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.
Minister Jet Bussemaker fully embraces the report released by the WRR on Thursday 5 March. In that report, entitled 'Revaluing Culture', the Scientific Council for Government Policy makes an appeal to see culture simply as culture again. "In doing so, the WRR distances itself, and I support it, from the instrumental approach to culture. As if culture only has something to mean...
100 Dutch plays were presented to them, the 224 Dutch heavy users of our theatre seats who took part in a survey by the Amsterdam Institute for Theatre Studies. Plays that ranged from fairly well-known, such as Herman Heijermans' 'Op Hoop van Zegen' from the beginning of the last century and Joost van den Vondel's 460-year-old tragedy 'Lucifer', to completely unknown, such as...
Use arts funding for research&development, attracting venture capital and crowdfunding with public money. In this way, according to the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), the same public money can yield more. In an 'exploration' presented to the government today, this advisory board breaks a lance for more daring and commitment from the government to strengthen the Dutch cultural sector: 'Increasingly,...
Of Dutch people, the province can cut back even more on Culture. This week, Ipsos Synnovate presented a survey to that effect, and it was another slap in the face for the sector. Apparently, the image of art as an expensive kind of leftist hobby has not yet been eradicated by three years of optimistic NLPing by culture minister Jet Bussemaker's PR machine....
Not every piece of art can hang on every wall. Utrecht's Galerie Kuub has one such wall, which is a challenge for anyone wishing to hang a work of art in the otherwise generous space. This is because the wall is medieval, and over the centuries has had more layers, stamps and anchors added to it than an average new-build house will be able to handle in its lifetime. With or...
Theatre De Nieuwe Doelen in Gorinchem will close its doors on 31 May, due to lack of support in local politics. The city council, which also previously closed the music school, would like to continue using the building as a Village Hall for amateur artists. For professional theatre, a CDA party leader reported, those few enthusiasts can just go to Dordrecht. Theatre director Rob van Wijk...
The Netherlands is one of the few countries where Science Fiction plays no role in mainstream media, let alone in the arts. If we look upwards at all, it is through Govert Schilling's disarming Duplo bricks, or Vincent Icke's mildly ironic commentary in DWDD. Or turning 'Mission Earth', a failing soap opera with bickering comedians, into...
The General Court of Auditors, a high college of state that independently audits government spending, is blowing the whistle on Culture Minister Bussemaker. Indeed, in an interim opinion, published on 12 February, the Court of Audit states that nothing at all is yet clear about the real consequences of the previous cabinet's cuts. That cabinet, with the widely beloved Halbe...
In Amersfoort, one art hall is empty and one art hall is full. KAdE, only recently completed and already successful, was dismantled five years after opening and moved to another, even newer building, across the railway line. However, the city council does not appear to have been properly informed about the financial consequences of this move and is now stuck with and noose of at least 10...
Altijd gedacht dat kunst iets was van creatieve wildebrassen, geobsedeerde autisten, ondanks zichzelf geniale knutselaars? Fout. Kunst is iets waarbij ‘sterke communicatoren’ de dienst uitmaken. Als het tenminste aan minister Jet Bussemaker ligt, en aan haar o, zo vooruitstrevende idee om kunst vooral nuttig te laten zijn. Voor de maatschappij. Kijk maar naar de horrorvideo hierboven. Waar we bang voor…
You can watch television again without guilt. After a two-and-a-half-year conflict, television broadcasters, producers and cable companies are coming to terms. This is going to make for a lot of happy TV, because after two years of waiting, the makers, actors and writers of television programmes will finally get the money they were entitled to all this time. And more. So does the lobby just make sense...
The play 'Heart' is one for your bucket list. In other words, the play 'Heart', created by Matzer Theatre Productions as an adaptation of Lisette Lewin's book 'Heart of Barbed Wire', is a play you really must have seen. Why? I'll give you 4 reasons why. 1: The book is no longer on sale Lisette Lewin wrote a book in 1992 that...
Last week, the Metaalkathedraal was celebrating. This 'creative breeding ground' in the picturesque no man's land between Utrecht and Leidsche Rijn can, thanks to a loan from a bank, grow into something that might become great fun for the neighbourhood, but also for people on the other side of town. The Metal Cathedral is an initiative of two artists. They...
De minister was erbij. Natuurlijk omdat Introdans een belangrijk gezelschap is, maar het was mooi meegenomen dat er bij deze avond met drie wereldpremières ook twee prijzen konden worden uitgereikt. En dat dat dan een ministerieel tintje kreeg. Trots op. Roel Voorintholt, artistiek leider van Introdans was door het publiek verkozen als winnaar van de Oeuvreprijs voor zijn werk met…
Dit is het Citaat van de Dag. Een voorstel. Omdat er zoveel leuke dingen gezegd worden, die soms geen toelichting behoeven, en soms veel. Heb je zelf suggesties: stuur ze naar de redactie.
Nathaniël Mellors is een van de grappigste kunstenaars van wie werk is te zien op Art Rotterdam. Geen bewegend schilderij, geen grofkorrelige vloeistofdia’s en ook geen Arnoud Mik: Mellors laatste werk: The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview, is goed geacteerde comedy over een serieus intellectueel onderwerp: de kunstwereld. Voortbordurend op de ontdekking dat de Neanderthalers helemaal niet de primitieve knuppelzwaaiende losers waren waar…
Radio Netherlands World Broadcasting no longer exists. The subsidy was withdrawn because no one in the VVD knew what it was: shortwave. And because the PVV, which was also in government at the time, finds everything scary that contains the word 'world'. Bad for those who miss calls from the ANWB emergency centre at breakfast for the Alpenkreuzer, even worse for...
He had had a TED training. It couldn't be otherwise. Bart Moeyaert, poet, writer and multiple award winner, sometimes literally wriggled into numerous corners to warm up the Dutch literary guild to his plans for 2016. That year, for the first time in a long time, the Netherlands will host the Frankfurter Buchmesse again, the Art Basel of the literary world....
'Do you not agree with me that many of you - like members of Roman Catholic curia - are already trying to make yourselves immortal and indispensable? That you are suffering from severe mental and spiritual petrification?' Kees 't Hart measured himself a papal role on Sunday 18 January, when delivering The State of Dutch Literature,...
Radbraken. This is how it works: you tie someone to a sturdy cartwheel, then break all his or her bones by beating them country-wide with clubs, after which you braid the mangled limbs around the spokes of the wheel. It is essential that the punished person undergoes all this alive and conscious. After the treatment, you bring the wheel with...
Zelden twee vrouwelijke kunstenaars aan een tafel gezien die meer van elkaar verschilden dan Dominique Goblet en Leela Corman. Twee vrouwelijke striptekenaars, aan weerszijden van Peter Breedveld die elk jaar als kenner van het comic genre wordt ingevlogen op Writers Unlimited. Corman, naast striptkenaar ook danseres, schrijft haar verhalen in een vrij herkenbare stijl. Indrukwekkende verhalen, historisch, zoals haar laatste…
Nii Ayikwei Parks wants to write a book describing bad places in Africa as ideal, so that people who use his books as travel guides will be mugged and robbed and thus will learn what fiction is. With this humorous statement, the British-born and British-based writer, who spent his childhood with his Ghanaian parents in Ghana, brings some air into the evening...
Home is where The hell is. De naamgeving van de programmaonderdelen van Writers Unlimited laat weinig aan de verbeelding over. En wanneer we naar de opening van dit bewuste onderdeel luisteren, is schrijfster Maaza Mengiste ook niet iemand die ons met prettige gedachten achter wil laten. Zij heeft zich literair gestort op het lot van vluchtelingen die uit Ethiopië naar…
20 jaar bestaat Writers Unlimited, en de verjaardag, nu in Den Haag, komt op een moment dat het vrije schrijverschap wereldwijd zwaarder onder druk staat dan ooit. Misschien daarom ook dat het publiek talrijker is dan vorige edities. Alle avonden zijn stijf uitverkocht, en dat zorgt voor een nogal zinderende sfeer in het Theater aan het Spui. Treffende opening van…
"Everyone who writes will sooner or later run into a wall, a limit of what cannot, should not and should not be written. And almost everyone will flinch at that moment and refrain from writing it. Because that wall is there to protect us from what we don't want." Karl Ove Knausgård, already compared by some to Marcel Proust,...
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