'How many realities can we handle? For me, that is the theme of 2018. Those ladies from North Korea who were cheering, for example. But it was also in Halbe Zijlstra who had lied about Putin's dacha.' Greg Nottrot, theatre maker from Utrecht, had set out for this year to create an end-of-year performance that would capture the zeitgeist well....
Three black men wash up on a small island. This threatens to throw a spanner in the works of the residents and their economic plans. So everyone prefers to pretend that nothing has happened. Archipelago of the Dog, Philippe Claudel's new novel, is a haunting book with lightness peeking through at times. The French bestselling author worries: 'Once, nuclear weapons constituted...
The Ministry of OCW has excellent black felt-tip pens. In no way, therefore, did I manage to find out which newspaper in Amsterdam made the WOB request to which Minister van Engelshoven is now responding. The length of the black bar could be anything (except Coöperatief Cultureel Persbureau UA). Anyway: someone is investigating the course of events surrounding the...
His short stories look deceptively simple, and every word is weighed as if on a gold scale. He therefore basically writes his very short stories from A to Z, without changing anything else. Portrait of writer A.L. Snijders. 'While my wife was dying, I unsuspectingly wrote a piece.' Elaborate You wouldn't expect it from...
In 2016, I was unexpectedly struck by a Beatles classic. So what are the ingredients of perfect pop music? It is August 2016. I am standing with my friend at a ticket office in Liverpool, the British port city that is just as much an open-air museum. It is rather rubbed in on us that this city gave birth to The Beatles. In the harbour, tourists spend the night in a yellow submarine, equally...
Menno Pols, reporter for De Gelderlander, was denied accreditation (free ticket and other benefits) for the three-day Manana Manana festival in Vorden this year. Reason: an article he wrote last year about the money flows within the club behind the festival. That club earns millions mainly from Zwarte Cross, the biggest festival in the Netherlands with 220,000 tickets sold. The accreditation...
Danez Smith is quite something. Or rather two, because the American poet likes to be addressed in the gender-neutral, or rather gender-plural plural form. A form of address not yet very common in Dutch, and thus avoided by everyone. Thursday night, 31 May at the former ro theatre, now Theater Rotterdam - Witte de With, fell around the...
EYE Film Museum has a robot filmmaker connecting old archive footage with trending topics from social media. Experimental filmmaking in the internet age. Watch and marvel at Jan Bot's work.
This was the email from the editors of Trouw, dated 9 May 2018: "Mr A. Bakx has had the phone number and email address we now have from him under this name since 2014. We therefore assume that he is A. Bakx." Was supported by an email to Erwin Roebroeks, which mentioned a telephone conversation with...
'Iris Hannema writes like a guy,' I wrote a few years ago in a review of her The Bittersweet Paradise (2016). You wouldn't get away with that now. Actually, I meant to say: Iris Hannema writes solid, image-rich, independent ánd critical texts that you rarely come across in female as well as male travel journalists. Why that is, I will tell you later. Get lost' Typical...
In the early 1990s, I am sitting in a small auditorium at The National Theatre in London. Before the performance starts, someone on stage asks if you want to greet the visitors next to you. This immediately creates a different, more intimate dynamic in the auditorium. On a tight stage with only a few props are four actors and an Arab musician. Yoshi Oida...
On 25 January 2018, the Musical Awards were presented with, as we are used to, many translated reruns and calibrated repertoire. Also notable was the appreciation for new Dutch work. Many a writer will have been cheering on the sofa when 'Was Getekend, Annie M.G. Schmidt' won the awards. Does that bode well for the future? Can today's (small)...
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...
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...
Struggle is by far the word that falls the most in the video triptych 'The Tempest Society'. The struggle for a dignified existence, the struggle for papers, the struggle with a system that does not want to give you rights. Refugees struggle with these issues day in and day out, year in and year out. In this video triptych, Moroccan-French director Bouchra Khalili (Casablanca,...
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...
Culture Press is an indispensable addition to the cultural news in your newspaper, on the internet or on TV. Independent, quirky, rebellious and above all: useful. After all, there is already enough nonsense about art. You'll understand that we don't serve the millions of readers that the big publishers and their advertisers exist on. Which is why everyone else does so little about art....
We are real Holland Festival specialists by now. We go and see performances beforehand, interview makers, actors and walk around the halls, in the foyers, just about every day. We hear a lot, we see a lot and we share it here. Cultural journalism as it should be, in short. Cultural journalism that should also be there. And it totally succeeds if you take out a subscription. Then you get...
In the 1980s, when I played teacher in Curaçao for a few years, a shiver of admiration and trepidation swept through the island's intellectual upper crust. Double Play appeared, the now classic Curaçao novel by Frank Martinus Arion. It was a hit. Gerrit Komrij loved the novel. [bol_product_links block_id="bol_5924039b33ad6_selected-products" products="9200000057138048,9200000005225011″ name="harri" sub_id="arion" link_color="003399″ subtitle_color="000000″ price... You can...
He finds himself lazy and under-ambitious, and struggles with acceptance - of himself, of others, of the world. Because his grandparents had lived through the Holocaust, there was a taboo on being unhappy in his youth. Eight life questions to Jewish-American writer Jonathan Safran Foer. 'Between what I could do and actually do, there is a big gap.' 1....
Earlier this year, Mircea Cărtărescu, Romania's greatest writer, was a guest at the Winternachten festival. Writer Mira Feticu, who was born and grew up in Romania and even received lectures from Cărtărescu as a student, interviewed her former compatriot and professor for A Quattro Mani. A beautiful conversation about their homeland, truth, literature and poetry. 'My books are...
Displaced paintings by Armando. Artists fleeing the city. A tinpot that brought financial disaster and summer festivals that attract tens of thousands of visitors every year. And you thought Amersfoort was boring? A footnote along the A1 motorway? Forget it. Let me tell you about this city struggling with its cultural identity. A story in eighteen impressions. Guilty landscape In his youth...
Adultery, lustful sex and desperately dating forty-somethings - these are the spicy ingredients of caSINO, Frieda Mulisch's debut novel. On their quest for true love, her protagonists Polly and Sam scour dating app caSINO, a kind of Tinder. We talk to her about her book, literary aspirations and, of course, her father Harry Mulisch. 'If Tinder had been around fifty years ago,...
In a discussion (on facebook, where else) about NRC Handelsblad's departure from Blendle, an editor of that newspaper made very disparaging remarks about a reader who had paid 30 cents for one of his articles. In a recent article on Frankwatching, an expert concluded that investigative journalism could only survive if we started subsidising newspapers....
The National Theatre plays Jeanne d'Arc by Friedrich Schiller and simultaneously retakes Johann Goethe's Tasso. Joris Smit plays in both plays, even the title role in Tasso. We talk to him about German romantics, Sallie Harmsen, the new-fangled National Theatre and the importance of going down on your face. Tasso and Jeanne, Goethe and Schiller. Is German romance...
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