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Jacqueline Blom and Mark Rietman immediately arouse laughter and sadness as desperate children of divorced parents at the beginning of Family Game. However, the sharp tragicomedy gradually becomes more of a farce good for an evening of laughter. In Family Play, Jacqueline Blom, Bas Hoeflaak and Annick Boer show their best side as actors, and I enjoyed the...
Scored a new bullshit bingo card, today. 'Art must no longer tingle, I quit'. Big headline in a quality newspaper, with below it the terrible story of gallery owner Jeanette Dekeukeleires of Gallery Art Kitchen. The 60-year-old says she is quitting her job because nothing more is allowed. (Read the story here) For instance, she received complaints from young people about the famous PSP poster with that naked woman....
This is a pre-publication from the book The Art of Different, which will be available from 17 January 2023 via the author's site The arts sector is vulnerable, as was unmistakably demonstrated during the pandemic years. It is also clear that these are not just temporary setbacks, but problems of a structural nature. These were already in play before Corona but were anticipated...
At the New Year reception, the Dutch cinema industry announced its 2022 results. Solid recovery, but we are not quite back yet. Top Gun: Maverick is the best-attended title, Soof 3 scores highest among Dutch films.
The Rotterdam Council for Arts and Culture (RRKC) has been disbanded from 1 January 2023. I wrote about this in June this year2, and earlier the editor-in-chief did3. At that time, formal decision-making in Rotterdam had yet to take place. Given the question marks in the city council, it is safe to say that the college finally pushed through the dissolution. The...
This site became big thanks to Twitter and Facebook. We were also created at roughly the same time. In 2009, Twitter was just getting off the ground, and the Netherlands still thought Hyves was going to be the be-all and end-all, while Belgium was already on Facebook. Anyway, tl;dr: social media was still fun. Only in the years that followed did...
A story about love, but above all an ode to imagination. Perfect Days by Spanish writer Jacobo Bergareche is a passionate novel. Deadly marriage With the excuse that it is necessary for his work, Spanish journalist Luis visits a conference in Austin, Texas. But actually, the trip is mostly an excuse for his dead-blooded marriage to Paula...
What do you hold on to when not only the world is tottering, but also your own life? Where then can you find a safe place, a future? That is what Tasmania, Paolo Giordano's new book, is about. Crisis What came first: the worries about climate change and other world crises, or the crisis in his own life? The first-person narrator in Tasmania, a...
The website where the Dutch umbrella organisation of museums, the Museum Association, keeps track of audience and number of people employed by its members was unreachable today. Perhaps that is because today the leading website Artnet also came out with revealing figures on the arts sector in the US. The report, titled The Burns Halperin Report, includes an overview of the...
Since Roberto Saviano published his book Gomorrah and incurred the hatred of the Italian mafia, he has been living in hiding. What that is like, the graphic novel I'm still alive shows and feels razor-sharp. Roberto Saviano is 12 when he witnesses at first hand the murder of a man in his neighbourhood by the mafia. Fifteen years later,...
Her debut novel The Sound of the Night, in which simple seamstress Sira Quiroga became a spy for the British secret service, became a global bestseller a decade ago. Now Spanish writer María Dueñas (58) is out with a new novel in which she takes Sira to task. 'She did have to suffer a little.' Second part Because of the somewhat...
1: The artificial distinction between pros and amateurs encourages exploitation. In the Netherlands, 115 writers can live off the sale of their books. The rest of the people who call themselves writers do so as a side income. In pop music, the figures won't be much different. Writers with a few euros earning on their Lira statement will not...
Why is the largest retrospective on Italian designer Gianni Versace yet on show in Groningen? "Why not?" jokes Andreas Blühm, general director of the Groninger Museum. Indeed, it seems like a bizarre choice, but if you look a little closer, you will discover a few commonalities between the museum in the down-to-earth north and the maximalism of Gianni Versace, who on 2...
Culture Press' new series of geek podcasts is about how to make theatre connect with your audience, and what happens when professional viewers continue to watch in their own way. And it's about the ambitions of 'the region'. So we also talk to Bran Remie, author and creator of the successful Enschede theatre series 'Huize Enschede', elsewhere on...
Grieving well for the loss of a loved one does not lead to Prozac or a shrink. On the contrary, a little life skill helps, as in 'Grief is the thing with feathers' by Max Porter, Jacob Derwig and Erik Whien. Once, after tragedy struck my family, I used to console myself by reading aloud the picture book Frog and the Little Bird by Max...
Director Alida Dors is pushing for inclusion at Theatre Rotterdam. What does this mean for a 44-year-old white director with great success with traditional audiences, as now with 'Sadness is the thing with feathers'? A Q&A. "Erik Whien's theatre is all about the human being. About the head and everything that happens in it. Every human being has thoughts, in the mind...
'See Naples and then die' were Goethe's famous words. If the German philosopher was as surrounded by beauty as I was during the new exhibition Dying in Beauty - The World of Pompeii and Herculaneum, I can understand his statement. For the Drents Museum, it is a peculiar choice: an exhibition on an already much-discussed period and society....
Before, when I used to write about theatre for a national morning paper, my travel schedule was partly determined by the reach the paper had in a particular region. So, if I necessarily wanted to write about a theatre performance in Enschede, about Enschedean states, my chief's question was: how many subscribers do we have in Twente? So usually it didn't get there
Anyone who sees anything other than irony in the work of the painter Rein Dool, completely unknown to me until now (as the painter also described it in an item on TV), has not been paying close attention in literature and art history lectures. Rein Dool painted a portrait of the then Board of Governors of Leiden University in 1974. We see...
IDFA DocLab has returned home to the Brakke Grond, and how! More than thirty-five works explore the boundaries of documentary in content and form. DocLab is the digital playground where anything is technically and conceptually possible now. So I watched a work with scent, danced in the 80s and got so relaxed I almost...
We grew up with it: live tweets from the heart of our democracy. Now, of course, debates on culture in recent years have been a bit different from what we expect now. There is no longer a need to fight over the reputation of the arts, as there was during all debates until a year ago. What is it about now? Energy, thinking...
Following the screening of her Venice Golden Lion-winning All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, committed and critical documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras had a good chat with IDFA's artistic director Orwa Nyrabia at Carré. About her discovery of the documentary world, her outrage at American politics and how she also learned to see hope.
Marietje d'Hane Scheltema, her name be praised. How corny I used to think she was with her neat little rhymes with which she managed to transform classical Greek and Roman drinking bouts into Kralings-judged bake sale parties. And how wrong I could be. Because how well her translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses works in the hands of the people at Alum. Yesterday was the premiere...
Squeezing village society and family, escape with harsh deflowering, student pleasures crushed by bloody abortion, inescapable marriage and childbearing, scorching relationships with men, fierce longing with loneliness, and finally resignation with grandchild; against the backdrop of war, reconstruction, stifled revolution, years of hope and finally in prosperity and cynicism extinguished idealism. Time flows through Annie, Annie flows through the...
Making is most beautiful, Rolf Orthel's latest film, is an ode to making and its makers. Why does the process of making fascinate? What is creativity or artistry? We meet at bodega Keijzer in Amsterdam, where the waiter knows his coffee preference. We talk about film, parents, getting older, primary school, forests, taking detours to see new things. If...
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