Skip to content

video

This is how pop music 'matures': British group Bitter Ruin reaches Opera charts US.

Photo: Joseph Sheperd Last week, they reached the US top charts. Nice for a British pop group looking to emerge from anonymity via a targeted Facebook campaign. Remarkably though, the pop group is not reaching the 'regular' top. In fact, with the song 'Trust', Bitter Ruin is on the opera list. But it is less surprising than it seems. At Amazon... 

#HF11 Dreamy cult pop and visual feast from The Irrepressibles

The Irrepressibles with their Human Music Box. Photo Patricia Niven At the request of the Holland Festival, Jamie McDermott of The Irrepressibles created a new programme: Human Music Box. The ten-piece British band will start its world tour in Amsterdam. The premiere on Friday 17 June at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ became an understated, musical evening that was especially visually appealing. In... 

#HF11 Messy set-up of Around Robert Wyatt gets in the way of magical moments

Scene from ''Around Robert Wyatt''. Photo Annabelle Tiaffay. "Alifib" by British progrocker Robert Wyatt (b. 1945) is a song that gets under the skin. Wyatt's near-breaking voice sounds so genuinely sad that it takes your breath away. It seems an impossible task to perform "Alifib" convincingly without the master himself. Yet the French Orchestre National de Jazz gets... 

#HF11: With The School for Scandal, Deborah Warner gives a gleeful kick to an arch-conservative theatre tradition. The British are not amused.

Photo: Neil Libbert

That was a bit of a grind for British theatre critics. The celebrated director Deborah Warner (1959) recently pulled Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal out of the closet. A play from 1777, and an untouchable part of the British theatre canon. Building on the style of her earlier production Mother Courage (2009) Warner also indicated The School for Scandal - goddamn - a quirky, contemporary twist.

 

"With many video, light, music and noise - like a rock concert, " grins Warner in the office of the Barbican Theatre In London. "Mother Courage had an incredibly populist, exciting atmosphere. I love that arrogant theatricality immensely, and I wanted to continue that style in The School for Scandal. For me, the big challenge was to explore the Brechtian theatre style of Weimar - which I got through Mother Courage had discovered again - to collide with an eighteenth-century theatre text."

'You can't become a successful cultural entrepreneur if you don't understand how a symphony orchestra works'

The opening images are apt: Joop van den Ende among men in togas, behind a real Pedel (the man with the bells), apathetic. And rightly so, of course. Because the once head man of cultural-entrepreneurial Holland, who started out in a party goods shop, achieved academic status without ever studying. For the man who always felt somewhat disadvantaged by the cultural and intellectual... 

Dutch ministry of OC&W bases vision 'renewal' cultural funding system on British example

Image via Wikipedia There is an interesting 'drone' underneath, and that may strike someone as menacing. In any case, the video at the end of this article has more meaning than many culture lovers might think. The fact is that the sweeping cuts made by the UK government through their 'Arts Council' have met with hardly any protests in retrospect, while the disproportion... 

Parade prepares for new summer tour in glorious weather

Terts Brinkhoff , founder of De Parade, has a set of sheds on the frayed edge of Weesp in which all the travelling festival's tents are stored, when not rented out. In April, the management (now Ray van Santen and Nicole van Vessum) gathers all the artists from the upcoming summer tour there for an introduction. Press time, of course. And with the weather like... 

Reviewers on the fortieth Rotterdam International Film Festival: lots of Chinese loneliness and that Russian needs to hit the cinemas

OK. A pilot. When Jeroen Stout lost his Wednesday film fork in Radio Kunststof on Radio 1 in December 2010, we made him an offer he could easily refuse: to do something like that with us. But that we would then look for a way that suits The Dodo. After all, audio online may be the... 

The deeper caverns of an adult film festival. Sven Schlijper on safari during IFFR 2011

The International Film Festival Rotterdam celebrates its fortieth edition with a fitting XL programme. That Roman numeral XL not only indicates respectable age. It also says something about size: this fortieth also bursts with the intiguing programme, with screenings at no less than forty locations throughout the inner city of Rotterdam. Inside the festival walls is... 

"Characteristic of the book trade remains the endless chatter, but this evening I wouldn't have wanted to miss." All tweets from #evdu, with video.

Interesting things are happening these days. The digital revolution is beginning to have traces of a real revolution. No one has yet set themselves on fire, as in Tunisia, but more and more people are taking to the virtual streets to overthrow the old powers: after the record companies, which let themselves be overwhelmed by people downloading, and the newspapers, which let themselves be overwhelmed by people searching freely for information, it now seems to be the turn of book publishers.

Tamer who! Haifa what! Some mega concerts are totally ignored by the media, like that of Tamer Hosny and Haifa Wehbe

Of course, we sometimes miss one. And of course Caro Emerald is cool and Graffity 6 is new. But there is more culture in the Netherlands than many users of mainstream media realise. Deep into the 1980s, sports halls were already full for Rai musicians, and that was years before Cheb Khaled penetrated the charts with Aïsha. The Cape Verdean community in Rotterdam... 

Moma shows video artwork previously barred from Smithsonian by American Christians

As recently as November, the Smithonian patronage-funded National Portait Gallery removed the work, following protests by US Catholics and Republicans. They found the video, titled 'A fire in my belly' by New York artist David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992, offensive. Yesterday, the Metroplitan Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York announced the work they had given the... 

The Homecoming: Matteo Simoni and Greg Timmermans on their club (FC Bergman) and their play. #njc10

The young Antwerp company FC Bergman performs Harold Pinter's classic play 'The Homecoming' in a completely unique, energetic and raw way. The Homecoming can be seen during Autumn Collection 2010 at Theatre Kikker on Saturday 30 October.... You can log in now to continue reading! Welcome to the Cultuurpers archive! As a member, you have access to all, more than 4,000 posts... 

'Vous êtes servis' gives household slaves a face, but subject deserved a more powerful film

At first glance, domestic help is not the most exciting subject for a triptych of film, theatre and performance. That is, of course, because the maid in the old-fashioned sense is virtually extinct with us in the West. But elsewhere, there is plenty of demand for submissive girls who work their asses off seven days a week until they threaten to... 

Raw 'Hard to be a God' by Mundruczó lingers on the surface #dekeuze

Things happen in places like this that cannot bear the light of day. We are deep in Rotterdam's container port, among the neon-lit transhipment yards and dark warehouses. In one of those raw warehouses are two truck trailers. One is set up as an illegal sewing workshop, the other is filled with earth and rubber tyres. They form the backdrop for Hungarian theatre-maker Kornél Mundruczó's performance 'Hard to be a god'.

The performance v...

You can now log in to continue reading!

Welcome to the Culture Press archive! As a member, you have access to all, over 4,000 posts we have made since our inception in 2009!

(Recent posts (under three months old) are available for all to read, thanks to our members!)

Become a member, or log in below:

Sixteen personal stories paint a moving picture of Rotterdam's multicolour. #he Choice

She has 14 first names because her father liked to name his whole family and she was an only child. She is an in-demand actress, but Gonny Gaakeer has also been a girl with a grandmother. A beautiful grandmother, who in the last years of her 95-year-old life fell over more and more often and bore the ugly wounds of it. Gonny tells her story, and... 

We will be there every day at The International Choice. With text. With video. With news and reviews

Tomorrow begins The International Choice of The Rotterdam Theatre. A festival that for years has presented remarkable theatre from all over the world at the Maasstad's theatre in September. Except this year, that is, because the 'chest of quist' is being rebuilt and that will take some time. Not something with Amsterdam metro builders, but whether the official reopening on 2 October 2010 will be... 

Drama is much more suited to interpret history than film. @RvanH writes essay on Hannah and Martin at #TF2010

Hannah and Martin by Mugmetdegoudentand is not only a heartwarming performance, played by one phenomenal actress and one inimitable theatre personality, it is also a brainteaser. Trouw reviewer and theatre scholar Robbert van Heuven felt challenged to write a short essay in response to this performance.

By Robbert van Heuven

Facts determine only a small part of historiography. Far more important is the question of how those facts relate to each other....

You can now log in to continue reading!

Welcome to the Culture Press archive! As a member, you have access to all, over 4,000 posts we have made since our inception in 2009!

(Recent posts (under three months old) are available for all to read, thanks to our members!)

Become a member, or log in below:

Private Membership (month)
5 / Maand
For natural persons and self-employed persons.
No annoying banners
A special newsletter
Own mastodon account
Access to our archives
Small Membership (month)
18 / Maand
For cultural institutions with a turnover/subsidy of less than €250,000 per year
No annoying banners
A premium newsletter
All our podcasts
Your own Mastodon account
Access to archives
Posting press releases yourself
Extra attention in news coverage
Large Membership (month)
36 / Maand
For cultural institutions with a turnover/subsidy of more than €250,000 per year.
No annoying banners
A special newsletter
Your own Mastodon account
Access to archives
Share press releases with our audience
Extra attention in news coverage
Premium Newsletter (substack)
5 trial subscriptions
All our podcasts

Payments are made via iDeal, Paypal, Credit Card, Bancontact or Direct Debit. If you prefer to pay manually, based on an invoice in advance, we charge a 10€ administration fee

*Only for annual membership or after 12 monthly payments

en_GBEnglish (UK)