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The Pyre: taut, disruptive performance by Gisele Vienne @HollandFestival

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Those who suffer from the misconception that dance is about beauty are mercilessly disabused of the dream by Gisele Vienne ...

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'El Djoudour' is interesting as a cultural-political project, but does not convince artistically @Holland Festival

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Men and women together on the dance floor, it is still forbidden in large parts of the Muslim world. Two years ago, the dance performance 'Nya' was at the Holland Festival, a piece written on the skin of nine Algerian dancers, mostly ...

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Meistersinger @HollandFestival convinces musically only

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Cowardly knight defeats untalented rule fetishist with help from wise cobbler and wins singing contest and the hand of coquettish goldsmith's daughter. Or: boy meets girl on the streets of Nuremberg and decides to enter the local version of Nuremberg's got talent. The judges send him away, but he gets the audience vote. Wagner wouldn't be Wagner, however, if he didn't take about five hours for this story.

Two voices on Sunken Garden @HollandFestival part 2. Thea Derks: 'Guilt & penance before, after, with and in death'

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Amsterdam, 5-6-2013 - It is difficult to go uninhibited to a production that has already caused so much controversy as Michel van der Aa's Sunken Garden. This 'first 3D opera' was ne...

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Social media and art connect people, but Egypt stays away for a while #vvu

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Experiments may well have a different outcome than you hope for beforehand. The Community Arts Lab is now discovering through the Face to Face project that the world of the internet still has to deal with real borders. A project in which ordinary people in Egypt would create a work of art with ordinary m...

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Wagner in Düsseldorf: opera jewel or publicity stunt?

When both nu.co.uk, BBC news and virtually every German newspaper simultaneously cover an opera, something must be going on. And there is: Nazis! Wagner! Outraged spectators! More than that: doctors had to be called in!

The occasion: the new staging of Wagner's Tannhäuser in Düsseldorf for Opera am Rhein. Director Burkhard Kosminski moved the action from the Middle Ages to the 1940s. Not earth-shattering, but what he too...

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Willem Jeths: 'My First Symphony is about life and death'

At 53, Willem Jeths can boast an impressive career. His orchestral and chamber music works are performed worldwide and have been recorded on many CDs. In 2008 the newly built Muziekkwartier in Enschede opened with his opera Hotel de Pékin, and three years later the recording of his ode to gay marriage Monument to a Universal Marriage even reached US President Obama. At the request of the ZaterdagMatinee, Jeths wrote his First Symphony for the Radio Filharmonisc...

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Only in final scene does Guillaume Tell bathe in golden sunlight

After more than four hours, it happens: emotion. Free Switzerland is bathed in golden sunlight and the chorus swells over the most beautiful orchestral sounds Rossini composed. Unworldly sounds, which have little to do with the best-known sounds from Guillaume Tell - the canter from the overture.

A lot may have happened in the previous four hours, but even the famous scene in which Tell has to shoot an apple off his infant son's head is not a dramatic highlight.

H...

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November Music focuses on multimedia

's Hertogenbosch 9-11-2012 - November Music was successfully kicked off last Wednesday and also focuses on multimedia in its twentieth edition. The duo Strijbos & Van Merwijk has been there before and that afternoon received the Prins Bernhardcultuurprijs Noord-Brabant, presented by former Concertgebouw director Martijn Sanders. In the evening, their multimedia show Cross Avenue, created for the American string quartet ETHEL, attracted many audiences, the two performances of Cloud-Messenger by Fred...

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Art for all: €3 per person, per month

The discussion was and is endless, but now we have figures. Thanks to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science's new 'key figures', we now know how much the state (all of us) are spending for the opportunity to experience art: per inhabitant, the state spends 38.90 per year on subsidies for dance, theatre, museums, youth theatre, opera and orchestras. So that's just over 3 euros a month. Indeed something to get into each other's hair about, we think.

In this climate, where this 3 euro pe...

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Der Schatzgräber II: Van Hove exposes core and weaknesses

"That fairytale world has never been my world," director Ivo van Hove declared before the premiere of Schreker's fairytale opera Der Schatzgräber. Remarkable, as Van Hove and his regular scenographer Jan Versweyveld were previously responsible at De Nederlandse Opera for Tchaikovsky's Iolanta and Janáček's The Makropulos Case - also fairy tales rather than grand dramatic works.

Tchaikovsky's last opera is all about Princess Iolanta. Everyone knows she is blind, but keeps...

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Photo: Monika Rittershaus

Der Schatzgräber I: blistering music, freezing dry staging

The Netherlands Opera opens the season with a rarely performed opera by Franz Schreker, in which pagan and Christian themes intermingle. The gorgeous music is countered by the chilly direction, preventing identification with the characters.

At the end of the nearly three-hour Schatzgräber, the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and chief conductor Marc Albrecht were clapping the loudest at the Muziektheater last night. At his instigation, De Nederlandse Opera pulled out...

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The Second Detail

Shock and awe ballet in Bill & Mr. B overflows with quality on all sides; there is no stalling

In the production Bill & Mr B, the Dutch National Ballet dives thematically into history with reprises of works by George Balanchine and William Forsythe. Balanchine's Symphony in Three Movements (1972) is considered the breeding ground for Forsythe, who then went 'the extra mile' with Steptext (1985) and The Second Detail (1991). From protocol to photocall: dance as a photo session. Movement - click,... 

Extremely imaginative Master and Margarita gets cheering reception on #HF12

Shakespeare had it, Oscar savage had it, Monty Python had it and Simon McBurney has trucks full of it. So it is British and it is called humour, or rather the ability to show the absurdity of life as simultaneously hilarious and deeply tragic. And let that also apply to Russian Mikhail Bulgakov. So his unfinished novel The Master and Margarita has now had to wait almost 75 years for a director like Simon McBurney to turn it into theatre.

Less is more? No, less is FAR too much, by Michael Nyman's Potemkin. #hf12

Two days later... Sometimes you don't quite know what to write: even reviewers have writer's block from time to time. Fortunately, Jenny Diski of London Review of Books published a blog just Friday about the functionality of not being able to write (yet). Apparently, more time was needed. Anyway, at some point you have to tie the knot. ... 

Iván Fischer sets new Wagner standard

That Pierre Audi does not shy away from religious symbolism is well known, but the true miracle with Parsifal by the Netherlands Opera is in the pit. There, in the hands of master conductor Iván Fischer, the Concertgebouw Orchestra sets a new Wagner standard. Despite a gigantic orchestral strength, almost chamber music-like lightness, extraordinarily transparent and, thanks to careful tempo choices, with wonderful dramatic tension. Five hours long.

And that's just as well, because dramatic tension is...

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Final edition of Springdance closes convincingly with premiere of nonstop intense concert by Meyers, Sehgal and the REDUX ORCHESTRA

For the second time during Springdance, artists and audience share the stage of Utrecht's Stadsschouwburg. REDUX ORCHESTRA, conducted by composer Ari Benjamin Meyers, plays his Symphony X, a pulsating, up-beat (120 p/m) minimal work. Spectators, conductor and musicians - can you just call them musicians? - merge into one big, extremely subtle, participatory choreography of... 

Rare and exceptional performance "Lang" by Kat Válastur knocks you out with wonder and sucks you into maelstrom

Kat Válastur claimed that it is almost impossible to describe the dynamics of her performance with words. She is right. It is rare skill how with only two dancers in one place, so much can be depicted and the audience is sucked into a maelstrom. photo: Nysos Vasilopoulos In the small auditorium of Theatre Kikker, mechanical thuds sound and two giants appear in the middle of the stage.... 

Avdal and Shinozaki send a sultry spring breeze through Central Museum offices with "Field Works - office"

You think you are buying a ticket for Springdance, but actually you are making an appointment at the office, at the Central Museum. Once let inside the waiting room, staff walk busily past you and the doorman takes one call after another. You obediently fill in a form. As usual, you have to reveal all sorts of personal details. And then that question: what... 

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