"Dear Mr Zijlstra, culture is an essential part of civilisation. It contributes to social cohesion and economic growth. The Dutch orchestras can make a major contribution, which, by the way, is not synonymous with everything just staying as it was." Unlike the 'Table of Six', the talking shop of six arts bobos who, in their enthusiasm about an entrance at...
With a last-minute added screening of the Egyptian drama 678, which caused quite a stir in Cairo in December, Rotterdam was still able to catch up a little on Egyptian current events. 678 dispenses with the myth that Egyptian women can protect themselves from handsome men by wearing a headscarf. In the loosely fact-based...
The first film from the Tiger competition for new talent that Rotterdam festival audiences got to see on Friday was Flying Fish from Sri Lanka. Director Sanjee Pushpakumara, present at the screening, was clearly overwhelmed. He himself was seeing his film on the big screen for the first time, and in front of a sold-out audience. His acceptance speech was not only touching but...
We were at a debate day in The Hague that was as inconspicuous as it was historic on 13 December 2010: it was about the budget of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the (first?) Rutte government, and that was the budget in which, at the request of the supporting party PVV, the amount to be cut in the arts budget was set at 200 million, with heritage and museums having to...
An intimate living room conference among living works of art. That is the best way to describe 'House without a maid, a "conversation, performance and installation project" by Jorge León and Simone Aughterlony at Huis Sonneveld. In the former garage of the 1932 modernist villa, a select group of women gathered for two days to discuss the phenomenon of the maid. In other rooms of the imposing...
'So, Dr Lacan, are women more susceptible to madness? ... Is the man susceptible to hysteria?' In 'Deserve', part of Jorge León and Simone Aughterlony's triptych about the maid, the makers dig deep, very deep. They follow the intriguing line of the great debunkers in our history of thought: from Hegel's master-slave analysis through Marx and Freud to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Core of...
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...
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 show tells the fairly inimitable story of Karoly, who wants to make symbolic torture porn to blackmail his father with it. That father once raped his sister and is now an MEP. Three women are lured to this sewing studio under false pretences to participate in those videos. Things do not end well for them, partly because the foreign film director has rather sadistic tendencies, damaging the ladies to the point of rendering them useless.
'He fears that the real thing may have come along a hundred times, but he missed it.'
'Exactly. And how old are you?'
'Twenty.'
'Well...'
In suits, wearing animal masks, five actors pose on stage. They represent a bear, rabbit, deer, rooster and monkey. From this 'freeze', they start making animal noises and moving around. A rhythmic performance follows. Fascinated, but confused, the audience watches the alienating dance. What do these animals have to do with the war in Iraq anyway? Just when you start to wonder if you are in the right audience, the actors take off their masks and answer: 'Have you ever wondered what the war in Iraq has meant to the animals there? We never hear anything about them in newspapers or on TV.'
Such a cool late summer evening as Thursday 9 September 2010 is a perfect night for the try- out of actor group Wunderbaum's location play 'Natives'. Clear sky, mildly rising autumn chill and virtually windless. Location: a swampy lawn between two abandoned housing blocks in Rotterdam's Pendrecht district. Once built from post-war ideals of family happiness, convenience and accessibility, but soon too cramped, ageing and...
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...
'Butt-fucking at extra cost.' 'Do they also do blow jobs without a condom?' 'That one sucked my cock once and then she was nauseated all night. In the morning she puked in my bed.' Continuously, they do suggestive dances and constantly look into the room, with fixed smiles that are somewhere between amused and sneaky. The six actors of About Animals are challenging and relentless. Susanne Kennedy's direction of Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek's play is unprecedentedly bleak and arrives as a punch in the gut.
Jelinek's wrote a text about prostitutes and their clients, partly based on eavesdropping tapes from an Austrian escort agency, in which the men talk about women as if they were animals, or more precisely, like farmers talk about their cattle. In her direction, Kennedy places great emphasis on the viewer's gaze. 'The woman is being watched and is always an object, the man is watching and is the subject. Looking is not innocent,' She said in an interview. The three men, in foul light blue show suits, talk over the women; the women, in dresses on which little subtle emphasis is placed on their nipples and crotch, obligingly talk after them. They look at us defiantly, making us complicit in the humiliating situation.
Invisible forces, described as angels, speaking through a Jewish woman to her friends at the time of the Holocaust in Hungary. A mysterious and true story, translated by American actress Shelley Mitchell into the one-woman performance Talking with Angels. A huge success in America. Yesterday on stage for the first time in the Netherlands.
'It is a wonderful thing, for instance, that every day, my body exhibits the same eager desire for a keigoeie kappoetzjino. That every 24 hours the desire to 'want to taste' is born in me and wants to hit me again. And I don't have to do anything for that, that desire drags me into the shower and saliva starts foaming...
The destructive power of war and hatred
Writer Wajdi Mouawad (b. 1968) fled his native Lebanon at the age of nine. At the time, a brutal civil war had been raging there for years. Together with his family, he ended up in Canada via France.
There, he develops into an internationally renowned playwright. His work is now performed all over the world. The Ro Theatre introduced Mouawad to the Netherlands for the first time this theatre season.
Director Alize Zandwijk chose the play Fires and puts on a bold and convincing version. Assisted by a talented cast of actresses and actors. You see the mother Nawal Marwan and her twins Jeanne and Simon. Nawal is dying.
By Wijbrand Schaap Once in a while, a theatre director stands up who wants to expose the emptiness around him or her. That it is about the emptiness within him (or her) himself, this young director usually finds out some 20 years later, once it has become a little less empty. That's how these things go. We...
The Russian soul. So there is something about that. And you get something from that when you see a Chekhov play (if done well), or read one of his short stories. Or when you read the works of Tolstoi, Dostoevsky or any other inhabitant of that vast nothingness east of Poland. Or seeing the paintings, which a few...
Valhalla. Someone called it, and indeed: Valhalla. I don't mean the Teutonic version of the Eternal Hunting Fields then, but Miss Asterix and Obelix. Egyptian style. You may colour in the picture yourself with dark curls, unimaginably flawless skin made of very creamy milk chocolate, and that then set on a pair of hidden heels and strapped into a corset that accentuates everything of value. So Amal Maher is one of those women for whom a man is happy to put his chimes at the disposal of science, if it gives him the privilege of being around her for a few moments.
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