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Holland Festival opens online with Memories of my body. About the body as a battlefield

In the pre-corona world, Garin Nugroho would open the Holland Festival with his performance The Planet - A Lament. It would no doubt have been as impressive an experience as his Setan Jawa staged in 2017. We would be enchanted by his dancers and purified by the story. In the stripped-down online version of the Holland... 

Homage to Robert Mapplethorpe: slideshow with moderate music #HF19

A black man sits on the edge of the stage of Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg, pardon ITA. He observes us with intense gaze as we walk into the auditorium. - As the incarnate subtitle of the performance Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe. Behind a gauze screen are the instruments of Asko|Schönberg, which, together with Roomful of Teeth, signs for... 

Making dance together as an example of living together: SOUL #3 Co-Creation

Making dance together as an example of living together. SOUL #3 Co-Creation is intimate, without eroticism.

You have those performances where, as an unsuspecting spectator, you are invited on stage and, once there, get completely blocked. SOUL #3 Co-Creation is not one of those. Well almost. Indeed, in this work, dancer Claire Hermans explains that fear is a blockade to creativity. The four performers therefore do not urge you to take to the floor to... 

'A woman still cannot write erotic books with impunity'

'Surely the fight for women's rights should have been fought by now, but it doesn't feel that way lately. Men still have a deep-seated feeling that they should be above women. Where does that come from anyway? Where does someone like rapper Boef get the idea that he should just give women, who were kind enough to give him a lift,... 

Sex sells, originality does not. Once again, two museums go out of their way to celebrate nudity.

When we don't have fresh, current posts on the site for a while, our 'most-read posts' list on the right always changes dramatically. Within two days, all stories are trending that include the words 'nude', 'nude' or 'sex'. After all, sex sells. If you like clicks from rutting men, at least. Unfortunately, this particular target group does not read much cultural news. But attention is... 

People no longer want to be seen as toys. We can't get around it. Museums can't get around it.

Searching for what I stand for and what path I should take, 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... 

Gisèle Vienne performs at @hollandfestival on rave culture: 'Violence and aggression are not necessarily negative.'

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. Crowd, Gisèle Vienne. Photo: Estelle H... You can... 

Boris Charmatz

Danse de Nuit in the Bijlmer: 'Of course we want to influence public space' #HF17

Boris Charmatz has been a guest at many editions of the Holland Festival with impressive, provocative, socially engaged, finely composed and conceptually strong dance performances: Aatt enen tionon and Con forts fleuve (both in 2001); 50 years of dance (2010), Enfant (2011) and Manger (2015). His latest choreography, danse de nuit, premiered in Geneva last September. During the Holland Festival... 

Dance festival closes with heady eroticism and fierce confrontation

The theme of this final day of the Moving Futures festival sounds and somewhat theoretical: self-reflection and cultural identity. But in the abundant programme, it becomes clear how directly these words touch everyone. Macho Macho That is immediately clear in Macho Macho by Bosnian-Dutch theatre maker Igor Vrebac. In it, two performers seek their way in a world of male idealism.... 

'D3US/X\M4CHIN4': special lightness in new work by Fernando Belfiore/Dansmakers

A wonderful performance full of hilarity, excitement and lightness, yet it sent me out into the world with a sad feeling. It seems as if the four women in D3US/X\M4CHIN4 by choreographer/director Fernando Belfiore are in the land of infinite possibilities. Anything they can do. Do they also want everything? Are they still themselves when they can do everything? How does it feel when the earth... 

A few comments on bare breasts (m/f) on #tfboulevard

Let's talk about breasts (m/f). Or, if that's a bit too confrontational: the tendency of young up-and-coming acting talents to get naked on stage. And then do something with juice. Of fruit mostly, or just water, or oil and glitter. At Festival Boulevard yesterday, for the third time in a week, I had... 

Romeo and Juliet: loose highlights in the Amsterdam Forest

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.

Moisio's choreography 'Mum's the Word' makes you yearn for peace and freedom

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... 

Fragment of diptych by Nicholas Hlobo (photo author)

'Frankenstein' Hlobo wants to cure South Africa

Scattered through the main hall of museum Beelden aan Zee in The Hague are enormous works, mostly consisting of ribbon and used car inner tubes. There are also canvases hanging on the wall, again full of colourful ribbon embroidery. These canvases are more sculpture than painting. They are the work of South African Nicholas Hlobo. Images by the Sea, under the title Imilonji Yembali (Melodies... 

Porn turns out to be the secret weapon against attrition

Three years ago, the suspicion was already expressed in America, now it is also penetrating Europe. People are reading far more than bookshops and publishers think. And this is not even due to the illegal downloading of bestsellers that everyone is so worried about. Logical, because what people are reading so fanatically is not the book you buy in a bookshop,... 

Cullberg Ballet, 'The Return of the Modern Dance' (chor.: Trajal Harrell)

Cullberg Ballet welcomes audience to monomaniacal awareness dance #HF15

Two choreographers exploring how a dancer and the eye of the audience interact. Dance makers who rattle common ideas about identity and sexuality. Artists who confront us with the dreams of perfection and glamour that advertising and marketing throw at us. The famous Cullberg Ballet made a striking choice by performing choreographies by the... 

Seven things that make Ghosts so special

1. Intimacy That the atmosphere in a packed hall becomes intimate enough for a girl in the audience to ask legendary American rapper-poet Black Ice the question: If poetry equals love, as he had just proclaimed, did it ever break your heart? Black Ice, the man who strings his associations together faster than Halbe Zijlstra strings his stupidities,... 

Chinese animation art between experiment and tradition at Holland Animation Film Festival

You haven't seen this before: stop-motion animation with figures made of Chinese porcelain. In the short film Mr Sea, Chinese artist Xue Geng has recreated an ancient legend about an explorer, a prostitute and a snake

brought to life with home-fired ceramics. A glossy, dreamlike depiction of eroticism and violence.

Mr Sea is part of the opening programme that kicks off the Holland Animation Film Festival (18-22 March) in Utrecht on Wednesday.

"A b...

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7 ½ times: looking surprised at 'Playing Cards: Spades'

1. Gene-shifting theatre doesn't have to be difficult.

Breaking new ground in theatre is the aim of Canadian director Robert Lepage and his group Ex Machina. It seems like everything is unusual about 'Playing Cards: Spades': playing floor, lighting, seating around the stage, the stories, the acting and the surprising denouement.

Young dance makers meet and develop talents in travelling dance workshop Europe in Motion

 Europe in Motion is a travelling talent development programme and acts as a battleground and meeting place for young choreographers. What is urgent in dance is discussed for a week to encourage dance makers in their artistic development. This second edition, with partners Dance4 (Nottingham), iDans (Istanbul) and Imagetanz (Vienna), ends in Utrecht. Springdance previously featured dance from high-tech laboratories in Israel (Batsheva Dance... 

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