'During performances or book signings, people often come up to me and tell me: "I wasn't a reader, but your book made me experience the pleasure of reading and now I really enjoy reading." I don't say that because I think my books are now so good, but because it shows that once someone experiences...
'I am not at all optimistic about the planet. Nor am I optimistic about the optimism with which the people in my show keep finding a solution to live on despite the calamity that befalls them.' Philippe Quesne has turned that despair into a beautiful play. Full of non-cynical survivors who turn everything into an adventure. How he does that...
Anne Lister. This 19th-century lady was a pioneer in many fields: she climbed mountains, travelled far away on her own and was successful in business. However, she gained fame mainly through her private life. Anne Lister has been called Britain's first modern lesbian. During her lifetime, she kept several diaries, in which she recorded her erotic escapades with ladies in...
Water and dance have agility in common. Yet there is much more to be gained from this interface. Two choreographies in the New Adventures series give audiences a water experience that is both playful and reflective. Under the title New Adventures, Dansmakers Amsterdam presents work by selected dancers and choreographers that they created during a four-week study residency at the production house,...
There is an artist café in Utrecht that few Utrechters know about. And I don't mean Theatercafé De Bastaard, where by now a whole generation of actors, filmmakers and writers come from, but the artists' foyer of TivoliVredenburg. I've eaten and hung out there a few times, as an embedded reporter of De Nacht van de Poëzie, when it's very late into...
Eye film museum kicks off its Virtual Reality season with Tsai Ming Liang's The Deserted. Tsai himself was in the country for a masterclass, introductions and interviews. And although his films suggest otherwise, he is a very animated speaker. In his masterclass, he talked about his career, his collaboration with muse and regular actor Lee Kang-Sheng, and his position...
'I work five nights a week and so I have to find out specifically when I can go to a concert. Sometimes I take time off for it. And then they do say, "hey, are you going to a concert again already?", and I say, "of course I'm going to a concert again". But I don't think it's extreme either.' Petra Gerritsen is process expert
The 2014 first season of True Detective was a huge success. A Southern murder mystery with an occult twist. Besides the 'who did it' storyline, the season was mostly about the complicated characters of Martin Hart and Rust Cole (played convincingly by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey). There was a raw and palpable chemistry between the two. The...
'When I look in the auditorium at a classical concert now, I do think: it's full now, but in 20 years eighty per cent will be dead. So the bottom has to be fed, and TivoliVredenburg does that well. They do it, for example, with Out of the Blue, which is a programme where you get great food and by a special host
According to those in the know, he is a master of glass creations: Dale Chihuly. Dynamic, colourful and fascinating. It is not just glass art, but installation art. The world-famous American artist's works are a feast for the eyes. Sensations of light and colour. Although the name may not ring a bell right away for most people, there is a good chance...
A Quattro Mani's pop-uprecent Afke Bohle takes on the challenge of reading a book with her sons. After good experiences with Suzie Ruzie, The Green Hand series by Susan van 't Hullenaar and Tori by Brian Elstak in collaboration with author Karin Amatmoekrim. This time they plunge into Lobke and the Light, a read-aloud book with a mission. Finding words 'Where can...
DocLab 2018 is no longer about the latest technology, but about the human experience. What menu can artists serve us with digital media and artificial intelligence. Examination of reality, playful installations, the Humanoid Cookbook and collaboration with MIT
Sounding Alchemy, is the name of the chunky volume recently published by music publicist Maarten Brandt (1953). It has 715 pages, including illustrations and an extensive index. In 98 articles, Brandt unfolds his views on music and music programming. He dedicated the beautifully designed book to his admired Marius Flothuis, programmer of the Concertgebouw Orchestra for many years. His heirs received a first copy during...
Searching for what I stand for and what path I should take, time and again I come across facts that confuse and amaze me. I live in a country where only a single woman is in De Volkskrant top ten most influential people - in tenth place, that is. Only three out of 100 young Dutch millionaires...
In the last century, we had Teleac. Teleac taught me to play chess. Quite extraordinary for television. Perhaps because I have associated television with 'learning' in that way from a young age, I am thrilled with the series made by VPRO with Martin Koolhoven. It is, for the first time in ages, television that stimulates the mind, that makes you think ...
The trans-drama Girl, Belgium's Oscar entry, is on a veritable victory lap. Filmmaker Lukas Dhont on the struggles of trans girl Lara, who is mostly an ordinary adolescent. On his personal struggle with stereotypes, and on his love of dance. "A place on the Oscar shortlist would already be very nice," he says.
Robert Beck, the protagonist of Benedict Wells' debut novel Becks last summer, hopes, as a near-forty-year-old, to make his dream come true after all: a career in music. Wells (34) knows what it is to go all out to pursue your dream. He turned a difficult childhood into literature, and he became damn successful at it. Over the past...
Usually when I speak to someone who calls themselves a playwright, they say they are 'only' a supplier of a 'half-product'. I never get that answer from a young actor, and certainly never from a director. It is they who make theatre out of the half-products supplied by writers. Actors and directors prefer to be addressed as 'theatre-makers'. Nothing wrong with that....
It did not require a manifesto, nor a fist-thick art-critical treatise in which a learned committee arrives at an all-defining verdict. No, it was a slip of the tongue by an artist, this time defining a new art movement. Olaffur Eliasson, the architect/artist rapidly gaining popularity in the world of design and architecture in recent years, says it in a...
In her novel Club Mars, writer Rachel Kushner shows what the life of an inmate looks like inside the four walls. 'I like to include people in my life who have been made invisible in our society,' she says. No mercy Thousands of women are incarcerated in Chowchilla, the jail that was the model for Rachel Kushner's writing of Club Mars. Kushner's...
Tightness. A feeling of oppression prevails when watching the new (mini)series from HBO's stable, Sharp Objects. The series launched this week, but I got to see a few episodes in advance. HBO's Sharp Objects is a film adaptation of the book of the same name by Gillian Flynn, author of, among others, the exciting Gone Girl. With Sharp Objects...
"In the Netherlands, we are actually on holiday," say Daphne (40) and Ilja (26), laughing. They are travel experts, with Japan as their core destination. "I visit a few festivals every summer, but whether I'm really a festival-goer? Not so much, I think." Seven years ago, Daphne was last to Lakedance, now she is "getting up to age" and got to go for...
Because Evening, Anna Enquist's new novel, is a book full of pent-up exasperation and anger. Never before has she written so freely as with this book, without knowing where the story was going. "I would like to be able to be a bit angrier myself." After the poetry collection Hoor de staden and her memories of Gerrit Kouwenaar, A Garden in the...
Johann Sebastian Bach and Kate Moore in one concert programme. With this choice for the fifth episode of her 'Cello 020' series, cellist Lidy Blijdorp once again outdoes herself in originality. And the effect of this choice is phenomenal. Enhanced interaction Not only does she bring together works by two completely different composers, she further enhances the interaction by playing their...
Neues Stück 1 Seit sie - Ein Stück von Dimitris Papaioannou is a long title for an overwhelming piece, which Tanztheater Wuppertal is bringing to the Holland Festival this year. Nine years ago, on 30 June 2009, a month before she was to turn sixty-nine, Pina Bausch died suddenly. The world-famous and highly influential choreographer of experimental, haunting and unparalleled dance theatre left behind a...
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