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'The drawing is literally and figuratively striking, painfully comic and wry: it brings tears and laughter at the same time. The combination of the boy's peaceful pose with the cruel assault on his body lingers in your mind. The print needs no text; it could appear in any European, even global newspaper, so powerful and universal is it
About 8 million Dutch people do something with art. They have music lessons, macramé plant pendants, paint plates or put together Christmas cards. But they also play theatre, sing in a choir, are part of a hip-hop crew or death metal band. That these practitioners of amateur art are not automatically also regular visitors to professional art is a mystery to many people. The Fund ...
The rapid austerity operation of at least 200 million on the cultural sector has yet to be fleshed out, but one thing is already clear. If it were up to state secretary Halbe Zijlstra, the National Reisopera, which operates from Enschede, would stand a good chance of being killed in that operation. His request for advice to the Culture Council, sent the week before Christmas, states the following:...
The margins are not huge, but the Van Gogh Museum's attendance figures have been falling for a few years now. In peak year 2006, 1,677,268 visitors still walked through the vistas; in 2010, there are likely to be only 1,432,000. The Rijksmuseum, which remains open despite its renovation, is also still far below the figures of peak year, with an expected 900,000 visitors....
Het Concertgebouw Amsterdam heeft een eerste ‘partner’ gevonden in het grote kapitaalkrachtige bedrijfsleven. Hiermee voldoet Nederlands wereldberoemde kroonjuweel aan de wens van het Kabinet-Rutte om meer geld ‘uit de markt’ te halen. De kapitaalkrachtige partij die is gevonden komt overigens niet uit Nederland, maar uit Duitsland: “Met ingang van 1 januari 2011 gaan Deutsche Bank en Het Concertgebouw NV een…
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...
The VVD group in the Senate is threatening to shelve the increase in VAT on performing arts tickets proposed by the CDA-VVD-PVV cabinet. The Nederlands Dagblad reports this today. According to Associated Press Service editor Laurens Kok, this is evident from the words of the VVD's group leader in that chamber, Fred de Graaf. We quote: Acting...
They researched it. And so it turns out to be true. You can also use sustainable light bulbs on stage. And that saves energy. Whether this will immediately get rid of the government's idiotic revenge cuts remains to be seen, because 200,000,000 euros is quite a lot of energy-saving light bulbs. But the start is there. From the press release of the Association of Stage Technology: With...
Rotterdam - That every disadvantage 'hep' its advantage is often apparent with symphony orchestras. A principal conductor, for instance, is usually in charge of his own orchestra for no more than about 12 weeks a year. He divides the rest of his time among the other orchestras he is also already chief of. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, for instance, is now not only principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic...
Today we posted this message, and quickly realised that the news had been released before. Only a few minutes later it dawned on us that the original post, of which this is a free translation, had already appeared on The Independent's site on 22 October 1995. Thanks to a database update and a perceptive site visitor, who...
Among lovers of the music of contemporaries Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and George Frederic Handel (1685-1759), the bickering is well comparable to that between supporters of Beatles and Rolling Stones. Bach is classical, Handel populist, Bach wrote lofty music, Handel flat-out , Bach was (barring his St Matthew Passion) succinct in his musical statements, Handel rambled on endlessly. And so...
Wonderful though theatre is. The closing night of the Autumn Collection festival made me realise once again that the best actors do not always make the best performance. Expressiveness depends on more than acting talent and a proven literary text.
It stood out: what a lot of cute girls in Theatre Kikker. Could it be because of the programming? Now there were a lot of cute men to choose from on Saturday night. The tough acting beasts of FC Bergman, for instance, or the androgynous Nik van den Berg, or perhaps the seemingly sweet Bert Hana. And if not, there was always DJ Oscar Kocken,...
Irrepressible, funny, touching Fast Car Ray. A boy whose head is never still, who does not sleep, to whom everything comes in and who just cannot manage to love himself. His illness, Tourette's Syndrome, makes him delusional and desperate. Tick-tock. On and on, on and on. Like a racing car.
From Wednesday 27 October, the Dodo will cover the Autumn Collection 2010 from Theater Kikker in Utrecht.
The arts are also being hit by cuts in the UK. The budget debate in the UK House of Commons has revealed that those cuts could amount to more than 30%. The lion's share of the cuts will hit Arts Council England. This 'Superfund', which distributes the lion's share of UK arts funding, has to cut 29.9%. Of its budget of almost 450 million...
Incandescent bulbs are also out of the question in theatres. Plays, musicals and concerts will soon all have to switch to "sustainable" lighting. And, just as this affects the atmosphere in the living room, it also affects the atmosphere on stage: sustainable light has completely different colour values than old-fashioned light. Lighting designers have been complaining about this for some time. But how...
Sir Simon Rattle is quite clear about it: "The entire musical world must be as horrified and puzzled as I am to see such a massive destruction of orchestral and choral institutions in Holland." (The entire musical world must be as horrified and puzzled as I am, at the sight of such massive destruction of orchestral and choral institutions in Holland)....
It was actually typically Dutch. After all, we have more awards to give away here in all parts of the creative sector than there are artists. Almost. And so all those awards have their own selection committees, juries, committees and you name it. Not only costs hands full of money, it is also cumbersome. Which is why there is now at least one sensible...
It is occasionally quite chilly on the Westergasfabriek grounds where three Fringe performances are on show. On Thursday night, they are Levelless by Theatre Group WAK, Vivarium #3 by LORNA Collective and Kaat by Eva Knibbe, respectively. The cold, however, is no killjoy. The physical jokes in Levelless (or Recht not in Dutch) are a bit like...
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...
Today (Friday 24 September 2010) at Amsterdam's De Balie debate centre, the kick-off of the art world's actions against the 21% cuts to the OC&W budget planned by the new CDA and VVD cabinet, tolerated by PVV. For those who have not yet found reports about it in the mainstream media: the social netwersite 'twitter'...
This year's debate season in Rotterdam opened in the renovated hall of De Unie. The newly completed space has a pleasant and intimate feel. All the more remarkable the statement by discussion leader Natasja van den Berg that questions from the floor are not allowed "because they are not about anything anyway". That doesn't exactly sound like a warm welcome in a debate centre. Admittedly, it did deliver...
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.
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