The CD Sax avec Elan! is the latest project by the ever enterprising Amstel Quartet. The four saxophonists made their name with impeccable and inspired performances of contemporary music, but do not shy away from the beaten track. For this CD, they joined forces with French chansonnier Philippe Elan. To my pleasant surprise, the...
Following the euro crisis, Culture Press focuses on Greece in a series of articles. In the first part, George Vermij looks at how film has influenced our image of the Mediterranean country. Is there not a more striking image of Greece than Antony Quinn as Zorba dancing the Sirtaki and finding resignation despite the harsh setbacks life offers? The...
Fifth batch of Masters graduating from Film Academy shows experimentation drive.
Cathedrals are 'in' Utrecht has a thing for cathedrals. The Dom was once a cathedral, but since the Reformation stormed its way through the Roman Catholic heritage, the real cathedral with the archbishop's chair is now a few hundred metres away. In the early 1990s, theatre-maker Aram Adriaanse renamed the former stables of the veterinary faculty 'Horse Cathedral',...
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...
The new operas by Arnoud Noordegraaf and Guo Wenjing, which the Holland Festival presented shortly after each other, both thematise the loss of traditional values due to the meteoric developments in modern China. Both also feature a Chinese soprano in the lead role and draw on classical Chinese opera and folk music. The inner landscape of Guo Wenjing, which will be performed Tuesday, 16 June,...
Had Anton Chekhov lived now, he would have written for television. Not drama, and certainly not film. Indeed, innovative as the great Russian playwright was during his short life (1860-1904), he would now have done something with selfie sticks and contact microphones. The result would probably have been something like what Brazilian artist Christiane Jatahy has now created. She took the text...
Over 70% of the talking heads on TV are men, Simone van Saarloos told us in the introduction to her own talk show. Niña Weijers and she thought that surely something like this could be done better, without talking about glass ceilings and other women's topics. And so, in October 2013, they launched their sexist talk show series with guests from the arts, literature, politics and...
There is something crushing about the massiveness. Choreographers Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten have brought the dancers of the Ballet National de Marseille and of ICK Amsterdam to the stage in Extremalism, thirty in all. A huge 'corps de ballet'. Greco and Scholten and the dancers take root in classical ballet, but also break away from it. The classical footwork with...
Der Untergang der Nibelungen - The Beauty of Revenge at Berlin's Maxim Gorki Theatre on Wednesday, 10 June, with its duration of 2.5 hours - without intermission - did quite an assault on the sitting flesh. Granted, Wagner spared four complete operas for his version of the medieval Nibelungenlied and director Peter Jackson devoted three full-length films to the also...
For eight years, the Mauritshuis researched and restored his painting 'Saul and David'. As a result, it can now be definitively attributed to Rembrandt. But the small exhibition 'Rembrandt? The Case of Saul and David' mainly shows how the museum collaborated with all kinds of different scientists and laboratories to unravel the numerous mysteries surrounding the canvas. As a visitor, you will be taken through the...
Twenty-two years after Jurassic Park the fourth instalment of the well-known dinosaur films enters Dutch cinemas on Thursday 11 June. In Jurassic World we see in 3D how the dreamed theme park with live dinosaurs is finally realised, and how things go grandly wrong when overambitious showmen start genetically manipulating dinosaurs. In each new volume, the plot is thinner, the special effects become more dominant and the scientific pretensions less so, but no one can deny that the Jurassic Park-films have revolutionised. Also in the arts.
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'See, that's how it goes.' Esther Ending flips open a magazine containing an interview following her new novel An Island of Her Own, set on Ibiza, the island where she grew up. The article is not about her novel, but, unbeknownst to her, is part of a story about partying, drinking and drug use. [Tweet...
The new format of the Holland festival puts the spectator first. Plenty of visible events, free performances and being in the middle of the city. It's director Ruth McKenzie's trademark. It is therefore not surprising that she does not shy away from the digital universe. After all, what better way to share than digital art? But what then is digital art...
Emio Greco and Pieter Scholten rehearse their new performance Extremalism in Marseille. The two dance companies under their direction, ICKamsterdam and Ballet National de Marseille, have merged for this occasion: 30 dancers on stage, six authors and designers in the auditorium, and the crew of technicians is also made up of Amsterdamers and Marseillais. They are working together on the biggest production that Greco and...
A young blonde woman climbs a staircase in a round, windowless room and emerges into a desert. She runs laps around a red cloth, singing "everything's repeated many times". Or: the same young woman lies in the same windowless round room, but now in a different dress and with a curious machine. "everything's repeated many times". Or: the same...
Stars, we don't really do that in the Netherlands. Our ground level does not allow diva behaviour. In our lowlands, you get a plus if you have stayed so nicely ordinary despite your success. Even if you stand in the Arena with your songs, like the Toppers, this weekend. How different it is in Istanbul. There, you are allowed to be shamelessly famous. Like.
In The Loom of Mind, Icelandic folk singer Mugison, his bosom friend Pétur Ben, and Flemish baroque ensemble B.O.X. join forces. What does that sound like: melancholic Icelandic blues with 17th-century instruments? Like a stand-up storytelling concert performance? Or like a drunken panda who wants to have a game? How did you find each other? Pieter Theuns, lutenist and founder of B.O.X.: "I found Mugison...
The only one really remembered in Jan Wolkers' novel 'The Peach of Immortality' is former resistance fighter Ben Ruwiel. On 5 May 1980, the entry of the Canadians from 35 years earlier was celebrated in Amsterdam. The crowds, not far from where Ben lives, fill him with disgust. It is unreal. People, wrapped up by welfare society, have no concept of...
Berlin's Gorki Theatre won a prize this year: it was named the best theatre in the German language area by the German-language press. The company won the award partly because it employs many actors of immigrant origin. With its performance Der Untergang der Nibelungen, which can be seen in this year's Holland Festival, the group also thematises the...
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,...
The opera Poland in Plan Zuid will premiere at the Liberal Jewish Community in Amsterdam on Sunday 19 April. Composer Caroline Ansink and librettist Olaf Mulder based their work on Daniël Vermeulen's (pseudonym) memories of going into hiding in Brabant and his subsequent reunion with his mother in Amsterdam in 1945. Three questions for Caroline Ansink. Why...
He has been given many labels. From (post-)minimalist to hardcore modernist and from neo-romanticist to neo-spiritualist. 'I don't pay attention to them anymore,' says composer Erkki-Sven Tüür (Estonia, 1959). Yet he responds somewhat surly when I ask in an email what he thinks of such descriptions: 'You either like my music or not.' Via Skype, he answers eight...
With 'The oasis of Matisse', the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam has put on a magnificent exhibition. Sixty years after there was last a major retrospective of Matisse in the Netherlands, his work is back on display in all its glory. So alongside 'Late Rembrandt' at the Rijksmuseum, there is another blockbuster in the capital. The thousands of visitors who attended the...
In early March, The Great War Machine, the new play by director Joachim Robbrecht, premiered at Theater Frascati. A week earlier, at the Rotterdam Schouwburg Swamp Club to be seen, by French director Philippe Quesne. Both performances address the current political climate. Whereas Swamp Club is explicitly silent about the world it calls into question, The Great War Machine is instead a rhetorical spectacle, constructed from quotes from TEDtalks. Both performances make mechanisms felt, rather than pointing out culprits. Voluntarily withdrawing or being shut out, the neoliberal order does not seem to allow much more choice. There is no question of resistance.
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