Cultural journalist since 1996. Worked as theatre critic, columnist and reporter for Algemeen Dagblad, Utrechts Nieuwsblad, Rotterdams Dagblad, Parool and regional newspapers through Associated Press Services. Interviews for TheaterMaker, Theatererkrant Magazine, Ons Erfdeel, Boekman. Podcast maker, likes to experiment with new media. Culture Press is called the brainchild I gave birth to in 2009. Life partner of Suzanne Brink roommate of Edje, Fonzie and Rufus. Search and find me on Mastodon.
Disturbing reports, over the past few days, in various media. First, there was Patrick van IJzendoorn in De Volkskrant, who observed that life had moved away from London's business heartland. I saw a few confusedly delighted reactions come along from friends on my cultural timeline. After all, the article made a clear connection between the closure of museums and theatres and the...
That 8.6 million the fund is now minimally short of will probably be found somewhere, so the saw line will be shifted again. Then the sector can - virtually - continue for another four years. Another one and a half million may be added to shape the spread. Pleasing the art world is not that expensive, The Hague will notice.
Exterior, day. A deserted street in a southern Dutch town, unusually bright daylight. No sound. A man drives up and parks at a vacant power point. He walks to the entrance of a large, empty, modernist building. He is greeted by a very very old veteran, who tells him that "the wife is in for a moment", "she asked me to go on the...
Boukje Schweigman is an artist this country desperately needs. My deep admiration for her arose with 'Klep', the performance with which she graduated from the Amsterdam mime school long ago. With eight others in a trolley, looking around through very small flaps in a world where sweet creatures are equally curious about you, after which a minimal touch has the impact of...
'For Indonesian Dutch, 15 August is definitely not liberation day,' explains playwright Bo Tarenskeen. The last day of the alternative Festival Boulevard in Den Bosch, Sender Boulevard, coincides with the commemoration of Japan's surrender on 15 May 1945. The Dutch East Indies, the colony exploited by our country for centuries, had also been liberated from the Japanese, but the end...
Ok, the Mauerpark in the real Berlin is more grubby, but what they call the Berlinplein in Utrecht's new Leidsche Rijn centre has something in common with it. Of course, a frayed edge organised by the local government is a bit suspicious, with a megabios as its biggest attraction, but property developers, the biggest abusers of artistic frayed edges, can't do much else on...
What festival director Viktorien van Hulst, together with her team, is pulling off seems almost impossible, but it fits the tradition she has developed since taking office. For a few years now, Boulevard has been as much about massive events as intimate encounters.
According to the minister, when applying for your grant this year, the Fair Practice Code, the Diversity and Inclusion Code and the Governance Code of Culture would be decisive. In several reviews by the Culture Council in the BIS and also locally, artists have been rejected on the grounds of poor substantiation of their following the code of conduct. If not at...
Illusionary Rockaz Company was due to release a new work by Shailesh Bahoran this spring. A new production for the first time in two years, after a time in which the Utrecht-based choreographer was constantly winning awards. And then Corona broke out. For Shai, reason to pause for a while: 'For Shakti, the performance that is coming up now, we have to...
The National Opera had made a mistake in preparing its application. According to the Culture Council, the multi-million-dollar national institution had failed to break down performance data between dance and music. As a result, the company had to come up with an entirely new application before 1 November. Now it turns out that was not so bad. As it turns out, the data...
'Of course Corona has an impact on me, but the impact of Black Lives Matter is much bigger. I want to get to work activating young people. They need to feel that this is our country. I think it's important to always use every stage to make that clear.' Bright Richards is twenty years after graduating from the Arnhem...
That they came up with a one-and-a-half billion support package for the arts in Britain last month seemed like very good news for a while. For a country of almost 67 million people, such a rescue package, which also consists of three quarters of loans and advances, is proportionately much smaller than what there is in the Netherlands in terms of support for the arts. How keen...
Barely three weeks into her job when the corona pandemic and lockdown came. So, for Halima el Ghamarti, who started as director of the Jongeren Cultuurhuis Kanaleneiland and Overvecht in mid-February, there is no other normal than the new normal: working from home, and doing so with an organisation whose main purpose is to connect young people in Utrecht with...
I have long put myself on the 'listen first, talk later' mode when it came to how we all deal with the festering sore of racism in the Netherlands. There's so much we don't know about each other, and there's especially so much I can't know about my fellow Black people, because for a long time I felt too little...
Just over a year ago, Culture Press carried the story that Wim Hupperetz, director of the capital's Allard Pierson, had resigned his post as chairman of the museums and heritage advisory committee to the Culture Council. The reason was Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven's decision to hand over control of national museums' policies to...
Immediately after the lockdown was declared in March 2020, Vincent Wijlhuizen, co-founder (along with Annette van Zwol and Ieme Soes) and director of the What you See Festival, set to work to come up with alternatives for the festival, which takes place in the autumn. 'We made several plans. We already had an ordinary plan, which went to all the funds...
Creativity expresses itself in Dutch politics mainly in bookkeeping. On 29 June, just before the start of the three-month summer recess, the Lower House actually found money to save pop festival Noorderslag and dance company Scapino from collapse. That demise would become a reality in the new arts plan, which takes effect in 2021, as the Culture Council...
On Monday 29 June, the Lower House will discuss the advice of the Council for Culture. An advice that, as the Volkskrant rightly noted on Friday 26 June, receives much more criticism than previous advice. In doing so, the newspaper reaffirms what we already wrote down immediately after its release on 4 June: there is a total lack of transparency, a...
In recent days, tentative proposals for a new system to fund the arts in the Netherlands have appeared in various places. Tricky pieces, and so far not attesting to very much incisiveness. In Het Parool, a number of prominent figures, including Tinkebel and advertising man Kessels, think that we should think less in pigeonholes, and that, besides quality, we should also...
2.6 billion euros. It is a sum so large that it means nothing to anyone. It is less than the tax support KLM gets, though. Today Kunsten 92, the arts-wide lobbying organisation, in an unprecedented collaboration with all interest groups and industry associations, brought out that that 2.6 billion is the damage to the arts sector caused by the restrictive measures....
The three of them are back together in the office for the first time since the lockdown on 13 March. The interview, in which director Emily Ansenk, music programmer Jochem Valkenburg and theatre programmer Annemieke Keurentjes take stock of the first - and hopefully only - online edition of the country's most prestigious performing arts festival, takes place a day after the lockdown. There was no...
The Council for Culture acted contrary to all policy agreements, its own advice and rules when it reduced the subsidy for the Holland Festival by over five hundred thousand euros. The Holland Festival, which is in serious trouble as a result, is now expressing its anger in a letter that went to the Lower House today. The organisation even speaks of "improper administration": a...
'We did get quite a kick out of spectators at the beginning: "How dare you treat the actors like that? First you put a mask on them, then you steal their voices and make them playback!'' Richard Jansen couldn't care less. He is part of the creative team as sound designer
'The spontaneous breeze should be planned at least 15 minutes in advance. After all, you have to buy tickets for a block of time. When you enter our venue, you immediately see all the security measures we have taken to protect staff and visitors. There are huge screens to separate the flow of visitors. There's a chance you won't get lost in... this time.
What an incredible bucket of guts Lucie Horsch has. Twenty years old. Quite world-famous by now, admittedly. But you just have to dare, in your acceptance speech for the prestigious Dutch Music Prize, to throw the minister's just-expressed words back in her face. Because that is what Lucie Horsch did, with a controlled fury that made a deep impression even from 25 metres away. The...
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