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'Paris' was wonderful, but has everything to gain when you add 'Den Bosch'. 

Going over the edge, exploring and pushing boundaries, pushing the limits of bystanders' comprehension, performing feats no one expects. And seeing gnomes walking through a forest. Or reading things in water. Seeing half a boy save the world. The first 11 days of August 2024 were legendary, never to be forgotten. And all in the... 

Boulevard diary #3: basil connects the world

The nice thing about festivals like Boulevard in Den Bosch is that after a few days, you automatically make connections between everything you experience. Not that everything starts to look alike, like in sport. There, a single chromosome or hundredth of a second determines the difference between world peace or the apocalypse. There, everything has to be so similar that over... 

Boulevard diary #2: Bossche street culture is different

Right by St John's, next to the Tower Stage where Theatre Festival Boulevard holds its talk shows and free live concerts, is 'Tent Purple'. That tent is different, this year. Outside, kids in baggy trainers are doing break moves, inside it is steaming hot. For ten days, Tent Purple is Cypher HQ, the home of Bossche hip-hop and street culture, also known as... 

Boulevard diary #1: Den Bosch has a cosy little village there

Yesterday, someone from Amsterdam told me that he had long thought Boulevard was a provincial version of an Amsterdam rosé party: lots of conviviality, food, drink and mediocre art. Fortunately, after just one visit, he was convinced that something has grown in Den Bosch over the past 40 years that cannot be compared to other Dutch festivals. There... 

International Theatre Amsterdam makes report on sickened working climate public 

"As for the victims, it was mainly employees with managerial duties who experienced the cross-border behaviour. This seemingly contradictory result with the discussed hierarchy is explicable from the fact that the perpetrator of the transgressive behaviour in the majority of these cases is (a) board member(s) or other manager(s)." Ivo van Hove suddenly left as director last year 

The stakes of Schoof 1 are clear: Culture, Sports and Leisure. 

With the new far-right cabinet, a new reality has also arrived for the arts. As before in Brabant, where the provincial councils no longer placed arts and culture under science and education, Schoof-1, despite an NSC minister on Education, Culture and Science, puts culture under the heading 'Culture, Sports and Leisure'. This is evident from the new classification of the... 

Gala Dutch National Ballet photo Altin Kaftira

Grand Gala of The National Ballet zooms in on duets

On Friday 28 June, the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam closed the season festively with a gala. In it, the company of some 80 dancers mainly takes a closer look at relationships. Of the 12 works, you will see no fewer than nine duets. A love letter, a relationship in troubled waters, a truce, an anticlimax, a conflict, a wedding dance party, a life journey, an unattainable happiness, a... 

copilot (AI): modern composers discussing with each other, photorealistic, no central perspective, black-and-white, dslr 35 mm

IN PERSPECTIVE #22: What does the Performing Arts Fund sound like for composers?

In the series In Perspective, Erik Akkermans looks back and ahead at developments in cultural policy and practice. Today: from noise around the Fonds Scheppende Toonkunst to laurel wreath for the Dutch Composer The adagissimo of windmills Like two bedraggled schoolboys, we sat In the meeting room opposite Reinbert de Leeuw, chairman of the Society of Dutch Composers (GeNeCo). We, Cas Smithuijsen... 

The Romeo. © Orpheas Emirzas

Trajal Harrell's The Romeo is the laid-back performance you need right now @Holland Festival. 

"I didn't hear a song I didn't know." Over white wine after Trajal Harrell's The Romeo, the lady was quite grumpy. I might add that I hadn't seen a move I couldn't have made myself. And yet that did not make me cranky. On the contrary: rarely have I been so happy and relaxed... 

Katia Ledoux in Carmen. © Inés Manai

Carmen adaptation by Wu Tsang shows how to combine respect and topicality

Probably the most famous murder of a woman for what she is is that of the fictional Carmen, a free-spirited young Spanish woman with a fear of commitment. Opera composer Georges Bizet immortalised this character from a French story by Prosper de Merimée, making the crime of passionel a common term for what is none other than femicide. That habit of men killing women... 

Eleven thousand strings in a round temple: Holland Festival highlight, but also missed opportunity?

Jet fighters, drones, thunderstorms with accompanying flooding and lovely babbling brooks with the occasional bird in a pine tree. All of Austria descended on the Gashouder at Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek grounds this weekend and it is what it promised: spectacle as only Austrian music spectacle can be. Georg Friedrich Haas' work 11000 Saiten is a great superlative: surround with emdr and... 

Melencolia by Ensemble Modern at Holland Festival: Unreal music theatre about the end of everything

Future health minister and deputy prime minister Fleur Agema graduated as an architect early this century with a study on the ideal prison. Artist Jonas Staal re-examined her graduation design a few years ago. Agema appears to have an extremely dystopian vision of the world in which prisoners and guards must pass through a disorienting, inky-black, concrete hell to... 

Dying drummer says it all in Tiago Rodrigues' Dans la Mesure de l'Impossible at the Holland Festival

Live music in the theatre, I long for it more and more. Performances in which actors are accompanied by a soundtrack, amplified with or without transmitter microphones, always only half captivate. You soon find yourself watching a kind of live performed film. But without the comfort of a cinema and the technical capabilities of the camera.... Sunday 9 June sat in... 

Music with balls for Beatrix at Holland Festival

Jazz-Rock, it still exists. In all those years of sitting in the theatre, reading books or listening to David Bowie or Rufus Wainwright, I had kind of forgotten about it. Music by real men, Heavy Metal for people who have studied for it, Gothic but with several conservatory degrees under their belt. Subtle chopping where the drummer's left hand is a 17/23rd... 

With Despois do Silencio, Christiane Jatahy commands deep respect at the Holland Festival

That's where Christiane Jatahy had me for a moment. When during her directed and devised story 'Despois do Silencio', one of the actresses falls into a Winti-like delirium, and her colleagues try to keep her from colliding unceremoniously with spectators in the front row, I briefly think it is real. That's how used to reality we are by now... 

Opening party Holland Festival drowns in Westergasfabriek

It was busy at Amsterdam's Westergas area, this Thursday, 6 June. Fantastic, of course, that not only do you have a couple of excellent running restaurants and clubs there, and the evening four-day march passes by while there is a big salsa party at the club near the world-famous Gashouder, but then it still feels a bit weird that the royal opening of the... 

Georgina Verbaan is let down hundreds of times by a different man each time during the final weekend of this Holland Festival. Photo Janiek Dam

The best chance of total bewilderment. Why you want to experience completely unknown performances at the Holland Festival.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the Holland Festival had a reputation for being elitist. The festival, which was founded in 1947 to get the culturally starved Netherlands back on track after World War II, had a bit of that about it because, for a long time, "being elitist" was also completely... 

Created with DALL-E 3 at the prompt "Ravine year affecting the city of Utrecht"

Ravine year 2026: Utrecht shows what consequence austerity can have

We need to talk about the Ravine year for a moment. After all, in 2026, the government is cutting billions from the municipal fund. Until now, this has been quite abstract because, let's face it: do we have any idea what money in your city goes where and from whom it comes? Municipal spending is a black box. My city now has in a row... 

Created with DALL-E 3 at the prompt: "An artist being watched by supervisors in black and white, without coloured-in figures, as in a pen drawing"

Ten tips to avoid a Governance disaster

According to the site wbtr.nl, "more than a thousand times a year within associations and foundations something goes wrong, with major consequences. Think of financial bungling, inattention of supervisors or entanglement of interests'. In the cultural sector, we are familiar with the Governance Code for Culture, which hopes to prevent 'things going wrong' with a series of recommendations. If an 'issue' hits the media... 

Photo opportunity at the end of Delft Fringe's first 'Makers Day' on 8-2-2024. Photo by author

How Delft Fringe Festival is reaching audiences open to experimentation: 'Away with theatrical codes'

'What makes your performance unique? Why should people come and see you, what will they take home from it?' At the Delft Fringe Festival's first 'Makersdag', at the end of January, it's little about art, but a lot about speed dates, workshops in marketing, pitching and making flyers. The 30 or so makers present also get a lesson in handling theatre criticism from... 

Rape under the carpet

What happens behind the scenes at organisations when they face allegations of (serious) cross-border behaviour? Trainee Emilia accuses a theatre technician at a well-known theatre company of rape. This piece is based on her story and her own research, anonymised for privacy reasons. June 2022, beer, vodka, joints and a share scooter It's party time in a city park; students... 

Sandor Somkuti: Budapest 1985. CCBY2.0Sandor Somkuti: Budapest 1985. CCBY2.0

IN PERSPECTIVE 20: BUDAPEST AND FREE SPACE FOR CULTURE

In the series In Perspective, Erik Akkermans looks back and ahead at developments in cultural policy and practice. Today: the 1985 Budapest Cultural Forum and a renewed cold war. This year marks the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Only a short time before, intense discussions between Warsaw Pact and NATO countries on security, disarmament and free cultural... 

In Perspective #19: The Branch and the Blossom

In the series In Perspective, Erik Akkermans looks back and ahead at developments in cultural policy and practice. Today: cultural education in primary education. Ambitions of a new cabinet Spring 2003. The sun began to shine a little more and branches began to blossom. Here presented the metaphor that could serve as a title for the report that... 

DALL-E 2023-12-01 11.58.18 - A photorealistic image of an elephant rampaging through a china shop, with shelves of delicate porcelain items being knocked over and shattered. The e

The Arts and Culture discount can start as early as 13 December

On 6 December, the new House of Representatives will be sworn in. a week later, the deliberations on the budget tabled by the incumbent caretaker cabinet in September will begin. The then secretary of state for culture, Gunay Uslu, has since flown the coop and cannot be challenged on her budget. Someone else will now have to defend that budget. Those who wondered whether the peace... 

cover Friesland My Love by Oeds Westerhof.

One region, one love: Oeds Westerhof's political declaration of love

In Zutphen, I attended Jeroen den Herder's congenial small-scale cello festival. There, two young Portuguese students gave a lecture/recital on their research project on the music of fado singer and composer José Zeca Afonso, an important voice in the 1974 Portuguese Revolution. At home, I looked up that music. It turned out to be the perfect background when reading "Friesland, my... 

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