Since the Amsterdam Uitmarkt is no longer run by the Uitburo but by a separate foundation, things have become a tad more commercial. The folder-fair-with-bands that has become the national opening of the cultural season over the past decades has to. The government has found art scary for a while now, usual suspects are pulling out as sponsors, and malaise is hitting...
I had promised to check out a session with Benjamin Zander. Me as a non-expert, together with someone who finds classical music downright soporific. To see if Zander works, as he promises to work: "Everyone loves classical music, they just don't know it yet". The man is in the Netherlands and that doesn't happen very often. Not so long ago...
It is the most ambitious summer festival in the Netherlands: Festival Boulevard in Den Bosch aims to showcase not only the finest theatre theatre theatre in the low countries, but also the fattest shows, and youngest new creators and the merriest bus drivers. And all that in 10 days, in once tad where the local newspaper does its best to promote culture as scary as possible to make. We briefly summarise it for you in eight enticing words.
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 in which bloodshed was elevated 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.
Every Holland Festival there is at least 1 performance which a lot of people wonder why it is programmed. This year, that honour falls to 'Bestiaire d'Amour' by and starring Isabella Rosselini. We take a moment to look for answers.
Nice 'old-fashioned' Holland Festival: a special set-up that confronts the audience with the implications of their own position and viewing behaviour. And that's just as well with Fassbinder's 'Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant'. Melodrama was no stranger to the German theatre and film wizard. The bitter tears are of a fashion queen and her entourage, clinical is the setting, wafer-thin the story, and yet unusually exciting how this lady drama develops.
Language is music. Sometimes we forget that. Then we think language is a way of conveying objective meanings. Kind of silly. Language is food for all the senses. No strumming is needed under that. That's pure opera without embellishments. The English-language performance 'tis Pity she's a whore' I saw at the Holland Festival yesterday proves that. Even if you don't understand the seventeenth-century phrases, it is a joy to listen to.
One of the rules of thumb of contemporary theatre art reads as follows: There is no middle ground in a production with an insanely long title. Such a production is either fantastic or dies of its own pretensions. At Judson church is ringing in Harlem (made to measure) / twenty looks of paris is burning at the judson church (m2m) is the latter.
This year's trip will go to India and Nepal. Because that seemed nice to him. Visitors to the Dutch premiere of Jelinek's Die Schutzbefohlene were looking forward to the summer. Next year they would visit a friend in Vietnam. Little hassle to get a visa. As a white European, the whole world is yours. You can go anywhere. The man did not realise how privileged he was.
The Valley of Astonishment. Titles don't come much prettier than that of 'The Valley of Astonishment'. Theatre legend Peter Brook's tentative last play is coming to Amsterdam. The Holland Festival gave me and two journalists from Parool and NRC, respectively, the opportunity to talk to the already legendary director when he was alive. Pretty special, because the man who enchanted an entire generation of theatre-makers and audiences with performances such as the nine-hour Mahabharata in Avignon, is considered a deity among theatre connoisseurs and enthusiasts.
The winners of the Dans Publieksprijs 2013 have been announced. On Friday 14 February, the prizes, divided into seven categories, will be awarded at The Hague's Theater aan het Spui. Besides winners Pascal Schut (Introdans) and Davide Cocchiara (The Red Piece), they are choreographers Conny Jansen Danst for the performance 'How Long is Now' and Isabelle Beernaert for the performance 'Red, Yellow & Blue'.
"Don't listen to the experts, they are actually always wrong." The gist of 'Eyes wide open', Noreena Hertz's latest book, is clear. That she is an expert herself, and therefore her views should be distrusted, makes sense. That the conversation she had on the subject with former politician Femke Halsema became increasingly bizarre was not so logical. Downright shocking was the fall that the terror of all the world's bankers took at the end.
Erwin Olaf has a thing for wallpaper. The art photographer, known for his hushed and ominous compositions, thinks what is on a wall is at least as important as what is in front of it. The New Institute has now managed to combine that idea beautifully in an exhibition which shows both the sets of Erwin Olaf's most famous works, and a few wallpaper designs from the quivers of great artists.
The bodies of Fokine, Van Manen and EGPC in the Dutch National Ballet's new programme 'Corps' are vastly different, though they all dance a form of ballet. It is the differences in stakes (decorative or expressive, stylised control or individual surrender, full of symbolism or stripped of it) and the key role for the ensemble that make the programme extremely interesting. Besides the fact that EGPC seems to be on its way to an artistic breakthrough.
More seats do not bring more spectators. The only way to get more spectators to venues and museums is: drop the price. This is according to figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics.
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.
Isn't avant garde dance too lofty? Is it still viable in these harsh cultural times? I Like To Watch Too aims to clear up this misunderstanding. The festival brings experimental dance closer to the public than ever.
Men and women together on the dance floor, it is still forbidden in large parts of the Muslim world. Two years ago, the dance performance 'Nya' was at the Holland Festival, a piece written on the skin of nine Algerian dancers, mostly B-Boyz from the streets, but also the son of a ballet teacher from Algiers participated. This year, French choreographer Abou Lagraa, his wife Nawal Ait Benalla and much of the Algerian cast returned to the Holland Festival with a piece in which women also dance.
It's a tricky genre, which drone, or ambient. Or, what do you call the avant-garde cello experiments of the Icelandic Hildur Guðnadóttir (1982). Very slow, very repetitive, very minimalist. Abstract sound art that leans heavily on loops, resonations and buzzing, über syrupy tones that swell into a large, layered sound collage.
Simon Stone (28) wrote a new play based on Henrik Ibsen's 1884 stage classic The Wild Duck. The Swiss-born Australian provided the Norwegian play with entirely contemporary language and dressing. The actors sit
In 'Cineastas', the Argentine director shows Mariano Pensotti (1972) a multi-layered story about four Buenos Aires filmmakers, each struggling with their new films. It is partly a portrait of the city, through the eyes of four Argentine filmmakers, says
Putting a man and a boy on stage together - upper body bared; in today's times, that means asking for trouble. Our gaze, saturated by paedophilia scandals, leaves little in the way of intimacy between what could also be father and son, brothers or friends. But 'Victor' by choreographer Jan Martens and director Peter Seynaeve is no good, politically correct repartee. In their search for a loving look at the relationship between husband and child, they also consistently push the boundaries of what is permissible.
When both nu.co.uk, BBC news and virtually every German newspaper simultaneously cover an opera, something must be going on. And there is: Nazis! Wagner! Outraged spectators! More than that: doctors had to be called in!
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