Anyone wishing to pass through the gates of Thebes must solve the riddle of the Sphinx. Those who fail die an irrevocable death, their bones fading into the charnel field around her. Oedipus challenges her, determined to save the city. 'Name someone or something more powerful than Fate!', oracles the Sphinx from her single-engine plane. 'Man!', jubilates Oedipus. To which.
Dance pioneer Lucinda Childs is actually the reason I went to Modern Girls. I am a lover of that. Of her work. But as a bonus, I got Regina van Berkel. With Frozen Echo. Why is it important for Introdans to bring a programme of work by female choreographers only? Huh? That's the feeling I got. With Van Berkel's Frozen Echo. Right from...
The riveting, Golden Lion-winning Roma immerses you in the Mexico of filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón's youth. Are we going to see it on Netflix, or in the cinema? Viewers have a choice that Netflix did not offer in our country before. In addition, the exclusive cinema window is also in flux.
'Culture is about stimulating, fraternising, challenging. Then there is no difference between corso and ballet.' Says Thierry Aartsen on Friday 16 November in the Volkskrant. Thierry who? Thierry Aartsen, the one who will be speaking on culture at the VVD in the coming months. The next few months? Yes, because VVD culture spokespersons are usually appointed for one or two debates, after which...
Searching for what I stand for and which way to go, time and again I come across facts that confuse and amaze me. I live in a country where only a single woman is in De Volkskrant top ten most influential people - in tenth place, that is. Only three out of 100 young Dutch millionaires...
The trans-drama Girl, Belgium's Oscar entry, is on a veritable victory lap. Filmmaker Lukas Dhont on the struggles of trans girl Lara, who is mostly an ordinary adolescent. On his personal struggle with stereotypes, and on his love of dance. "A place on the Oscar shortlist would already be very nice," he says.
The female composer, she continues to stir minds. My article following Mathilde Wantenaar's world premiere of Damocles unleashed a fierce discussion on Facebook. 'Why should women be given preferential treatment?" an angry man asked. 'All that matters to me is quality, not whether a piece of music was written by a man or a woman.' He got icky about the m/f discussion, which...
It is also never good or bad: the female composer is either ignored or arouses jealousy when her music is performed. For years, I felt my fingers calloused and talked my head off to put women composers on the map. I invariably came up against a wall of...
One of the sources of inspiration for director Ingrid Kuijpers was a film about a certain kind of flatworm. It has also found a place in her performance WO-MAN. Flatworms are hermaphroditic animals. Mating amounts to a fight over which of the two gets fertilised. Kuijpers: ,,The one that manages to get the other pregnant has won. If you get pregnant...
"Don't let Netflix tell you what to think". The Netflix documentary Making a Murderer caused a huge stir in the United States and the rest of the world in 2016. Society was divided into two camps: those who believed Steven Avery was guilty and those who believed he was once again innocent in jail....
After years, my ranting about the invisibility of female composers is starting to bear fruit. Thanks in part to the #MeToo movement, composing ladies are also finally being taken seriously and performed. The NTRZaturdayMatinee is even making them a spearhead of its programming this season. Last Saturday, it performed the world premiere of Salto di Saffo by Calliope Tsoupaki (1963). She composed this double concerto for pan flute, recorder...
Small-scale film festival Film by the Sea specialises in book adaptations. It celebrates its 20th edition with an award for Sophia Loren and a Bergman retrospective. Artistic director feels it is now time for rejuvenation and is handing over the baton.
Goed nieuws van de cultuurfondsen: ‘diversiteit’ wordt een serieuze voorwaarde bij de vraag of je subsidie krijgt voor je culturele ding of niet. Natuurlijk zal een en ander tot discussie leiden. Om te voorkomen dat mensen terugvallen op het Jeroen Pauw-argument (wij willen wel vrouwen in de uitzending, maar er zijn niet genoeg goeie die ook willen), stelt de groep…
This edition, Theatre Festival Boulevard invited the audience to reflect on the two sides of identity: its immutability but especially its malleability. All this under the heading what you see is what you guess. If there is a performance to which this applies, it has to be Goat Song. A fascinating fifty-minute wordless performance by...
Usually when I speak to someone who calls themselves a playwright, they say they are 'only' a supplier of a 'half-product'. I never get that answer from a young actor, and certainly never from a director. It is they who make theatre out of the half-products supplied by writers. Actors and directors prefer to be addressed as 'theatre-makers'. Nothing wrong with that....
In her novel Club Mars, writer Rachel Kushner shows what the life of an inmate looks like inside the four walls. 'I like to include people in my life who have been made invisible in our society,' she says. No mercy Thousands of women are incarcerated in Chowchilla, the jail that was the model for Rachel Kushner's writing of Club Mars. Kushner's...
Tightness. A feeling of oppression prevails when watching the new (mini)series from HBO's stable, Sharp Objects. The series launched this week, but I got to see a few episodes in advance. HBO's Sharp Objects is a film adaptation of the book of the same name by Gillian Flynn, author of, among others, the exciting Gone Girl. With Sharp Objects...
In 2016, I was unexpectedly struck by a Beatles classic. So what are the ingredients of perfect pop music? It is August 2016. I am standing with my friend at a ticket office in Liverpool, the British port city that is just as much an open-air museum. It is rather rubbed in on us that this city gave birth to The Beatles. In the harbour, tourists spend the night in a yellow submarine, equally...
"In the Netherlands, we are actually on holiday," Daphne (40) and Ilja (26) say with a laugh. They are travel experts, with Japan as their core destination. "I visit a few festivals every summer, but whether I'm really a festival-goer? Not so much, I think." Seven years ago, Daphne was last to Lakedance, now she is "getting up to age" and got to go for...
French-Austrian theatre maker Gisèle Vienne is showing her latest work Crowd at the Holland Festival. Vienne takes the rave party as a starting point for subtle observations on what moves people during a night out. Besides the ecstatic pleasure of dance and trance, the performance also stages all kinds of nocturnal self-loss, awkwardness, loneliness and aggression. Acid The wonderful mix of acid, trance and...
The Film Academy presents the graduation films of the 2018 batch. Feature films and documentaries with many small, personal subjects. Awards for best documentary and feature film, for best screenplay and commercial, and for best film score. Frans Weisz appointed Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau.
That George Benjamin is this year's Holland Festival court composer makes perfect sense. And I say that as a non-expert. After all: the way contemporary classical music is often written and talked about scares laymen like me. Would I ever have enough knowledge to appreciate those gourmet sounds? On Saturday night, I made my first live acquaintance...
A sizable group of women, their skin all shades of brown, white and black, their breasts and chests hopping briskly to the beat of stepping and running movements on the spot, swirls around its own axis upon entering the auditorium at the Brakke Grond. Legacy is an intimate performance that moves loosely up and down between concert, performance,...
Nothing defines us like our taste. And especially taste in music. We find that music taste defines exactly who we are and can easily distinguish us from people who have distinctly different, and therefore lesser, tastes. Pinkpop, a pop festival with several world-famous headliners, experienced this. Each world star plays to their own audience, which schi...
Neues Stück 1 Seit sie - Ein Stück von Dimitris Papaioannou is a long title for an overwhelming piece, which Tanztheater Wuppertal is bringing to the Holland Festival this year. Nine years ago, on 30 June 2009, a month before she was to turn sixty-nine, Pina Bausch died suddenly. The world-famous and highly influential choreographer of experimental, haunting and unparalleled dance theatre left behind a...
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