Little rebellious girls, that's what writer Jaap Robben and illustrator Benjamin Leroy know how to deal with. Suzie Ruzie, the girl with a stinky finger, goes to the swimming pool. Not in the toddler pool - well, in the deep end! A Quattro Mani's guest reviewer Afke Bohle, mother of three, went with her. The first book we had here in the house by Jaap Robben...
In the presence of Amnesty International and Edward Snowden - via a video link from Moscow - Oliver Stone's new film Snowden premiered at Tuschinski on Thursday night. The dramatised story of the young, gifted public servant who is troubled by conscience and decides to go to the press is not very original or compellingly portrayed. But on the wave of...
Isn't there enough anger and aggression in our world yet? You would think so, yet Rikko Voorberg (36)[hints]Theologian Rikko Voorberg (1980) is founder of the PopUpKerk, organises art installations and is a publicist; he is a guest correspondent on Anger at De Correspondent and has a regular column in the Nederlands Dagblad. He started the PopUpKerk at the invitation of the...
'Not only work has disappeared, but also knowledge and craft - the whole perspective is disappearing. While the Netherlands as a dance country was renowned in the world precisely because it had the luxury to research, to build, to stimulate.' Ronald Wintjes, the brand-new director of De Nederlandse Dansdagen, worries. What about the future of dance?....
Among all the great titles vying for attention, debuts are often overlooked. Each month, in the series The Debut, A Quattro Mani discusses a notable debut novel of recent times. On your own two feet You are eighteen, nineteen and moving out of the house, studying. The world is at your feet, freedom beckons, your promising dreams are about...
Huge passenger trunks, like those at the airport, are stacked crosswise on the stage in the Amsterdam Forest. This immense rendition forms the backdrop of Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare in the Amsterdam Bostheater's performance. Director Ingejan Ligthart Schenk stages Shakespeare's classic modern, with acrobatics by the Tent Circustheater group and musical input by De Veenfabriek.
Bassoonist Pascal Gallois gets laughs when he tries in vain to insert the flowers he has just received into the tube of his instrument. Also in the now classic Dialogue de l'ombre double by Pierre Boulez, he manages to make the audience chuckle on Sunday 19 June, when he produces a kind of elephant-like trumpet with much misfiring. His performance is part of the ''Save the bassoon', which will conclude on Sunday 25 June with a concert at the Holland Festival Proms at the Concertgebouw. For this hundreds of (amateur) bassoonists ON. Action successful, in other words.
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 capable of it, but I never succeeded. It was like a...
Had her name been Marc, Marie Jaëll (1846-1925) was undoubtedly considered one of the important French composers of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. But then again, she was once a woman - so unimportant. Praised during her lifetime by none other than Franz Liszt, she was soon forgotten after her death. At most, she lived on in the by...
'This regime also rules over you after you die. The regime steals your story. They use you to tell their own story. Relatives are forced to sign statements that the dead were killed by the opposition. The regime uses the dead to oppress the living.' Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury made a statement: Gardens Speak (Gardens Speak). An installation, an immersive[hints]definition: immersive, making you forget the real world around you[/hints] performance, in which the spectators themselves are actors. A performance that consists of a mountain of earth from which soft voices sound from beneath tombstones. That performance comes in June to Amsterdam, as one of the examples of the new Holland Festival programming by festival director Ruth MacKenzie.
The pile of earth in and on which the installation takes place represents the many thousands of anonymous backyard graves in Syria. At the beginning of the Syrian civil war, the struggle was still mainly between opponents of President Assad's dictatorship and his (secret) police. The first victims were often still just students taking part in peaceful demonstrations, handing out pamphlets, or attending the funeral of a friend. After all: bombing funerals was and is a proven method of murderous regimes and crime syndicates to eliminate insurgent networks.
Tania El Khoury heard of the Syrian alternative in 2013: the private burial in one's own backyard, or failing that, in an anonymous city park, with no headstone or memorial. Such an action is both an expression of fear and an act of resistance: these are deaths that the government can no longer abuse. 'The play was not originally intended for European audiences either. It was made in Lebanon and the text was also in Arabic. The last thing I thought about was the European audience. The idea was
How far can you go in using Shakespeare's name for a theatre production? Or rather, when does an adaptation of a classic stop being an adaptation, and when should you just come out and say that you have written your own play? And then, if you've reported in your four-year plan that in 2016 you will be doing a Shakespeare...
Three mongols playing Mongols. Dschingis Khan, the opening performance of Something Raw, is provocative and consequential. With this performance by German theatre collective Monstertruck, or the also Berlin-based Man Power Mix by Sheena Mcgrandles and Zinzi Buchanan, the festival Something Raw lives up to its name. Something Raw is a festival in which Amsterdam theatres Frascati, De Brakke...
Never before has the Holland Festival placed itself at the centre of society as it is today. The 2016 programme is steeped in the turbulent times in which we live. The Netherlands holds the presidency of the European Union this spring. Artistic director Ruth Mackenzie has taken this fact unflinchingly to give 'Europe' a wide place in the programming. In presenting...
Three and a half hours of streaming video from a seating area at The Hague's Winternachten festival. I won't blame you if you didn't follow everything. I wasn't quite there myself at the end. Still, it was a success. If only because it hasn't been done here in the country before. Blab is so new that...
Those working in the cultural sector should not expect much from the VVD. Lately, however, the party has been trying to show a different face. Indeed, only recently, the new culture spokesperson of the right-wing liberals tabled a motion in which the VVD actually gave back 10 million of the more than 250 million the national government took from the arts....
The healing power of music, some firmly believe in it - in 2013, it was even the premise of the City of London Festival. Believing that music can connect people and have a healing effect on conflictual societies, festival director Ian Ritchie asked the Brodsky Quartet to commission a composition around this theme. Thus was born the by...
By 1970, Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) had run out of 'intuitive' compositions in which the performer had to choose his or her own path from a series of written instructions. Like Intensity, for example, whose score consists of this text: Play the individual notes with such dedication until you feel the warmth radiating from you. Play on and keep them on as long as you can....
A damning report by organisational consultancy Berenschot, the voluntary or involuntary departure of director Harm Mannak, repeated bickering in the State Assembly and panting reports of high salaries for directors and artistic directors, all the way to the national newspapers. It marks the chaos at HET Symfonieorkest and the lack of any form of direction, not only at the orchestra itself,...
The Lower House caused serious problems for culture in the Netherlands a few weeks back. In a noble attempt to save a few festivals and a youth theatre, SP, D66, CDA and PvdA caused chaos. They passed a motion instructing our culture minister to still set aside money for a few festivals and an extra...
'Exciting and accessible, with great tragic content and an unexpected and poignant ending'. With those words, writer Jan Vantoortelboom was awarded the Zeeland Book Prize last week. A Quattro Mani visited him in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen and talked to him about his novel De man die haast had. 'I have grown as a writer.' Writing house 'The Tortelnest' adorns the hand-painted...
In a full University Theatre on Tuesday 6 October, Pierre Audi gave a master class for young singers, dramaturgs and directors. Three scenes had been prepared by the students and were then expertly filleted by Audi. "Sorella, que dici?.... Prenderò quel brunettino", from Mozart's Così fan tutte began as a scene of two punk girls gripped by consumerism. The director and trainee dramatists...
Stop rehearsing, Yorick van Wageningen advises Dutch makers at the National Film Conference. It doesn't always have to be intelligible, either.
Utility and necessity of explicit sex in 'Love' and other cinema films.
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