Lois Lumonga Brochez was nominated by the TheaterFestival jury in the category “Most Acclaimed Acting Performance” for their role in “Vier Muren” (Marios Bellas) In “Vier Muren” (Marios Bellas), her voice—full of pain and incantation—is one of the driving forces behind this poetic hip-hop ritual. Watch the interview with Lois here. The Aura Gala is […]
A casting becomes a mirror of a larger political narrative, in which Palestine also seems to be auditioning for the right to exist. On Feb. 2, Rubin Ajlouni premiered his first show Rubin. Rubin started his trajectory with MAP during WIPCOOP 2023. Then he delivered a monologue Jasser, a text by Abdelkader Benali. After WIPCOOP, […]
“With ‘Four Walls,’ rapper and director Marios Bellas said he created a hip-hop ritual. At first glance, that seems like an odd combination. Hip-hop has its own ritual forms, but here it is placed in a theatrical framework. The question, then, is not what such a hip-hop ritual means, but what it demands. A review […]
Na een passage op WIPCOOP 2023 in Campo Victoria voerden we gesprekken met Omar Cortegana over: Peke, alles waait beter met una cancion, een muzikale theatervoorstelling voor kinderen (én hun ouders).* In 2024, we saw the OPEN CALL of Op Visite pass and Omar was obviously one of the artists to whom the open call […]
The 2023 edition of WIPCOOP brought together an international company of promising artists. What happened to their work after that? We look back at the trajectories of Melisa Diktaş (Amsterdam), Eli Mathieu-Bustos (Brussels) and Ping-Hsiang Wang (Berlin), and how their careers continued to grow after WIPCOOP. Melisa Diktaş is a dancer and maker who develops […]
Last week a nice review of Marios Bellas and Four Walls appeared in the Theaterkrant, written by Pieter Verstraete. “Four Walls ” is a thunderous hip-hop ritual that starts from the beating of the chest by the audience and that shimmers through to the end. In a long-drawn-out scenic poem with a mix of musical […]
Great news from The Hague: dancer/movement and choreographer Melisa Diktaş is the winner of the BNG Dance Award 2025! On Thursday, April 17, this was announced in theater house Korzo, where the jury was deeply impressed by her solo Dat wat ontembaar is. As the winner, Melisa may tour eight Dutch theaters with her performance, […]
A rushed performance about caring “In a hectic, laboriously told performance, dancer Tamayo Okano wants to tell the audience something about caring. Care (Past/Present/Future) claims to be about how different generations of women care for others and, if possible, for themselves. What we get to see revolves mostly around an undigested mother-daughter bond, in which […]
Anna Karenina Lambrechts dances between proximity and boundaries In her solo From Gravity to Grace, Anna Karenina Lambrechts shows that she effortlessly touches audiences with her unique dance idiom: a powerful blend of krump, contemporary dance and both traditional and contemporary Filipino dance forms. “That is the hallmark and peculiarity of this performance: how the […]
Half the art of telling a story well is a good story. The other half is not so much empathy, but just distance. Especially when that story, as with David Labi in “Pieces of a Man,” is about your own father. Or is Labi himself the man in pieces from the title? True storytelling lies […]
‘Intellectual terror’ – Aïcha Mouhamou on Kidnapped by Rodrigo Batista and Mariana Senne. “I would like to see this much guts more often,” writes Aïcha Mouhamou in her review of Kidnapped, the performance by playwrights Rodrigo Batista and Mariana Senne. In her piece, titled Intellectual Terror, she praises Batista’s uncompromising and confrontational style: “The white […]
So, what about the further development of Rubin Ajlouni’s monologue Jasser? Rubin Ajlouni shared at WIPCOOP 2023 in Kambala* a preview of the first stages of his very first creation of his own, and gave the monologue Jasser, to a text by Abdelkader Benali, a breath of fresh air. During the follow-up discussion with some […]
