This week, the Connecting Arts festival takes place in Utrecht. This festival, contrary to the expectation raised by the title, revolves entirely around the organ. The instrument is in a bottomless identity crisis. The solution lies in connecting with other art forms: connecting arts. The organist. One of those guys with a beard. Not a meticulously trimmed weekend shadow, but a wild...
The Netherlands Film Festival is only halfway through, but let's list three notable premieres anyway. Three films that may not be big crowd pleasers, but three uncompromising auteur films that bear witness to a vision that goes beyond entertaining storytelling. Three films that have also received attention abroad...
With temperatures above 25 degrees, it will be a sweltering but also unique summer day, that 10th September. The Cultural Press Agency will be present that day and Sunday with four journalists at the former Soesterberg Air Base to report on festival De Basis. When you get there, you will make lots of nature, even more impressive war history and a theatre performance or two...
With temperatures above 25 degrees, it will be a sweltering but also unique summer day, that 10th September. The Cultural Press Agency will be present that day with four journalists at the former Soesterberg Air Base to report on festival De Basis. When you get there, you will make lots of nature, even more impressive war history and a piece or two of theatre performances and visual...
'And why do all these art institutions have to open on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and even Thursdays? I don't understand that. I'm far too busy working on those days.' Just a question during the Paradiso debate,
With a few creative friends and a nice budget, romp around in a playground of many tens of acres of pristine nature. Surrounded by the remains of military might. It automatically makes you talk riotously. But that's how it goes sometimes. With art. So, to get right to the point: cuts are not always bad. For instance, divesting the...
Rain, rain, rain. That looks bad for the festivals. Right? "Weather has less of an impact on a festival than people think," says Noorderzon's Mark Hospers. And they should know. Last year they had a lot of rain, and at the same time sold a record number of tickets. How is it that bad weather seems to bother the festivals little?....
Holland Festival, Julidans, IT's, Over 't IJ. End-of-season theatre is always strewn across Amsterdam. Between April and September, international performance offerings migrate from Utrecht (Springdance and Festival aan de Werf) via Amsterdam to Rotterdam (Internationale Keuze). If you want to experience something of contemporary, international dance, Springdance, HF and Julidans are the places to be. [For...
There is an interesting 'drone' underneath, and that may strike someone as menacing. In any case, the video at the end of this article has more meaning than many culture lovers might think. The fact is that the sweeping cuts made by the UK government through their 'Arts Council' have met with hardly any protests in retrospect, while the disproportionality in the cut...
It's easy to cycle past it as a Utrechter, the Basis voor Actuele Kunst (BAK) in Lange Nieuwstraat, but internationally few can ignore it. BAK is big. Under the leadership of artistic director Maria Hlavajova, who is as ineffable as she is sympathetic, the centre has become a leading centre in the world of contemporary art. A few years ago,...
Springdance Utrecht has ended. Boris Charmatz gave the last performance of the Utrecht dance festival last night with "Levée des conflits". Critics Fransien van der Putt and Daniël Bertina already show their opinions in the film below. They also have a conversation with Boris Charmatz. Read more about this performance.
The Springdance Festival in Utrecht is coming to an end. Today, the last performances take place. Three reviewers from the Cultureel Persbureau look back on the festival, in an interview with Jeroen Stout. Reviewer Fransien van der Putt does get spring fever from Springdance, she says in the interview: 'This festival exceeded my expectations.' Daniël Bertina (also a critic) also found it a particularly...
When music sounds, almost everyone tends to move with it. Music leads to dance. That link is crystal clear. But in modern dance, that obviousness is broken. Watching 'Silent Ballet' by Emanuel Gat Dance, this becomes poignantly clear. Without a single sound being sent into the auditorium, the eight dancers swarm across the stage....
With their name, the five Japanese of contact Gonzo refer to the gonzo journalism by the late Hunter S. Thompson. Raw, harsh and subjective. Thomspon also showed how he worked in his pieces. Contact Gonzo warms up during the performance, taking snapshots of each other with disposable cameras and passing the water bottle. Gonzo-style: what you see is what you get.
Contact Gonzo adheres to simple rules. For example gravity: jumping and coming down. Or attracting and repelling: pushing, pulling, like a rugby scrum. In doing so, they touch on minimal art that adhered to a set of parameters; one thinks of Sol LeWitt.
The 27th edition of Springdance in Utrecht is in full swing. Cultural Press Agency reviewers are there, attending dance performances from all corners of the world. For instance, Fransien van der Putt visited the opening performance Sideways Rain by Brazilian Guilhermo Botelho and the jazzy tap dance performance by Broadway star Savion Glover. Maarten Baanders attended Studium by Belgian dance collective...
"I don't care about the body, I make music," Savion Glover said last night, leaning against the doorframe of his dressing room after the performance Bare Soundz. The dance audience at Utrecht's Stadsschouwburg theatre struggled to master the mores of a jazz audience. As the concert progressed, it increasingly produced encouraging yells when the three tap dancers loosened up
It is nothing new that simple movements, close to the everyday, are given a place in dance performances. But the particular way they are constructed and highlighted in 'Studium' by Belgian group Busy Rocks makes you look at them with fresh wonder.
Three of the four dancers, darkly dressed, lie down on the floor against each other in carefully crafted poses. On this construction of bodies, a dancer, dressed bright white, takes her place in a horizontal position. The lighting makes the body lying above seem to float. The underlying figures push up the limbs in such a way that the white figure moves as if she is walking. The manipulation is done with great precision. Looking at it with tilted head, one sees perfectly natural steps.
Amsterdam-based company Dood Paard itself translated Shakespeare's 'Othello' and waves goodbye to the bard with 'Bye Bye'. The quirky collective performs a one-and-a-half-hour topical comedy of manners and soul mirror, in which pointing at 'The Other' is central. Shakespeare's plays are quite often performed quite reverently. . Moreover, the adored 'bard' from Stratford-upon-Avon has bestowed on the English language countless expressions that have come to...
The festival for short film Go Short in Nijmegen is not quite over yet, but last night the winners of the various competitions were announced at the Award Show in LUX. The award for best short fiction went to Incident by a Bank by Swedish director Ruben Östlund. He took a failed 2006 bank robbery as the starting point for...
Art costs money. The current Rutte administration has hammered that into it: it's expensive, no one but a small club of insiders goes there, and either way those are leftists or pseudo-leftists who can easily pay for it themselves. So much for the government's opinion. The opinion of the art world can be guessed: it is...
We had done the necessary research work ourselves, and then it turned out that something had also been sent to the House of Representatives, which contained many more figures. We asked for those figures and were shocked. After 2012, when the current arts plan expires and after a year of inaction and wait and see for the whole sector a...
Jeffrey Meulman, director of The Dutch Theatre Festival TF, reacted to Rutte's statements in Buitenhof, which also seen on this site his. He then received a letter back
"That looks like a book series!" my wife spoke with some horror upon seeing the cover of 'The Revenge of Iphigenia'. And yes, it has to be said: in book format, the poster of Theatre Group Alum's latest theatre production is a bit too much of a stretch. From the A0 poster, you would never have thought so. Indeed: those posters of Alum, which...
Between 21 and 30 January 2011, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Rotterdam will host the Flamenco Biennial, a music and dance fest around that mythical Spanish primal music that leaves no one untouched. A style of music, moreover, that developed in parallel with the history of the Iberian peninsula, where the culture of the Indian Roma gypsies came together with that of the...
On Thursday 14 April, the Springdance festival 2011 opens with the opening performance Sideways Rain by choreographer Guilherme Botelho and his company Alias in the Stadsschouwburg Utrecht. Springdance 2011 presents innovative and high-profile contemporary dance from around the world. Besides many premieres, the festival has an extensive fringe programme including street performances, lectures, an introduction to contemporary dance for those starting...
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