One of the special performances at this year's Holland Festival is 'Ça Ira (1): Fin de Louis' by French company Compagnie Louis Brouillard. I visited the performance earlier in Luxembourg and spoke to the director and writer of this over four-hour marathon about the French Revolution. It seems quite something: 40 actors on stage...
His novel The miraculous incident with the dog in the night, starring the engaging autistic boy Christopher, made British writer Mark Haddon (1962) an instant audience favourite. In his first collection of short stories Pier collapses he once again shows strength in describing people who are just slightly different from most, yet oh so recognisable in everyday life. Compassion for the underdog, that's what it's all about.
Mark Haddon gave
Go ahead and express Nietzsche's book Also sprach Zarathustra in dance. But Brazilian choreographer Samir Calixto can do it. By focusing on a poem from the complex book: the Song of Midnight. This is immediately the reason for the title M: Midnight. Or Mensch, or Myth. Or Mahler. Or Metaphysical. You...
'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
Joost Galema, journalist and programme maker, was called one day by Bastiaan Everink. The baritone and ex-marine wanted to make a book about his personal struggles and how music changed his life. Not being a writer, he started looking for a ghostwriter. Joost was third on his list. A few days later, Bastiaan was standing in Joost's Hilversum living room telling his story. The singer talked about marines, survival, violence, Iraq, Wagner's music and a quest. Not a one-dimensional chronicle, Joost thought, and he decided to start working with Bastiaan. After three years
Filmmaker Louis van Gasteren, who died on 10 May 2016, was initially an electrician but still found his calling as a filmmaker, producer, bohemian, visual artist and sleeper by conviction. The creator of a distinctive documentary oeuvre put much of himself into his work.
For a dramma giocoso, there was precious little to laugh at during a performance of Don Giovanni by De Nationale Opera on Tuesday 10 May. This production, taken over from the Salzburg Festival, is weighed down by a leaden seriousness, exacerbated by the turbo-Mozart presented to us by conductor Marc Albrecht and the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra. Despite his often punishing tempi, the...
Connie Palmen won the 2016 Libris Literature Prize on Monday evening, 9 May, with her novel You say. In the long history of this literary award, which was first presented in 1994, Palmen is only the third woman to receive the €50,000 cash prize and a bronze medal. Previous winners were Frieda Vogels (1994) and D. Hooijer (2008).
Imagine has been transforming for several years. When this festival was still going through the world under the name Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival, its main focus was on genre cinema. The Fantatstic genre is an insidious term used as a catch-all for science fiction, fantasy and horror. In these postmodern times, fantatstic is harder to delineate. The festival therefore changed its name back in 2009,...
She came, saw and conquered. Until recently, Nell Zink was almost the embodiment of the cliché image of the poor writer, alone in an attic room. But when American writer Jonathan Frantzen touted her work, she grew into literary hype in no time. Her publisher gave her a six-figure advance. From nobody to 'Her Nellness' -...
Most impressive is the moment when the orchestra falls silent and Romeo tries desperately to storm the white wall behind which his sweetheart Juliet has disappeared. Time after time, he runs up the steep slope, only to slide down defeated each time. His wild jumps and trotting make his black coat tails flutter high, as if he were a tipsy bird in...
Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes is not a rewarding play to direct or perform. For that, the image of man that the American (1905-1984) portrays is simply too morbid. The Nationale Toneel, directed by Antoine Uitdehaag, unfortunately fails to add sufficient psychological layering to it. In The Little Foxes, successfully filmed in 1941 with Bette Davis in...
The Cinéma Arabe festival (from 19 April) is showing a rich palette of new work from the Arab World. Interview with director Hany Abu-Assad who sets a new tone with The Idol. And he has plans for a film about William of Orange. 'That will be my parting gift to the Netherlands.'
"This was actually a mixtape," says Yassine Boussaid, Saturday 9 April 2016 after his concert, "as my cousin used to give me, for the long way back from Morocco to Amsterdam. Yassine is the business leader of the Amsterdam Andalusian Orchestra (AAO). Together with artistic director Mohamed Chairi and director-writer Mohamed Aadroun, he puts together concerts at breakneck speed....
Last year, Julia Wolfe (1958) won the Pulitzer Prize with her oratorio Anthracite Fields. In this poignant piece about the plight of miners, she draws on American folk music. She composed it for the co-founded Bang on a Can All-Stars, a New York ensemble that became known for its rousing mix of rock, mimal music and...
In his recent collection Achter het verdwijnpunt, death plays an important role. Poet Frans Budé lost no fewer than four poet friends in a short time and honoured them in verse. The 70-year-old poet himself still writes as avidly as in his younger years: in addition to an occasional collection on the Maas, to be published in May, he wrote poems for the upcoming exhibition...
At five, he started playing the violin, and after only six months he gave his first performance. At 17, he was the youngest participant ever to win the prestigious Queen Elisabeth Competition. In 2002, Vadim Repin, born in Novosibirsk in 1971, played at Willem-Alexander and Máxima's wedding concert, together with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Three years ago, Repin started his own...
As soon as soprano Miah Persson enters the stage, we hear a loud, electronic crack. Is a branch breaking here, one of composer Michel van der Aa's (Oss, 1970) favourite sounds? Or is it a stone crashing into another after all? Boulders play a major role in his latest opera Blank Out; at the end they crush with thunderous roar
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...
Writing cost him his marriage, he is being shadowed by the secret service and risks being arrested in Angola. But José Eduardo Agualusa, who has a chance of winning the 2016 Man Booker International Prize with his new novel A General Theory of Forgetting, does not hesitate to put down his pen. 'I won't let myself...
Mothers and daughters: is there a closer bond? Their lives are an extension of each other. Mother treads the same path her daughter will later follow. She is a friend, to whom one can always fall back. But under the skin, a suffocating power struggle rages in which they hold and attack each other. Jealousy and competition gnaw at the domestic idyll. Escape is impossible. It is a...
Things have been rumbling in the film world for some time: Why is the silver screen so, er, white? And where are all the women anyway? #OscarsSoWhite but also #OscarIsADude! Many people in the industry have already expressed their displeasure at this. At the previous Oscar ceremony, actresses aimed their arrows at equal pay, or rather, the lack of it. This year, many an African-American actor and...
'Someone like Umberto is of greater value on earth than in heaven.' Actor Roberto Benigni, known for films like La vita è bella, said goodbye to his friend Umberto Eco (1932-2016) at his funeral at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan on Tuesday. Eco's grandson also spoke and thanked his grandfather for the stories told, the crossword puzzles, the books and music...
Hieronymus Bosch is back. With a special exhibition in Den Bosch - in case anyone has forgotten - and with enormous attention. The exhibition is widely acclaimed and star-studded. It is already being called 'the exhibition of the year'. Newspapers were full of it, documentaries filled the TV screen and the opening was...
In the flat where he is temporarily staying, David Vann (1966) hangs out on the sofa a bit, tired from busyness and late nights as a result of phone calls to the other side of the world. Not too long ago, Vann's marriage stranded, not without a fight, and the legal settlement is still ongoing. He sighs: 'It was the worst...
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