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On 18 May this year, the Volkskrant carried a scoop about strikes and dropouts among technical staff at the country's largest company: ITA. In Trouw on the same day, the united theatre directors (VSCD) sounded the alarm about the lack of technicians. It is even so bad "that performances have to be cancelled". Two reasons in particular are cited: technicians have...
From now on, can we agree to replace all DJs with real drummers? I mean, what I witnessed at the premiere of Eros, Schweigman&'s latest project, was so overwhelming that I can't imagine I've ever gone out of my mind on a drum machine. Two living drummers, splashing and at the same time individually starring at the...
In Flanders, or rather in its cultural capital, Antwerp, the theatre sector is faltering. The Toneelhuis, founded in the late 1990s as a merger between the legendary Blauwe Maandag Compagnie and city company KNS, is in crisis after the departure of Guy Cassiers. It is now losing more than half of its subsidy after a scathing opinion. The Flemish government is stopping...
Screen Daily bracht twee weken geleden al het nieuws dat het International Film Festival Rotterdam gaat herstructureren. Niet vreemd na twee corona-jaren: dat heeft er bij elk festival, bij elke culturele instelling, hard ingehakt. Zorgwekkend werd het toen de afgelopen dagen de sociale media vol stonden met berichten over massa-ontslagen bij het IFFR. Alle senior programmeurs zouden zijn ontslagen. Omdat…
It attracted widespread media attention in late 2020. Putin opponent Alexei Navalny survived an assassination attempt with nerve poison, revealed the suspected perpetrators and ventured back to Moscow despite everything. In this documentary, we witness it up close.
Ok. One time I will say it. That Yara Piekema is the daughter of Harry Piekema. You know: that man who single-handedly gave that Zaanse Grootgrutter a human face. Harry was already a big one in Utrecht, and now it turns out he secretly, years ago, gave birth to an even bigger one: Yara Piekema, no longer the daughter of,...
In the week that already began dramatically with the deaths of Jan Rot and Arno Hintjens, Henny Vrienten has now joined musician heaven. Far too young at 73, but still 41 years older than he was in one of his most famous songs. A bit weird, but mostly very sad. One of the most sympathetic musicians...
In the best-read newsletter of cultural Netherlands (on average 60 per cent open and 12 per cent click links, where the national average for peers is 30 and 2 per cent respectively), I wrote recently that the news, that visits to theatres and museums have not yet returned to precorona levels, seemed to come as a surprise to some. I mentioned...
Nederland leerde de Frans-Senegalese auteur David Diop enkele jaren geleden kennen met zijn roman Meer dan een broer, een indrukwekkende vertelling over een stukje Frans-koloniale geschiedenis, die werd bekroond met onder meer de Europese Literatuurprijs en de International Booker Prize. Ook zijn goed ontvangen nieuwe roman, Reis zonder terugkeer, of de verborgen cahiers van Michel Adanson is een belangrijk boek…
How beautiful art for children can be when a real artist is involved. When themes like death, falling in love, loneliness and exclusion are made palpable in such a beautiful way that you step outside with a deeper feeling about life? With theatre-maker Moniek Merkx, you can. A year ago, she stepped down as artistic director of...
That you are suddenly back in 1996 at Black Snow, the television series in which actress Tamar van den Dop managed to hook an entire generation of viewers at the time. Since then, her raven-black curls have turned into a glittering cloud of silver, but those who go to see Het Nationale Theater's Leedvermaak trilogy suddenly see that young Tamar again. A miracle of talent in...
Babeth Fonchi Fothchind. Onthou die naam, want ze gaat groot worden, als ze het niet al was, maar dan buiten mijn zicht. Kan gebeuren, met al die bubbels en vinkjes waartussen we ons een weg door het leven banen. In juni 2022 komt haar debuutbundel uit, en dan kun je het zelf lezen. Ik zag haar op een dinsdagavond tijdens…
What magnificent beauty of Dutch language from Tom Lanoye! What greatness of stage by Theu Boermans! What great acting by Romana Vrede, Mark Rietman and Myrthe Huber! Three hours of enjoyment at the very highest level that culture has to offer. And then the Koninklijke Schouwburg in The Hague is not even sold out on a Saturday night. Did the big...
De nieuwe animatiefilm van Ari Folman (Walz With Bashir) Where is Anne Frank is de openingsfilm van het Kaboom animatiefestival. Folman vertelt hoe het beslist een film voor jong publiek moest worden, waarom er een gevlucht meisje uit Afrika in voorkomt, en waarom het concentratiekamp lijkt op de onderwereld uit de Griekse mythologie.
On this website (and still read here), we posted a post that we had had artificial intelligence (AI) write all the way through for fun. The post looked real, had even included some relevant-looking information from the internet and made up some names that provided quotes. Brilliant, on the one hand, but also a bit scary. Rightly made...
Update April 2022: Turns out it's not an April fool's joke, so all the beats we were holding back at first turned out to be unnecessary. Since 2018, Toneelgroep Amsterdam no longer exists, as does the capital's Stadsschouwburg. Together they have since formed 'Internationaal Theater Amsterdam', because that better suits the global ambitions of Ivo van Hove's Amsterdam city theatre. It was thus...
We always want to do the best, but usually fail horribly. Whether this is our habitual way of thinking, or whether we owe that idea to Ovid, we will never know. We can, however, say that the literary work 'Metamorphoses', published by Roman Ovid in the first year of our era, is the single most influential book of the...
Which sentence stuck with us? The question to the audience comes from Madeleine Matzer after the performance of 'Smart'. It is a rather loaded question, as the play is about very direct loss. When a child has just died in a stupid accident, every sentence you remember is worth gold. The blunt accident that the subject...
Few actors can portray timidity as aptly as Jan-Paul Buijs. With his wonderful Circus Treurdier, he made a catchy performance that anyone who has something against big mouths should enjoy. Especially at chat show tables and on Twitter, but also with the incessant smattering of columns in the Volkskrant; the big mouths of the betwetervolk exert a power that you...
Lena Rubashevskaya is a well-known film journalist and documentary filmmaker from Ukraine. She was working on a new film in Donetsk when Russian troops began their invasion of Ukraine. She had to flee headlong. Now, eight days later, she tells us her story from Warsaw. When you listen to her, you understand forever that fleeing war and violence is one of...
De absurde tragedie Donbass van de Oekraïense filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa keert terug in de filmtheaters. De opbrengst komt ten goede aan vluchtelingen uit Oekraïne.
Great international recognition notwithstanding, Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai himself considers every novel a failure. 'I strain my brain to the limit, but it never becomes the book it should be. So I start again. And again.' Hope for redemption lost Film adaptations of his novels and winning the prestigious Man Booker International...
Susannah Elmecky and Emma Remmelts were in the third year of the Utrecht School of Theatre when Covid struck. Now they have both graduated and started careers on stage. In this podcast, they tell how they experienced the time of lockdowns. Also joining us is Victorine Plante, director of theatre group Aluin, where Susannah Elmecky is now playing a beautiful role in...
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz. Remember that name. A writer who left us only two books, and whose life history reads like a twentieth-century horror novel. He wrote, in 1939, three years before his death by a torpedo in the Indian Ocean, 'The Man Who Took Trains', under his English pseudonym John Grane. This book, published in 2018 in the original German...
Giving up a loved one poisons bodies, which then repel each other. Is there consolation for pain from cruelty? About a thousand children under 20 die every year, most of them babies. And 600 people die in traffic, thankfully far fewer than before, but more since 1945 than in the Holocaust. There are no collective commemorations for it, bereaved families often suffer in...
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