The Van Abbe museum in Eindhoven has existed for 75 years, which was celebrated on 24 September 2011. Everyone was invited to visit the museum for free. Three exhibitions were on show under the theme ‘Vanuit hier / Out of here’ , where the significance of artists, collectors and city of Eindhoven were central. In addition to these were all sorts of activities and a workshop for pizza baking, theatre, music and circus. ‘Vanuit hier / Out of here’ will continue showing until 8 January 2012. Photo essay by Manon Vosters, on assigment for Vers Pers.

HET VAN ABBEMUSEUM is jarig
Het Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven bestaat 75 jaar en dat werd gevierd op 24 september 2011. Op deze dag kon iedereen gratis het museum bezoeken. In het thema ‘Vanuit hier / Out of Here’ vielen drie tentoonstellingen die elk de betekenis van kunstenaars, verzamelaars en de stad Eindhoven centraal stelden. Daarnaast waren er allerlei activiteiten zoals een workshop pizza bakken, theater, muziek en circus. ‘Vanuit hier / Out of Here’ is nog te zien tot en met 8 januari 2012

It’s just lovely to introduce a new collaboration between The Dossier and VersPers, an online publication that gives Dutch Journalism graduates the chance to show their stuff. Looking forward to hosting more photos and words by young Dutch talent here on The Dossier.

Hallo stranger!

There’s a bit of a trend of that’s going to hit the streets of our town soon. Some of it has already arrived. Strangers to and in Eindhoven.

Vreemd in Eindhoven (Foreign in Eindhoven)
This is a project by Museum Kempenland and  Historisch OpenluchtMuseum Eindhoven (Historical Open Air Museum). From June, these museums have put together a joint exhibition over two locations (rather something new in the museum world, they say). The exhibition gives a voice to foreign (non-Western) amateur artists (and much more).

Dialoog en Diversiteit in Eindhoven (Dialogue and Diversity in Eindhoven)
Photographer Saskia Holtjer took on the challenge to capture, in image, the 158 different nationalites that call Eindhoven home. I asked her more about the experience in an interview (see below), and had a mugshot taken as well. This exhibition will be shown at the Van Abbemuseum, and portraits of the residents printed on gargantuan banners and posted all around the city in early November.

Hallo040.nl summer series
This summer I was commissioned to write a bunch of stories about newcomers to Eindhoven in all their forms. So I started off with Saskia (above), and then I looked for random tourists, expats, temporary visitors for work, uni students and even someone on their way here. Good fun, and hopefully I’ll work with Hallo040 some more in the future.

The Voice Of
Onamatopee, a local hub of reflection on communication and design, is doing a research project on opinion-forming as citizenship. I’m one of the four teams working with the very cool Amsterdam based artist Rob van den Nieuwenhuizen. He and I are going to investigate an idea close to my heart, something on the tip of my tongue, but something I can’t share until it’s unveiled in mid October (and posted up all around town). Should be interesting, to see my viewpoint posted in public spaces around Eindhoven. I’m as curious as you probably are. I’ll post about it when it happens!

a) All day mini-dance festival ZomersSwingFeest III in the Philips de Jongh Park
b) Night of the Unexpected chamber music mini-festival at Muziekgebouw Frits Philips
c) A birthday party (what’s with all these people born in September?) with a guest performance by Michael Jackson (channeled through the body of my friend’s 6 year old son).

Whatever I was going to choose, it was going to be a ripper, and so the choice had to be made.

I went with option a), because I have been meaning to check out the good people from Eindhoven Danst, since I heard about them in March last year.
Their annual outdoor dance celebration is the ZomersSwingFeest which opens the new season with a singing workshop, something called contact-improvisation, as well as an intro to acroyoga, a picnic, with the  main part of the program being the 5ritmes (5Rhythms) wave session and then free dance. Advertised as “bare foot, no drugs or alcohol” I thought, yes, this is something I need to experience, and the weather was begging for a day in the park.

Contact Improv
To the uninitiated, this may seem to the onlooker not really much as dance. We were situated in a circle marked by a unlit fire torches, at around 2pm. Firstly, we were asked to walk randomly in a circle. “Ah, this is very western, you’re all walking anti-clockwise,” said Kees, the workshop leader. He asked each of us to pick two random people and keep an eye on them. One was labeled our ‘monster’ and the second our ‘hero’ and we had to try to keep an equi-distance between the monster and hero, in a triangular or linear form. This involved, as you can imagine, much running around and hysterical laughing (on my part) and a pleasant exhaustion after only minutes. That was a warm up towards the goal of contact improv which ranges from making shapes with our bodies and mirroring or complementing other people’s shapes with forms we can make with our own. Sometimes we had to push each other. Sometimes we had to play ‘statues’, ‘freezing’ people with a tap and ‘defrosting’ them with a complementary shape. We had to make people walk, we had to resist being made to walk. There was a lot of rolling around in the grass – wholesome, childish, physical stuff I’ve not done in a long time. And never so closely with a bunch of strangers.

5Ritmes/5Rhythms

5Ritmes is a guided dance form, which, on Saturday night lasted 3 hours non-stop. Now I’m not particularly fit at all, but I participated for the first time and didn’t stop for a rest a single moment. We were talked through the process, by Marc Lendfers (see minute 3.20 in the video below), in individual dancing and partner dancing covering the movements of flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness. In a word, it was brilliant. Completely un-self-conscious, completely out of control, completely perfect and strange. When I eventually stopped to drink it all in I saw a full moon ringed by mysterious clouds and a smattering of stars; the rustle of the wind in the trees; the glow of the campfire in the centre of a dancing ring encircled by fire torches, the breathless smiling faces of people, whose names I never learnt, who set free their truest selves. Children, men, women, young and old; women in flowing dresses with flowers in their hair, others in tracksuits or jeans. Men with shirts, men without shirts. And no one spoke. We just danced. For three straight hours.

What was unexpected? All of it. The warmth of the people. That I could ‘dance a moment’. The willingness of my normally non-dancing husband to participate. Getting grass stains on the soles of my feet that even a pumice stone wouldn’t release. Feeling free to make my body move and feel like I was 10 again, without complaint or judgement for 180 minutes. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before; not a sip of water – or any other substance – to pass between my lips.

I feel a lot better since Saturday. I feel like I’ve shaken off the mantle of summer, even though summer’s meant to be a time of freedom and lightness. This summer has been heavy on me and I’m looking forward to the cleansing nature of autumn, where I can slough off anything else that remains and settle in for the snap-freeze of winter and be reborn in the spring. And then the cycle will continue, where I will anticipate another unexpected day & night of dancing and liberty, at what I hope results in the ZomersSwingFest IV.

Thanks Frank ter Braak (a great dance partner, by the way), without whom the festival would not have been possible. And thanks, Marion, for the tip back in March last year. I’m glad I summoned the courage to make it; without your advice, I wouldn’t be feeling so light today!

For a while there I was in love with my new city. So much so that I started this blog – I wanted to share my newfound joy! But, as with any relationship, we’ve had our ups and downs, and this summer was lower than anything I’d ever experienced since arriving. Why?

1. The weather.
What a crappy summer this was, weatherwise. Not only did this region not experience any serious Vitamin D radiation, but there were terrible storms that ended in tragedy for festival-goers at the Pukkelpop in nearby Belgium.

2. I’ve personally celebrated my five year anniversary of living in the Netherlands
So I’ve recently realised what I have done/am doing/will continue to do indefinitely – which makes me pause for thought. That’s only human, and if you know anything about the culture shock stages, then I was up somewhere regressed in the cycle of “withdrawal”.

3. This site has generated lots of  paid work for me!
So running this site solo has been almost impossible to maintain while I’ve been working for good ole’ moulah. I’ve been writing a summer series for Hallo040, in English, so that’s been good fun and keeping me busy.

4. A dearth of worthwhile things to do over summer
Well, things to do that interest me.

On the up-side, the summer has come and gone without much notice and “the season” has started. Everything, absolutely everything was on this past weekend.

1.  Flux-S had a mini-preview festival to give a taster of the main one to come in Spring next year

2. Hallo Cultuur had 23 cultural institutions fling its doors open for everyone to sample the fine theatrical/musical/artistic profferings of the 2011/2012 season

I love crisps!

3. Tante Netty had an exhibition opening “Get Hooked” in its little gallery space tucked away in the once very seedy part of Eindhoven (it’s located in a former brothel, there, I said it) where I proudly (patriotically speaking) saw the work of Finnish-born Chinese Australian Thomas C Chung‘s knitting genius. And I really love handcraft.

4. My friend Emma had a birthday party with really good chocolate cupcakes and nice people.

(I’ve definitely missed a bundle of stuff there). What else?

My piano lessons are starting again, and I’m working on a great Kate Bush number (think red dress and weird druid dancing, think the greatest love story ever!), I might be joining a blues improv workshop, my art project is going well, I’m partnering up on another one with an Amsterdam artist (more on that later) and I think I might be able to find a way to give The Dossier enough legs to keep going a little further.

If there are any readers who want to contribute to The Dossier – students, expats, culture mavens, and you’re situated in the south of the Netherlands, please drop me a line. Help me spread the love and fatten The Dossier files! (Don’t they say that you put on weight when you’re in love … or is it that you lose your apetite? Hm). Email me at jane(at)thedossier(dot)nl!

Kurt Elling reminds Patricia, masterclass participant, how to breathe from the diaphragm.

Two decades ago I took singing lessons for two years, from one boastful Mr Ian Field. An old woman of a teacher – he was a baritone who claimed how easy it was for him to learn how to be a tenor, but was also a hurdler for Australia in the 1952 Olympics. I ask you. Anyway, I learnt more from one formidable Mr Kurt Elling in 45 minutes than I did in those laborious lessons, and this is why. I’m an adult now. I think.

Yesterday at the last day of North Sea Jazz Festival 2011 (ashamedly my first, and certainly not my last), there was a clinic held by Kurt Elling. In it, he was going to reveal the inner machinations of the jazz singer as a musician, real-time composer, conductor and front(wo)man for what is for many people “difficult music.” Kurt says: “Your job is to play an avenue through the music, that has never been played before.”

Three darling novices, no more than 20 if they were a day, sang for Mr Elling. No one was spared from a delightful tearing to shreds, by way of the maestro’s humour, insight and helpful advice.

Rule number 1: Be analytical, precise and detailed

Rule number 2: Be intuitive

Rule number 3: Be kind to yourself

Rule number 4: Remove all obstacles, such as an unused microphone stand. “Above all, if you’re singing with your eyes closed and  bopping your head around, the last thing you want to do is poke yourself in the eye with the mike stand. You don’t want to scare your audience.”

But the best rule of all was this:

“Music will teach you to be an adult. You need stamina. A plan. To be charitable to you. And to overcome yourself. I promise you, you will grow.”

Now that’s what I call a call to action for young people (and not-so-young people). I’m getting off this computer and going to tinkle some ivories now.

Katrien van de Camp - proving how strong desire can be. Photo by Mike Roelofs

A KAT dance production
If you get 8 amateur dancers together, each with anywhere between 2 and 10+ years’ dance experience, and you measure the length of their arms, then you get an average of 0731. That’s the sort of thing that choreographer Katrien van de Camp does. She’s not your average dancer or choreographer. First of all she’s a fighter; second of all, she rotates your perspective and prods you to jump out of your comfort zone and into uncharted territory.

“I fell.”
In 2007, Katrien had completed choreographing her first show and six days before its opening, she fell. The worst two words in a dancer’s vocabulary. She bunged up the top part of one of her legs. The first and second medical opinions were “You will never dance again.” But she got a third, a fourth, a fifth – even a sixth opinion. She finally had eight operations and now has acquired a level of mobility that enables her to do far more than just sit in a wheelchair (the initial prognosis). Four years on she has wrestled her way to a hard won place. This place? A show about the brutal truth of emotion – intimate, moving and yeah, sometimes ugly. It’s called 0731.

Adapted reuse of a factory space and a catwalk. Photo by Mike Roelofs

Raw and resonant representation
“The beauty of dance is in the effort it takes to get here. I don’t believe it should be something the viewer sees from far away, where they take the supple, polished result for granted. I want people to see dance really close up, with all the hard work that goes with it,” she says. In between each vignette, the grunting, laboured breath of the dancers rang loud and clear through the transformed machine factory room in the Klokgebouw; one dancer liberally sprinkled water over me as he grabbed his bottle, gasping, rasping, to quench a well earned thirst. Every bang, thud and facial expression resonated. Alarming, true, up-close.

The democracy of dance
One by one, the eight dancers rose in pairs, alone, or larger ensembles, from their seats amongst the audience to take their place up on the dance floor: for this performance, the stage would be a raised catwalk in the middle of a large, echo-ey industrial space. This runway transformed its length into a linear site for duals, exchanges of tenderness, showdowns of forgiveness and the setting for swift, violent battles. Normally a catwalk allows us to see a garment up close. This time we got to see the mechanics of dancers – of all shapes, sizes and abilities.

“I completed my dance training about 10 years ago. Some of the dancers I’ve been working with for that entire time. I wanted to give free lessons to people if they would be prepared to perform! Three of the dancers – Frans, Danielle and Vera – in this current group are reasonably new to dance. They only started two years ago, and I hand-picked them. We worked really closely together to come up with their pieces. Each piece is meaningful to each dancer – some story and emotion they had to work with, deal with, at a very personal level.”

Amateur dancer is no perjorative term
I don’t know what more to say about this performance, other than that my cynical attitude and analytical approach to the arts and culture was momentarily silenced tonight. Why? Because this committed troupe of dancers all have day jobs.

One of the dancers I know professionally and personally – Simone van Wijk. She is a sweet woman, a talented graphic designer and a soulful person. Her performance was, for want of a better word, inspiring. We can – all of us – have jobs that define us and which we do passionately. But we can also be compelled to express ourselves bravely, and with no holds barred.

Simone van Wijk and Marleen van de Camp, photo by Mike Roelofs

My own transformation
But you know what it is? If I had to name my biggest weakness, it is that I think too much. As a writer, my job is to synthesise, analyse and be able to break down in order to (re-)construct. This is the quality that failed me in my journey as a musician (ach, it’s not too late, Jane!). 0731 forced me to stop thinking. All I had to do was feel. And the length of my feelings surprised me. Long and wide, at least as long as wide as that catwalk. I was reminded that you don’t have to have the answers, or an opinion on everything. If you simply let something wash over you, the world will be at rights.

0731 is a KAT dance production.

Katrien van de Camp, choreographer
Marleen van de Camp
Simone van Wijk
Yvette van Wijk
Claudia Timmerman
Tanja Verhoeven
Vera van het Hof
Frans Brok
Danielle Linders

There's got to be more to Dutch food than this

A-Z of food
I have been totally obsessed with food, lately. I am expanding my vocabulary of food, starting with a basic alphabet of cuisine.

I’m Australian, so that’s the “A”. We have great produce, and everyone’s from somewhere else, so the food heritage in my home country is so rich. For B, British – seriously, Brit-food is no joke anymore. The number of great chefs from Jamie, to Nigella, to Hugh should not go unnoticed. And for  C, I would choose Chinese I guess. So, D. What would I choose?

Lowland groceries
I tend to make a real day of it when I go grocery shopping in the Netherlands. I try to keep my visits to the Albert Heijn to a minimum. It’s to the market for me! There I can buy cheese and practise my Dutch with to the cheese vendor. They know their stuff and they’re happy to sell it to you. A couple of weeks ago I walked off with €14 of cheese but had such a pleasant experience, I didn’t mind at all. If you don’t know how to prepare green cauliflower or you’re looking for super hot green chillies, then I can tell you a few good stalls at the Woenselse Markt on a Saturday morning. They know me now. Great to have some reliable suppliers, and feel part of the community. Open 10am – 5pm every Saturday in the Kruisstraat, Eindhoven.

So produce-wise, I find it quite easy to access. But what’s it like, good Dutch food? I’m not really talking about krokets, frietjes (fries) and frikandels. I mean real Dutch cuisine.

Dutch food goddess?
I stumbled upon Yvette van Boven – a foodie and illustrator on Twitter. Her book, Home Made, seems gorgie (as in gorgeous) but I haven’t yet bought it. I like the typeset, the layout, the paper, the photography, and how she’s making Dutch food a little cooler. It’s about making it at home, yourself – no more of the Dutch instant food mentality, of kant-en-klaar. Awarded in 2010 with Dutch Cookbook Of The Year, Best informative Dutch book and nominated for Best first cookbook’ at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards this year, she will tell us how to make cheese from pantry staples, and how to create an oven smoker from scratch in just two minutes. There are even recipes for doggy treats. Home made in every way, Yvette made her own fonts, drew the illustrations, wrote all the recipes, prepared the food for the photographs  and designed the book. I’m holding out until it’s out in English (gotta wait until September – that’s me being lazy).

Work it out in a workshop
But still, I don’t really have personal answers for foodies out there. What is Dutch food!? I am curious myself. Maybe if you head up to Den Bosch this Sunday, from 1.30pm -4.30pm there is a free workshop: “Get to know the Dutch by their food“. If you tag along, do tell me what you learn. Then Dutch food might pip Danish or Dominican Republic cuisine at the post and make it into my A-Z of great food traditions. Who knows?

Holland Expat Services Workshop for expats
Sunday 26th of June 13.30-16.30 AND Sunday 17th of July
“Get to know the Dutch by their food” a workshop for expats. Always wanted to know when we eat “beschuit met muisjes” and what “naked bums in the grass” are?
Location: ‘s Hertogenbosch
Cost: FREE
To join, send an email with your name, address, phone number and dietary restrictions.

In Praise of Slow
I have to admit, I tried reading this book, three, maybe four times. I just can’t get into it. I think the author, Carl Honoré himself, put me off trying to finish the book after I saw his TED speech – and he delivered it soooooo fast. He wanted to tell us all the benefits of slowing down and yet he did it in fast forward. I might give it one more go. Later.

Slow Management Live Conference
If you speak Dutch, have a spare €395 on you and can get the day off tomorrow, I’ll bet there are still a few tickets to this conference tomorrow at Eindhoven’s Strijp-S.  It promises to share creativity, expertise, trust and knowledge – apparently the keys to organisation in the 21st century. Also co-creation and open innovation helps us make and experience things – together – that are relevant to us. For business people, it is bound to be a varied program full of lectures, interactive workshops. interviews with authors, confronting columns, practical examples and engaging company visits. It’s actually the Slow Management magazine, (which I’ve read a few issues of, and quite like) acted out in real-life. Live. From publication, to interaction.

KLOKby, unique clocks made by many hands
One of the businesses that will be part of the Slow Management tour is KLOKby, a start-up mechanical design clock producer. They want to bring back the clock as an heirloom, and stimulate the appreciation of the beauty and mechanics behind precision clockwork. They also believe in co-creation as they appoint their designers based on pitch performances, and then collaborate with the selected designer throughout the technical process and production. KLOKby also works closely with high quality local suppliers until they produce one of their masterpieces – what they call “jewellery for the wall”. Their first model, called O’, is a body-less clock that can be read from the front and from the side. From the front it shows a “digital” interface, and from the side, an “analogue” interface. Because you can see the inner workings, it is meant to mesmerise the viewer, causing one to reflect on the machinations and passing of time. (And probably the purchase price, because one of these babies would cost you about €21,000 to buy! Seeing the materials are fairly unusual, but durable, and almost every component is hand made and the clock is hand assembled, the price is fairly understandable. And it’s also really big and needs to be mounted at about eye level height when standing, so about 2m in total height).

Henk Hulshof, managing director: “We aim to be the leaders in a revival of mechanical clocks as treasured objects – as heirlooms. You can have more than one piece of beautiful furniture or more than one painting in a space, but you can only really have one clock. And, KLOKby clocks are so unique, they’re like living pieces of functional art.”

Looking vs reading a painting
There’s something terribly wrong with the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. As I went around, I felt it more and more. By the end of my visit, I knew exactly what it was. Van Gogh’s paintings are taking up too much space!

See, I came to this conclusion because that day I’d decided to free my eyes from the ‘information panel’ and concentrate on the paintings instead. As I wandered round, I found people absorbed in the one thing that I choose to avoid. At any one time, as I looked around, it seemed that at least 50% of the people were reading.

This struck me as strange. Here we were, in a building full of Van Goghs. We had all paid (well the adults at least) 14 euros for the pleasure to see this collection of work, and yet, many people still spent more time reading about than looking at the paintings.

Another thing I noticed was how some people glanced at the painting and then buried themselves into the information. Once satisfied with the information they glanced at the painting again and then repeated this with the next painting and then the next painting.  They obviously had a method.

Perhaps people were watching me too. If they were, they would’ve noticed something strange too. I was biting my tongue when I looked at the pictures. Yes, it is strange!  But I had my reasons.

Biting one’s tongue will increase engagement
The day before I read something on why 95% of language learners fail. Arkady Zilberman, once a simultaneous translator for the Soviet Union and now inventor of a new language learning methodology, believes that most people after the age of 18 become logical thinkers. Only a lucky five percent remain visual and that’s the main reason for such a high failure rate in language learning. I’m not sure I believe this but he added an interesting tip that he used in his teaching approach. When people heard or saw a word in their target language, he got them to hold their tongue between their teeth, as this prevented them from trying to pronounce the word or get caught up in translating it from their native language. Above all it made it easier for them to see in pictures.

Besides feeling a bit self-conscious, my visual approach had some advantages, I’d quickly dismiss paintings that didn’t interest me and move on to the ones that did.  I also spent time with the paintings that fascinated me.

The two paintings that I spent a lot of time on were The Potato Eaters and one of the portraits of Van Gogh himself.

Mysterious potatoes and mystical self-portraiture
The Potato Eaters (shown above) is an awkward and fascinating painting for me. The people seem too big for the room and the crude strokes created people with personalities. One of the women stares at the man who’s eating the potatoes. Her eyes are trying to say something. What, I don’t know.  His eyes are lost to the world. What is their story? Why? This painting made me wonder and wonder.

The self-portrait that I enjoyed the most is a radiant, brightly coloured and fiercely painted one. The strokes go outwards from the centre, which creates energy and Van Gogh looks like some crazed saviour. His eyes connect, his passion is felt and his thoughts, mmmm, are a little uneasy. This style of portrait has been taken up by the world religions. Strokes have been replaced by electric lights that flash around the gaudy heads of Jesus, Buddha and Shiva. Plastic has replaced Van Gogh’s canvas. It’s a very powerful portrait.

And what to do about the problem at the Van Gogh museum?
One option is to reduce the size of the Van Goghs.  We have the technology and it’s only fair.  I believe that we can reduce his paintings by 50% and that will allow us to proportionally increase the size of the information panel.  This will also allow us to increase the amount of information given on each painting, seeing as this is what people are interested in.

Another option is to bite your tongue and ignore the information given. This way, you’ll spend more time looking at people and paintings.

And a third option and the one I recommend, is to follow the advice in Jane’s article How to visit a museum.

The Villagers: I cried.
Conor J. O’Brien has incredibly good diction. He’s also Irish, which makes you certain that the lyrics will be good – no, excellent. Despite his quirkiness and whimsy, despite the pared down version of his line up, despite the fact that I chose a seat literally a million miles away from the closeness of his songs, The Villagers painted us real pictures. Many of them sad, which left me gulping for air. Bittersweet notions to be found In A Newfound Land You Are Free about new territories containing both grief and freedom, and Becoming a Jackal, about a dreamer’s fears and ultimate doom; but with this group it’s the nexus of chord, melody and lyric that gets you. Right. There.

Teitur: I laughed.
Described as other patrons as “nerdy”, I found Teitur‘s performance incredibly intimate. Engaged in an awkward one-sided conversation with us, he (sometimes redundantly) announced before each number what it would be about. But he filled his pieces with oozes of time. Pauses. Moments for us to catch our breath. His piano playing contained dynamic control – the deliberation you see more often in a classical musician (although technically his ability is of another ilk). The show was more cabaret in style than I had expected, and yet that was refreshing. I couldn’t help but laugh at his absurd observation about wanting to photograph parakeets over having coffee whilst sitting near John Malkovich in the King’s Road café, before singing You Never Leave LA.

Joan as Police Woman: I nodded.
You know, in the beginning of this highly anticipated performance, I was not sure what my ultimate verdict was going to be. You really needed to go the distance with Joan, because she began shakily. Slightly skewiff. Her original songs left me a bit “mwah”. I found her musical instrument technique lacking (a bit like hearing myself accompany myself on a rainy Sunday arvo) on both the piano and guitar. But … her true instrument is her voice, and her interpretation of song. This woman is a diva. As the 50 minutes went on, Joan served us her soul, on a platter. And it was wrapped up in a big red bow when she gave us Woman, her version of the John Lennon classic.  I nodded righteously throughout this rendition.

Marques Toliver: I admired.
This young man has perfect pitch which was brutally challenged in the little corner he was assigned to play. On the zither, toy xylophone and the violin, Marques Toliver (pronounced “Mar-kiss”) astonishingly sang, stamped and clicked his way through a wonderous syncopated one-man-band show of somewhat familiar numbers. He struggled for perfection, which to him was out of his reach, and he couldn’t hide his extreme frustration the entire set; we loved him anyway.

Thomas Dybdahl and band: I danced.
The Naked Song Festival isn’t really a dancing sort of festival. You sit in concert halls, mostly in the dark, and you are sung to by artists in a mostly unplugged atmosphere. However, when (the extremely handsome, sigh) Thomas Dybdahl enters the room, his ego looms large and you just want to be in his general vicinity. Thomas said he and the band didn’t know us well yet, and wanted to get to know us over the next hour or so. He invited us to do whatever we liked; call out, sing along, dance anywhere we liked. The stage even. The staid Eindhoven crowd didn’t seem to take the bait. But fast-forward 40 minutes you’ll see that Thomas is irresistible. There we were, putty in his hands. Dancing at his feet and bopping within arm’s reach at his side – and feeling all the warmth and energy right up close. Gosh, I can’t pick a favourite number. He is technically excellent (even playing the ‘whirly’ – not his ‘best instrument’ was a masterpiece with It’s always Been You,) his voice never fails him, his oeuvre spans all genres and his influences cannot be mentioned in one sentence. Go see him, I say.

The Naked Song Festival. The power of song, the wit of its writers and the charisma of its performers result in life in all its colours. I was saying to my companion last night, wherever I am, whether I am living in Buenos Aires or Melbourne in the distant future – I will always come back to Eindhoven for this festival. Year in, year out.

(I say this despite my mild disappointment with the catering in terms of quality and service, and also reports I heard that the building is ‘impossible to navigate’. But next year, I hope that the festival is longer than just one day, and that these minor points can be addressed. Such a shame to not provide the complete package …)