In preparing my coverage of Theatre Festival Boulevard, I had also put 'interview with Elias de Bruyne' on my wish list. It didn't materialise, which is fortunate in retrospect, because Cornald Maas beat me to it. At least, Cornald Maas interviewed Elias de Bruyne during his performance 'Euhm... In 5 Acts', which premiered on Saturday 5 August. Well...
On 21 December, Jetse Batelaan, director at Artemis, will give a lecture at the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam. Using visual clips, he will show his development as a theatre maker and share the insights he has gained in the process: from his initial discomfort with drama and conflict to his conviction that it is important to let children and adolescents experience panic in the...
We like to play by the rules. That's quite OK if you're driving through a historic city centre in a tractor or truck combination, for instance, but it gets tricky when the rules stop obeying themselves one day. The actors of the rather physical theatre group Bambie, Paul van der Laan, Jochem Stavenuiter and Tessa Jonge Poerink, have worked with...
Plays often end in chaos. An overturned liquor cabinet, a blood blade among royals, we are used to a few things. Jetse Batelaan's latest play, baroque and sharper than he showed before, also ends in beauty, but then that is actually the beginning. Indeed, the ending is sterile and stripped of any life. But that is where the performance begins. The artistic director of...
According to Linde van Schuppen, philosopher and linguist, medics do not really listen to people with psychosis. At least, they do listen to someone suffering from obvious delusions, but that is to establish that the person is indeed off the track. 'But, how then?" is the question a psychiatrist or neurologist is not trained to answer, she argues. That is why she is doing her PhD.
Theatre festival Boulevard is going ahead this summer, just like last year. Everything is adapted to 'corona': safe at one-and-a-half metres, placarded, with registration for catering, but still just about a hundred performances. In this podcast, I speak to Nina Aalders and Tessa Smeulers, responsible for Boulevard's programming. They remained at the helm after the much-loved and...
Last week, Theatre Festival Boulevard announced the first performances as well as the theme 'Hack the horizon'. Today at noon, online ticket sales start for a large part of the programming. The programme is still under development and will be announced through online channels in the coming weeks. Fans can buy tickets for Jan Martens/GRIP, Nastaran Razawi Khorasani,...
Under the banner 'Sender Boulevard', the organisers of Theatre Festival Boulevard signed up for six weeks of live encounters in 's-Hertogenbosch. More than 40 different projects delivered an extraordinary variety of performances, performances and installations. Based on the theme 'Nader de ander' (Closer to the other), Boulevard more than ever entered into dialogue with makers and audience, which led to an intense dialogue with results.
Under the banner 'Sender Boulevard', 25 performances, performances and installations are popping up in 's-Hertogenbosch this summer, especially in the second week of August. Their shared motto is 'Approach the other'. Because after months of isolation, appropriate distance and avoidance, the desire to get [a little] closer glows. Boulevard celebrates the resilience of makers and audiences in 2020 with a programme...
Last month, De Arbeiderspers published Romana Vrede's novel De nobele autist, based on life with her son Charlie, who has a mental disability and autism. Conversation on what she learned from him and other life events. 'Not Charlie is crazy, the world is crazy.' 'Normal' is not normal 'When my son Charlie was a 2-year-old boy in...
Theatre Festival Boulevard is a highlight of the festival summer every year. Because there are no barriers and because it carries the casual atmosphere of the city in every fibre. But it goes even further. Here are my seven learning moments: 1: Boulevard is more accessible than the city itself Some people find it verging on the hysterical, but...
When you make theatre for children and young people, you tell stories to children and young people from your adult existence as an adult. You can do that. You can get funding for that. Artemis, previously named the second-best theatre company in the Netherlands here, is such a company. But, because this youth theatre company is led by Jetse Batelaan, Artemis likes to do things differently. Stronger...
Bossche Theatre Artemis is, after International Theatre Amsterdam, the best theatre company in the Netherlands. The company owes this to an illustrious past (Pauline Mol!!) and to Jetse Batelaan. This director recently received the prestigious Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale for his disruptive oeuvre. This consists largely of performances in which children take power, without...
The central character in theatre-maker Marijn Graven's Lo Lie Taa was there early. At least, so he tells the mirrored floor and the audience in his monologue Lo Lie Taa. As a nine-year-old, he was already madly in love with his mother and not long after, his life was defined by pursuing as many splashy results of his...
The Council for Culture has just proposed the new Basic Infrastructure (BIS), and it has become a very big, in traditional terms 'prosperous', baby. Since the Council is not allowed to name names, and can only list functions, we have already made a fill-in list here, in which we list (very briefly, because little time and not knowing about everything) which existing cultural...
Would it happen after all? Would Liesbeth Coltof's dream really come true? For 36 years, she made theatre in which the age of the audience played no role. On Saturday 6 October, she received the Oeuvre Prize from the Association of Theatre Directors (VSCD) from the hands of Hedy d'Ancona. In doing so, she surpassed Ivo van Hove. The internationally breakthrough leader of the...
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...
Jetse Batelaan has spent pretty much this entire century making the most extraordinary theatre in the world. At least, of my world. Often with very few words, always with a great sense of bare aesthetics and usually sympathetic with a weird twist halfway through. His latest masterpiece is an adaptation of Thea Beckman's Crusade in Jeans. Though we need at least three quarters of...
The Amsterdam Fund for the Arts would love a central 'vibrant dance venue' in Amsterdam. But surely such a Dance House has just been torpedoed? It was striking: in the Introduction to Dance to the grants awarded by the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK) for the 2017-2020 grant awards, they note an "ardent need" for a "dance house": a central place for development, production and the...
The hero who does not know his own strength (Wildman); a mad scientist who goes too fast for everyone (Galileo); a dream empress who gives thanks for the fairy-tale wedding and steps out of her role (Sisi); guinea pigs who rebel against the popularity contest they are caught up in (Guinea pig!) and an ugly duckling who accepts the chaos, but doubts that the chaos...
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...
Festival Boulevard kicks off on 4 August. The traditional reason to come back from holiday in August has a fuller programme than ever this time. With lots of youth theatre. We'll help you get started in advance.
'Young people can very well decide for themselves where they want to go or not go. And it just so happens that most of the time it is not to the theatre. So what? That will come naturally. Young people make their own choices, and that more often includes a house party than a play. Dragging them inside is counterproductive. And above all, no compulsory book-list performance,...
That you wake up at night and there is a full-blooded hipster sitting at the foot of your bed. One of those whose beard has two ragged tips, whose hair is in a messy bun and whose right ear has a tuft of hair bulging out of it. This pretty much sums up my worst nightmare. Well struck, then, by Lisah makes Roozemoes, to...
Every company 50,000 euros more. Youth theatre in the Netherlands should be very happy with the letter culture minister Bussemaker sent to the chamber last Monday. After years of squeezing under Halbe Zijlstra, finally more air for the makers. But the investment of 4 tonnes a year turns out to be a cutback. In fact, Bussemaker only gives a gift to eight companies. Company...
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