someone who could do everything and knew everything. Kircher wrote books full of the most diverse subjects, from the meaning of hieroglyphics to vulcanology and musical instruments. He even designed a cat piano, based on the idea that each cat screams at a different pitch when you tap its tail. After his death, Kircher fell into disrepute as a charlatan.
However, unusable for science, he forms gefundenes Fressen for a composer like Andriessen, who likes to explore the boundaries between reality and fiction. His opera Writing to Vermeer (1999) is based on fictional letters to the Delft painter; Rosa, a Horse Drama (1994) is about the murder of a composer, allegedly part of a conspiracy against music.
An exhibition that puts our view of migration and migrants at the centre, critical of our migration policy but does not fall into easy pamphleteering, that is "Voices outside the echo chamber". On Friday 29 April, the exhibition "Voices outside the echo chamber"-an exhibition by Framer Framed, the Amsterdam-based organisation that has been questioning and commenting on the visual language in our arts for years-opened at the Tolhuistuin. After all,...
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