Better to die standing than to live kneeling. The statement is fresh in memory after the murder in the Lange Leidse Dwarsstraat, as a mantra in praise of Peter R de Vries, his fearlessness, non-conformism, straightforwardness and honesty. This same statement jumps out even from the first paragraphs of the introduction to the biography of poet Jef Last, written by Rudi Wester.1....
Naomi Velissariou (1984) was actually supposed to be at the Bossche Festival Boulevard 2021 with more performances. This year, her entire trilogy 'Permanent Destruction' would be performed in a setting like club rave. Fierce musical theatre, based on playwrights Sarah Kane and Heiner Müller, and concluded with the more subdued work 'Pain against Fear'. All parts have received rave reviews from audiences and press, but...
Saturday 26 June at the Holland Festival, a special evening around two music films by Frank Scheffer: the documentary Inner Landscape and the opera film Si Fan. Supplemented by a short live performance by Chinese musician Wu Wei. This will present a musical journey from the seventh-century Tang Dynasty to contemporary electronic music. An evening with unexpected perspectives.
For the exhibition of the anniversary programme Vive le Cinéma! Art & Film, Eye Filmmuseum and the Rotterdam Film Festival invited five filmmakers to create work for the three-dimensional space. Intriguing installations that play with camera and viewer, image and meaning.
The art of slowing down in times of pandemic. Aceleratio is an interdisciplinary performance installation that aims to confront online and offline audiences with struggle, freedom, courage and comfort, from the need to embody these times. Artistic directors Dayna Martinez Morales & Vincent Verburg are the initiators of Movement Expo Aceleratio. Ten experienced and very different performers in...
On social media, and in mainstream media for that matter, it is not helpful to be overly clever. The adage of my father, who was a journalist and taught me not to be afraid to ask stupid questions, has been elevated to a code of honour. You only have to watch 15 minutes of Op1, or WNL on Sunday, and you make...
In this podcast, I talk to Marjolein Verhallen and Paul Adriaanse from Public Administration, Nanna Verhoef from Media and Iris van der Tuin from Philosophy, and artistic directors Lars Ebert and Jente Hoogeveen about what that is: leadership. And we talk about how you can learn it.
French-Austrian theatre maker Gisèle Vienne (1976) and Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952) have been appointed associate artists for the 2021 Holland Festival.
Those who read De opgang begin to understand more about Belgium: the country's gigantic split, the friction between the two parts of the country, and the rise and success of the Vlaams Blok. Hertmans has also come to a better understanding of how deep the cleavages and "the sorrows of Belgium" run.
With northern Italy cut off from the outside world because of corona and looking increasingly desolate, we are reminded of an interview we had a few years ago with writer Davide Longo about his book The Vertical Man. A book à la The Road by Cormac McCarthy, in which Longo outlines a desolate world that has changed dramatically as a result of...
The great philosopher of the 1968 left-wing uprisings was untrustworthy both privately and in his philosophy. His muse Simone de Beauvoir was also a victim. In almost an hour and a half, theatre company OT Rotterdam unfolds the disenchantment of De Beauvoir in a brilliant role by José Kuipers, opposite Tim Linde as ex-student leader Benny Lévy and confidant of Sartre. Kabbala Piece...
Ensemble Modern presents world premieres by German-Dutch Iris ter Schiphorst and Turkish Zeynep Gedizlioğlu in November Music. And that is good news, because the female composer remains too often invisible even in 2019. In the brochures of any Dutch orchestra, you will find none, or only a single work by a woman. On the new Heart & Soul list of...
This weekend, there was some fuss on Twitter. Something about a Nazi comparison that didn't quite work out. Now there is quite often a fuss on Twitter because of a Nazi comparison that doesn't quite work out, but this time it concerned one of our cultural figureheads. Kees Vlaardingerbroek, artistic director of the NTR Saturday matinee and former head of programming at the Rotterdam...
The 2019 batch of the Film Academy shows graduation work. What do students think of the changes needed at the academy?
With his new book The Discovery of Elsschot, Elsschot biographer Vic van de Reijt wants to get the whole of the Netherlands reading Elsschot's books. Seven reasons why these classics are timeless fun. 1. You can finish any of Elsschot's books in one day 'In 1970 I bought his Collected Works for nine guilders, I remember it well. At the time...
It was just missing the heavy music and gothic storm images in the Game of Thrones trailer whose lyrics Thierry Baudet uttered on the night of Wednesday 20 to Thursday 21 March 2019. 'And so here we stand, at the eleventh hour, among the debris of what was once the greatest and most beautiful civilisation the world has known. A...
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...
The cultural sector is sometimes behind, but more often ahead. In the - otherwise very much to be welcomed in terms of content - advice issued by the Amsterdam Arts Council on the future of the local Stedelijk Museum, you can read that job security in the art sector is once again under pressure. Especially for young entrants from 'diverse' backgrounds: 'Preferably, the museum will make greater use of...
You must be a serious misanthrope not to have a good time in Stadspark Maastricht that Friday. The sun is shining. It is subtropical warm with a light spring breeze. The location, next to a pond embraced by ramparts and turrets, is perfect. Under the ancient oaks, some 40 food trucks and bars with simmering kitchens await you. Oh...
Poets Danez Smith and Patricia Lockwood once broke the internet with their virtuoso wordplay. Smith with a frothy tirade about ineradicable racism and police brutality in America (Dear White America) and Lockwood with a heartbreaking/funny poem about her rape (Rape Joke). Both have outgrown their hypes. They have secretly been doing a fantastic job for years, using Twitter, YouTube, paper and stage...
At the end of the nineteenth century, Western music gradually began to come apart at the seams. Composers used more and more dissonances so that the familiar tonality hardly fitted into its shell. From a constant desire for even more expression, the orchestra was expanded with ever-newer instruments. This led to monster productions such as Gustav Mahler's 'Symphony of the Tausend', with more than a thousand...
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...
A new generation of leaders in culture rose in the Utrecht Academy Building on Thursday 9 November. The 39 leaders come from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam to Schunck in Heerlen and from the VPRO in Hilversum to the Utrecht festival Le Guess Who. In a year and a half, they discovered new working methods and formulated new vistas for the arts. That could ...
Brandend Kalf wants more fire in Dutch cinema. Parallel to the opening of the Dutch Film Festival, this initiative group organised a meeting where objections to the far too safe Dutch film were listed. Where is the subversive cinema?
Vincent Macaigne is uncomfortable. He looks around nervously every time the waitresses run past with trays full of clinking glasses and slam the doors. He has barely slept, and the previous evening he had walloped the audience of the Swiss Theatre Vidy with his brutal, inimitable performance En Manque. Braced, he sat down for the interview. "Sorry, I...
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