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.
The Ministry of OCW has excellent black felt-tip pens. In no way, therefore, did I manage to find out which newspaper in Amsterdam made the WOB request to which Minister van Engelshoven is now responding. The length of the black bar could be anything (except Coöperatief Cultureel Persbureau UA). Anyway: someone is investigating the course of events surrounding the...
Dutch youth theatre has been awarded the Prize of the Dutch Critics this year. Quite rightly so. That youth theatre of ours is of superior quality, diverse, dares to tell stories and look outside its own navel. It is more than a pity that, as an adult without a child, you don't come into contact with that theatre so often. Many an adult would fervently...
Dutch theatre is remembering less and less. This was evident last Friday during two meetings at ITA, the building that once housed the Stadsschouwburg. During Nieuwe Grond, part of the Dutch Theatre Festival, the topic was heritage. One meeting will possibly be remembered by the six attendees: the two guests plus presenter, and their three audience members. The other...
1On 6 September 2018, Chokri Ben Chika left his sense of humour behind in Belgium. He trekked to the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg with a filled jerry can and committed a criminal offence. He threatened a Rabo Hall filled to the brim with an indistinguishable fake weapon. He said he admired the anonymous Tunisian who, with his self-immolation ...
Sometimes there is a gap in the strolling crowd in Groningen's Noorderplantsoen. Often this is due to a local resident with muscle-dog, who continues to make his daily round despite the crowds. It is one of those funny things that give Noorderzon its very own character, as the most Groningen-like of all summer festivals in our country. There is...
Less supply of subsidised art is good for the country. Antoinette Laan, culture spokeswoman for the governing VVD party, has thought so for at least eight years. Back in 2011, then still as alderman in Rotterdam, she stated that she did not understand why art institutions were open on weekdays. After all: everyone was at work then and so couldn't come and have a look anyway. Listen here...
Good news from the cultural funds: 'diversity' is becoming a serious condition when deciding whether or not to get funding for your cultural thing. Of course, this will lead to discussion. To prevent people from falling back on the Jeroen Pauw argument (we want women on air, but there aren't enough good ones who want them too), the group suggests...
Usually when I speak to someone who calls themselves a playwright, they say they are 'only' a supplier of a 'half-product'. I never get that answer from a young actor, and certainly never from a director. It is they who make theatre out of the half-products supplied by writers. Actors and directors prefer to be addressed as 'theatre-makers'. Nothing wrong with that....
Speaking of bubbles. In the middle of Den Bosch, on the parade square, there are three mega-play blocks you can enter. They are mini theatres, brainchildren of designer Theun Mosk. In one of them, you come across a very large plastic bubble in which young, mostly naked, people move. The audience stands on either side of the bubble feeling uncomfortable. Partly because the naked young people...
It started three years ago. Guilherme Miotto, working as a dance maker in Tilburg, was asked by a good friend of his. Whether he wanted to come and have a look in Noord. There, in that rather notorious slum, there were some fantastic freestyle footballers running around. YouTube runs with them, and the best one, Nasser El Jackson, is even world champion. A ball wizard. That is.
About 18 years ago, while on holiday in the Auvergne region, my wife and I picked up a paraglider that had ended up rather unhappily in a meadow full of indignant cows. We were happy to do something. The paraglider looked grateful, although he was a little worried about the car in which we were going to take him back to...
We have sound from the opening. A speech, interviews with three of the four guides and lots of fine sound from a busy festival square in Den Bosch. Listen in, and above all, come and see for yourself. With your family, on an adventure or as a pearl diver. Or all at once. There is water for everyone, and air conditioning where needed.
Last Tuesday, 24 July, in a week when the whole of the Netherlands is voluntarily lying down for pampus or any other island, the Culture Index came out with an important piece. In 'Five questions about volunteering answered', the Culture Index does indeed answer five questions. The question, however, is how relevant these questions are to the state of professional culture in the Netherlands. And, more importantly, does...
If the weather holds up a bit, the upcoming edition of Theatre Festival Boulevard will be the most tropical in history. The smart ones among us, who opted for a staycation in West Balkonia this year, can indulge their cultural heart in Den Bosch. Not for nothing regularly called 'The Avignon of the Netherlands'. Theatre festival Boulevard is unpacking 2018 with a truly overwhelming...
It did not require a manifesto, nor a fist-thick art-critical treatise in which a learned committee arrives at an all-defining verdict. No, it was a slip of the tongue by an artist, this time defining a new art movement. Olaffur Eliasson, the architect/artist rapidly gaining popularity in the world of design and architecture in recent years, says it in a...
What does Billy Wilder have to do with Mad Men and Breaking Bad? Or with a football team in a cave? Everything, it turns out. The filmmaker, who died in 2002, appears to be far, far more important to our visual culture than someone like Alfred Hitchcock. At least: it is beginning to look very much like that. Eye, the striking film theatre and museum in Amsterdam, is from now until...
Last week, while walking the dog, my neighbour Stefanie asked, "What is that anyway, this Holland Festival?", and I almost caught myself wearily going to explain that it was the most important performing arts festival the Netherlands and its environs and that everyone with a bit of education should know it. But I held back. And wondered: how...
That's at least one mistake you can make: booking for a Christoph Marthaler performance and then expecting something new to happen. Yet I did it, on my last visit to this year's Holland Festival. Someone had said that the Swiss playwright, who has been creating performances in which lost souls are...
Then suddenly there is a very different audience in Amsterdam's Muziekgebouw aan het IJ. Gamers. Or rather developers. And hardcore new-music aficionados. 'I only come for Maze,' said my neighbour petulantly. He came for the music ensemble. Not for the games, that is, not for the computer graphics. And maybe not even for Claron McFadden. That famous, hyper-pliable opera singer who appeared in...
That George Benjamin is this year's Holland Festival court composer makes perfect sense. And I say that as a non-expert. After all: the way contemporary classical music is often written and talked about scares laymen like me. Would I ever have enough knowledge to appreciate those gourmet sounds? On Saturday night, I made my first live acquaintance...
Pizza Napolitana is not going to taste the same again. After all, mozzarella can be anything. We owe this enrichment of our lives to De Warme Winkel, the anarchic theatre company hired by the Nederlands Kamerkoor to enhance their Holland Festival programme. We knew it. And you can go and check that out for yourself, because after that...
First of all, the chairs have to leave the auditorium of the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ. Then some discomfort, those two hours that Octavia E. Butler's The Parable of The Sower lasts. At least it would make for some shared sorrow, and possibly some awkward swinging. Because the way things were going, that first night of Toshi Reagon's debut at the Holland...
Nothing defines us like our taste. And especially taste in music. We find that music taste defines exactly who we are and can easily distinguish us from people who have distinctly different, and therefore lesser, tastes. Pinkpop, a pop festival with several world-famous headliners, experienced this. Each world star plays to their own audience, which schi...
Of course, we have Chriet Titulaer. But it kind of ends there. And to say we took those very seriously, back in the day? No. The future, and fantasising about it, is not really a thing in the Netherlands, at least not with the big publishers and broadcasters. A writer dealing with science fiction will never join a big...
Menno Pols, reporter for De Gelderlander, was denied accreditation (free ticket and other benefits) for the three-day Manana Manana festival in Vorden this year. Reason: an article he wrote last year about the money flows within the club behind the festival. That club earns millions mainly from Zwarte Cross, the biggest festival in the Netherlands with 220,000 tickets sold. The accreditation...
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