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.
Ellen Vogel is dead, aged 93, and that is a loss. Calling her 'a monument' is an insult, so I won't do that here. Ellen Vogel was a regal actress, though: dignified and a bit posh. She was also someone who knew how to hide her anger sublimely. I experienced Ms Vogel a couple of times. The first time...
Een betere plek om persfoto’s te vertonen dan een kerk is er eigenlijk niet. Tenminste, zolang het zo’n Nederlandse kerk als die in Naarden is. Witgepleisterde muren, geen afleidende beelden en schilderingen. En dan toch die gewijde sfeer die een beetje hoort bij wat al die winnaars van World Press Photo 2015 uitbeelden: verschrikkelijke verhalen, glorieuze overwinningen en mysteries die…
It could just be a solution to Greece's problems: investing in culture. For Britain, at least, the softest of all sectors has proved a fertile cash cow. The cultural sector added 15 billion in value to the economy there last year, almost 3 billion more than two years ago. In other words: for every pound the government put in...
Three years ago, the suspicion was already expressed in America; now it is also penetrating Europe. People are reading far more than bookshops and publishers think. And this is not even due to the illegal downloading of bestsellers that everyone is so worried about. Logical, because what people are reading so fanatically is not the book you find in a bookshop,...
Cathedrals are 'in' Utrecht has a thing for cathedrals. The Dom was once a cathedral, but since the Reformation stormed its way through the Roman Catholic heritage, the real cathedral with the archbishop's chair is now a few hundred metres away. In the early 1990s, theatre-maker Aram Adriaanse renamed the former stables of the veterinary faculty 'Horse Cathedral',...
There was an air of more expensive perfume in the foyers than at a Dutch gala premiere. The women were younger and smoother, or had a better botox doctor than usual. The jewellery looked very expensive, as did the dresses. Russian sounded everywhere. It seemed as if Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg had been moved for a while to PC Hooftstraat, a few hundred metres away....
The second chamber was also keen to know what exactly Culture Minister Bussemaker meant by that 'cash shift'. After all, it was that cash shift with which she could festively announce that she would put an extra 18 million into culture, after 2017. In a letter to the chamber, the minister has now shown how creatively she can bookkeep. A few costs...
2014 was the year of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, award-winning stage adaptation by Ivo van Hove. This year, that performance has been outstripped by 'Passions Humaines', written by Erwin Mortier, magisterially designed by Guy Cassiers. Again at the Holland Festival, confirming its place as a stage for the great debate on art. Two plays in which architecture, artistry and...
Had Anton Chekhov lived now, he would have written for television. Not drama, and certainly not film. Indeed, innovative as the great Russian playwright was during his short life (1860-1904), he would now have done something with selfie sticks and contact microphones. The result would probably have been something like what Brazilian artist Christiane Jatahy has now created. She took the text...
Get lost festively. In what new building is it still possible? It is possible in Utrecht's TivoliVredenburg, the building that has now been officially open for a year. Saturday 13 June marked that anniversary with a repeat of the opening party. Because that was such an unexpected success. During that repeat, it once again became clear why: TivoliVredenburg gives new meaning to the term festival. It is...
The repair of cultural subsidies by more than 18 million, announced by culture minister Bussemaker on 8 June 2015, mainly concerns a perpetuation of earlier patchwork. That patchwork was necessary in recent years to smooth the crudest consequences of the cuts by her predecessor Halbe Zijlstra. That predecessor is now in the chamber as a coalition partner, to ensure...
A confession. There is no other way. So: yes. I was lying between immaculate white sheets in a comfortable bed with actress Lina Issa and it was beautiful. She whispered soft words in my ear, put a hand on my hand and it was very quiet around us. Thanks to that whispering, the noise of the big city fell away. Trams...
Stars, we don't really do that in the Netherlands. Our ground level does not allow diva behaviour. In our lowlands, you get a plus if you have stayed so nicely ordinary despite your success. Even if you stand in the Arena with your songs, like the Toppers, this weekend. How different it is in Istanbul. There, you are allowed to be shamelessly famous. Like.
Fort Nieuwersluis is the biggest surprise of the art event Gimme Shelter. Until a year and a half ago, the defensive work was a no-go-area. The BB ('Bescherming Burgerbevolking') sat there until 1989 to protect telephone lines during, but especially after World War III, when the rest of the Netherlands would be hiding under the kitchen table from the H-Bomb. When the atomic-proof fortress became permanently obsolete, the...
Europe's biggest hangout. That's the best way to describe the roof of that half-sunken car park in the heart of Rotterdam. Transformed fifteen years ago into the impression of a ship's deck, that 'Schouwburgplein' is now mostly owned by groups of skaters, vagrants, street urchins and other metropolitan troublemakers. Visitors to the Schouwburg usually rush without looking around too much to the...
The building alone made literature festival City2Cities worth a visit. After all, the Post Office on Utrecht's Neude, built in 1924 as an ode to progress in a style that brought together the best of the Amsterdam School, had been closed for years. So even those who don't get excited by Nick Cave and those who think Michel Houellebecq is a creep had a reason...
Berlin's Gorki Theatre won a prize this year: it was named the best theatre in the German language area by the German-language press. The company won the award partly because it employs many actors of immigrant origin. With its performance Der Untergang der Nibelungen, which can be seen in this year's Holland Festival, the group also thematises the...
The fastest, and most beautiful, way to cycle through Leidsche Rijn is along the Groenedijk, and then all the way to the end. Pedalling 20 minutes from Utrecht Central Station, there recently, and for 2000 years, lies Castellum Hoge Woerd. It is a newly built idea of a Roman fort that guarded the ancient border of the Roman Empire here, along...
At Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg, Hans Kesting will once again play the title role of Shakespeare's Othello, in a legendary version by top director Ivo van Hove, already 12 years ago. A stone's throw away, at De Balie, is the equally impressive actor Kenneth Herdigein in David Mamet's play Race. Why connect the two? Hans Kesting, the...
The 1970s have for some time been the target of what we shall conveniently call the up-and-coming generation. And so we are talking about the 1970s as the glory years of hippy-dom, the jubilant times of the left-wing church and everything else that, with today's knowledge, is dirty and dirty. They were the years when...
Hatred of dependents runs deep in the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy. The political game the party plays nationally and locally cannot be explained otherwise. Amsterdam is now experiencing the latest example of how the party has launched its publicity attack on dependents: while the cut in cultural subsidies of four years ago was...
Christian von Hornsleth is exhibiting in Amsterdam, and there was an immediate small riot. An organisation that raises money against trafficking in women no longer wanted to receive a contribution from the proceeds of his exhibition in Amsterdam, because the artist, whose conceptual work often features porn images, would actually be an advocate of prostitution. Something Hornsleth himself vehemently denies. The...
What is already going on on a small scale in Groningen, Enschede, Zaltbommel, Amersfoort, Gorinchem and Vlaardingen, is threatening to happen nationwide as well: cultural institutions falling over while politicians look on helplessly. According to the Council for Culture, the situation is alarming: 'Institutions are draining their own funds, cultural funds are maintaining schemes by drawing on reserves. We therefore make the urgent...
Indeed, you couldn't release this message on 1 April, because nobody would have believed it. But it is coming, then. Bowie, The Musical. But from the man himself. Sort of. Ivo van Hove, the boss of Toneelgroep Amsterdam who is now more famous in America and England than in the Netherlands, is going to direct Lazarus. That's a new...
Tilting is in. And that is good as long as tilting means taking a sharp turn and following the freshly chosen course with new vigour. Tilting is unwise if you are on the brink. Because then tilting soon becomes tumbling. Cultural education, I fear, has begun a tumble. Last year, it appeared that...
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