Feet in the warm sand, Caipirinha with parasol, murmuring sea in the background and you are lying on a deckchair with 600 books. All I'm saying is: you are seriously selling yourself short without an e-reader. And the benefits are much bigger than just having to lug around less on holiday, which I'm going to explain below. Downloading in Luang Prabang I now read...
The previous cultural exploration among playwrights gives cause for further exploration. From the earlier article, we take away that further privatisation only partially captures public money and objectives. See also from elevation ideals to efficiency thinking. We also take away that a public as all-important leads to one-sided popular culture, entertainment and false competition with the free circuit. It all has very little...
Every city in the Netherlands has artists who enjoy local fame and glory but just beyond the city limits yield only questioning looks. Take the Goeting family of painters from The Hague. They are Jan Goeting (1918-1984), his wife Catharina (1912-1987) and son Joep (1946-1986). The nice thing about this family is: every Hagenaar or Hagenees over 55 knows many works by at least Jan...
Beethoven and Bach brought the true music. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen the future. The rest, from Beatles to hoempa, was 'jazz', commercially capitalist and therefore pernicious. Very briefly, this is what we should know Theodor Adorno from. Paul R. Kooij now plays this art-philosophical sharper in a performance by Mirjam Koen. Just when the division based partly on Adorno's thinking between...
What would Italy be like a year after the earthquakes, we had wondered. What would be left of the centuries-old cultural heritage in this beautiful region on the border of Umbria, Marche and Lazio? Why do you never really hear about it in the news anymore? We ourselves, Vivian de Gier and Marc Brester, residents of just...
You probably know the feeling. Holidays at last. No more thinking about work or school. And yet. Your cottage or flat is a miniature version of home. Whereas on holiday, you really want to live differently. Still, why those big bedrooms, the sparse plumbing and still the television central? So this summer I stayed with the kids for a week in the...
On 11 September 1985, the biggest train disaster in Portuguese history took place. Near Alcafache, an international express train collided with a local barge. Nothing was ever recovered from dozens of passengers. They were totally charred in the scorching inferno. Portuguese writer João Ricardo Pedro, in his stunning novel Underway, reconstructs how one of those missing people ended up in that place where...
Good timing always remains tricky. Just as the middle class is getting ready for the Sinterklaas season, the Supervisory Board of Kunstencentrum Witte de With announces that the name is going to change. That name came up for discussion in the wave of public agitation over appropriation, unionist images and reparations for the Netherlands' slavery past. Initially, it seemed to...
Anyone who is young, a little nicely educated and otherwise generally of good character does not go on a North Sea cruise. A cruise on the North Sea, that's what you do if you have no imagination, have bad legs or are too sick for anything else. Believes Wunderbaum. The theatre collective that likes to take care of the vulnerable of this planet is...
The prize for the longest and most artful kiss of 2017 has been given away and goes to Conny Janssen Danst. In a small tent on the square below Bossche Sint-Jan, this danced kiss forms the technical and dramatic highlight of Clarity. Two dancers, spinning pirouettes while keeping their lips connected, a video artist and the floating music performed live by iET were on Saturday ...
Heroes are not always the smartest people. Indeed, most acts that have gone down in history as heroes have been thoughtless actions. That happened to succeed. Pure luck. Against every heroic act, therefore, there is an unknown but not negligible number of senseless deaths of would-be heroes. The main character of the theatre play The Heroes, which I attended in Den Bosch on 4 August,...
Opening speeches. Every festival has one. Or two. You have to go through them. As a guest, but also as a host. Something should be found on it. Of course a point has to be made, a flag raised, a champagne bottle bang introduced. And also the sponsors should be thanked. In these times of a retreating government, there are more of them every year. And.
Would like your interpretation of the cover girl's look on the Theatre Festival Boulevard programme book. It may be projection, but I see a slightly overwhelmed desperation in those eyes, whose eyebrows have been replaced by two playfully placed arches of St John's, above: Den Bosch on my mind. Where to start, mostly. In the book, especially abundance. Glassily designed...
[This post was already online under the title 'Save us from the Transition Office', but has been updated in a few details] While you are preparing for a well-deserved holiday, people in the arts sector are working on a new model. That new model is needed because the old model is no longer adequate. That old model, and we are of course talking about our...
The advantage of being a subscriber to Culture Press is, of course, mainly that we can exist thanks to you. So our independent sound remains audible, so you get the interpretation of the news as you get it nowhere else. In June, a total of 14 authors hit the road for you to see as many Holland Festival performances as possible....
A Quattro Mani's pop-up reviewer Afke Bohle took up the challenge of reading a book with her eldest son. After the first volume in Susan van 't Hullenaar's De Groene Hand series, the second soon followed. And what was her surprise: now the wait for part three is actually taking too long... My youngest son loves books, but...
You can't help but grin at the sight of a cute little jellyfish consisting of a bottle and an orange net. A spray bottle with a well-placed cap becomes a penguin, or a goose. Even rolled-up hair, harvested from a washing machine, does not escape Adriaansche's universe: a family of flies called Musca capillus. It does something to the way you look. 'Where...
On Tuesday 12 April 2017, Finnish pioneer of avant-garde electronic music Mika Vainio passed away. He was 53 years old. According to Finnish media, Vainio died in an accident while on holiday in France. Shock Mika Vainio is considered a shining example and inspiration. Many artists from the electronic music world are therefore stunned and reacted on social media in disbelief....
Delicate petals, tough links, a denim collar. You can't dream it up or Danish designers have designed them in silver as jewellery. Thousand Jewels offers an overview of Danish design from the twentieth century. Among them are internationally renowned designers and silversmiths, such as Georg Jensen (not only jewellery but also silver tableware), Kaj Bojesen (not only silver but also...
From a country where a giraffe is dissected for children as a holiday attraction, you don't have to expect a sugary pink Disney opera. And so Intet (= Nothing) is not. Think Lord of the Flies, place of action: a peaceful Danish village. Also think Søren Kierkegaard - because philosophy. Also by no means a buffoon. The story Intet is based on the eponymous...
It may be our friend or foe, but it is a basic necessity of life for every human being: light. Yet we know very little about it, journalist Gemma Venhuizen realised, although for several years she has noticed sometimes sharp differences in her state of mind. For articles, she sometimes travels to countries where it barely gets dark, discovering the euphoria that the abundance...
Meg Stuart's two-hour heroic epic Until Our Hearts Stop, showing at the Rotterdam Schouwburg this week, does not engage in dramatic construction according to the rules of Aristotle's Poetics. We don't know who those people are there on stage. Nor do they seem to have been given any special assignment, although they are clearly being...
Magic cannot be grasped. Certainly not such a short and fabulous moment as twilight, when the day turns into evening so quickly and the lights go back on. It is precisely this elusive, short 'magic hour' that photographer Jan van der Horn (1951) tries to capture in his staged photographs. The magic pictures he takes light up from 11 November (St Martin's Day) until...
This week saw the publication of Nobel laureate Herta Müller's autobiography, My homeland, an apple stone. A few years ago, A Quattro Mani had an exclusive interview with the Romanian writer, when her first collection of poetry collages was published, The Skirt-chaser and its sly aunt. We spoke to her at her home in Berlin, she revealed how her poetry collages are created, and the making...
For now, an unusual state of affairs in the field of cultural governance. Unsatisfactory also because of the many questions it raises: Wim Pijbes rather unexpectedly announces his departure as chief director of the Rijksmuseum on 1 March 2016, opting for a director's position at a new private museum (Voorlinden) owned by billionaire Van Caldenborgh on 1 July 2016. Equally unexpectedly,...
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