I have to say I was a bit afraid for this performance. I met my current wife while participating in fake speeddate performance on a festival. I was married to someone else at the time. So without sharing all the details lets just assume I know first hand that one simple performance can change your life. But my fear was misplaced. When you really follow ‘ETIQUETTE’, you’re way too busy performing. With ETIQUETTE, two people take the role of performer, following a script that unfolds by someone talking to you through headphones (you might have seen the video footage in my earlier post). It builds up nicely, first introducing you to the format, giving you time to adapt, then pulling you in through the story itself. Watch out! If you are to fall in love, it’s at this moment! But if you keep up with the script, it becomes quite difficult to get lost in the story. For...

It’s always a risk when you’re really looking forward to see something. The reality often doesn’t match the image you’ve made in your head. I deliberately took that risk with MatchAtria, after seeing their trailer of the show (which you can see here). And it didn’t match. Don’t get me wrong. Yui Kawaguchi is an amazing dancer and I was intrigued by the way she was interacting with the 3D graphics. I was also fooled and tickled by the mind blowing surround sound production, which was just perfectly timed. I looked behind me several times, thinking someone was right behind me. At the tech company I work, we would call it pixel perfect. But despite the beating placebo heart I was holding in my hands, supposedly connected to the heart of dancer, I just wasn’t touched. I suppose the image I created in my head, was one where I could actually...

So there I was: eye to eye with a real ‘lügendetektor’. But that was not everything the installation DATE ME offered. There were visuals that I didn’t really register consciously. And there was noise. A lot of noise. I liked the noise, but I didn’t like the end result: not an artist, but a liar… Looking back at it, I think it went wrong with the question about stoeckelschuhe. I said yes, but felt uncomfortable, because I had no clue what the word means. Turns out I confessed that I wear high heals… Maybe the machine knew I was lying without me even knowing it! Either way, there was no date for the lying fake artist in me yesterday :-) All in all, DATE ME is what you want from an installation: a short shot of adrenaline, a laugh, a serious thought. And then you’re ready for the next one. That’s the only problem with these kind of...

What a wonderful kickoff of #GC2015 that was. It all started even before the festival was officially opened. A little bit confusing, but I think that is actually good thing. Also a good thing was the opening speech, this time done by a puppet, doing a historic speech. But lets not get off track. In the end it was what it was, an opening speech. The real thing was yet to come. As you might have read, I saw Ivo Dimchev in the tough and rough city of Rotterdam. And looking back on it now, it was much better in Cologne. , mainly because the tension seemed to be bigger this time. In Rotterdam it almost was too easy a question, something that was just fun to do. In Cologne, the conflict, the tension, it was really part of the show. It may not be a secret that I loved it. Dimchev did it. Again. He pushed the audience of Cologne to think about the taboos and borders of performing art with a...

After that last preview I’m a bit reluctant to go on. As a matter of fact I will stop pointing you to spoilers of the performance you’re going to see at #GC2015. I’m going to leave it up to yourself and to the moment. But I do have the one thing you really need for next week (if you can’t wait, it’s at the bottom of the page…) It is as with reviewing bands. When I worked for Dutch music platform 3VOOR12, we roughly had two types of live reviews: The first type was about bands we never saw before. The second was about artists we knew so well that the review was a kind of ‘check up’: are they doing an interesting interpretation of the new record? Are they still good live? I never liked the second one. The only surprise that could happen was that the show wasn’t as good as expected. Whereas with the new bands it was more like a travel...

Ok, this is the kind of performance you should NOT Google. Just don’t. I did it and it spoilt my evening. Like you don’t want to know the score of a soccer game upfront, or the end of a James Bond movie… oh no, wait. Forget that. DER STAAT, I think we all know what we need to know to make this performance one we will remember. So stop searching for more information, just come to the performance. To get you in the right mood without giving anything away, I’d like to inspire you all with something completely irrelevant that still feels appropriate somehow: a nice new video the Dutch band De Staat just released…. Damn, now I did gave the end score away after all ;-) >>> More about DER STAAT at...