"Janine Dijkmeijer to National Ballet"

The message below has since been confirmed. But we cherish our scoops like. Hence.

The merger event in and around Amsterdam's Muziektheater, where ballet, opera and theatre will work in unison, naturally also produced a musical chairs. Stijn Schoonderwoerd, for instance, announced a month or so ago that he was going to do something else, and so the Dutch National Ballet was looking for a new business manager. That now seems to have been found in Janine Dijkmeijer, we heard in the corridors of the ever buzzing Holland Festival.

Dijkmeijer was ready for something new after a long career as artistic director of dance film festival Cinedans and general director of Nicole Beutler's dance company. Both clubs received a positive recommendation from the Amsterdam Arts Council, so that was a nice milestone. A career as a website designer, her other talent, was a slightly less scintillating prospect thereon.

Enfin. On Monday 25 June, there will be a press release and pretty pictures and so on. And then the woman who once worked as a dancer with legendary creators like Krisztina de Chatel, P Selwyn Norton and Pete Rogie will be the new business boss of the country's first ballet company.

At least that is what the coughing trenchcoat in the Stopera car park told us.

Nice move that would be for this jack-of-all-trades, who was in need of something more light-hearted after the hard times as adviser to both the Council for Culture and the Performing Arts Fund.