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That they came up with a one-and-a-half billion support package for the arts in Britain last month seemed like very good news for a while. For a country of almost 67 million people, such a rescue package, which also consists of three quarters of loans and advances, is proportionately much smaller than what there is in the Netherlands in terms of support for the arts. How keen...
Over seven years ago, I started as house poet at Sven Ratzke's Late Night Show in Utrecht's Blue Hall. It was a special time. Not for Sven, who probably came into the world singing and wearing designer clothes through a curtain of peacock feathers and imitation ermine fur. For him, the sultry, permanently ramming sold-out nightclub performance was cut-and-dried. For...
Krap drie weken was ze aan de slag toen de coronapandemie en de lockdown kwamen. Voor Halima el Ghamarti, die medio februari begon als directeur van het Jongeren Cultuurhuis Kanaleneiland en Overvecht, is er dus geen ander normaal dan het nieuwe normaal: werken vanuit huis, en dat met een organisatie die vooral bedoeld is om jongeren in Utrecht met elkaar…
I have long put myself on the 'listen first, talk later' mode when it came to how we all deal with the festering sore of racism in the Netherlands. There's so much we don't know about each other, and there's especially so much I can't know about my fellow Black people, because for a long time I didn't care enough to...
Just over a year ago, Culture Press carried the story that Wim Hupperetz, director of the capital's Allard Pierson, had resigned from his post as chairman of the museums and heritage advisory committee to the Culture Council. The reason was Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven's decision to hand over control of the policy of the national museums to...
A school friend was a mountain climber. He was good at it; he never did anything else in holidays. The school friend was tall and so strong that he could pull himself up by one finger. On the first day after the autumn holidays, he told me that another climber in his group had fallen to his death before his eyes. If I remember correctly, he was alive...
Immediately after the lockdown was declared in March 2020, Vincent Wijlhuizen, co-founder (along with Annette van Zwol and Ieme Soes) and director of the What you See Festival, set to work to come up with alternatives for the festival, which takes place in the autumn. 'We made several plans. We already had an ordinary plan, which went to all the funds...
Thank God the theatres are reopening to more audiences and The National Theatre is playing for a while longer, for instance with the infectious Every Brilliant Thing with Tamar van den Dop or Bram Suijker. At the Theater aan het Spui on Wednesday 1 July, Tamar van den Dop in the afternoon and Bram Suijker in the evening played their first Every Brilliant Thing. It is,...
My story about cultural big earners turned out to be the talk of the town in the cultural sector. Not publicly, i.e. mainly behind the scenes, I was approached. One of the few people who did speak out publicly was Henk Scholten. On Facebook, he responded to a column by journalist Aukje van Roessel about the questions raised by The Hague city council
Creativity expresses itself in Dutch politics mainly in bookkeeping. On 29 June, just before the start of the three-month summer recess, the Lower House actually found money to save pop festival Noorderslag and dance company Scapino from collapse. That demise would become a reality in the new arts plan, which takes effect in 2021, as the Council for Culture...
On Monday 29 June, the Lower House will discuss the advice of the Council for Culture. An advice that, as the Volkskrant rightly noted on Friday 26 June, receives much more criticism than previous advice. In doing so, the newspaper reaffirms what we already wrote down immediately after its release on 4 June: there is a total lack of transparency, a...
In recent days, tentative proposals for a new system to fund the arts in the Netherlands have appeared in various places. Tricky pieces, and so far not attesting to very much incisiveness. In Het Parool, a number of prominent figures, including Tinkebel and advertising man Kessels, think that we should think less in pigeonholes, and that, besides quality, we should also...
Hannes Minnaar valt met zijn neus in de boter. Zijn #coronatournee met de Goldbergvariaties van Bach start op 1 juli, precies de dag waarop het maximum aantal concertbezoekers wordt losgelaten. – Mits 1,5 meter afstand et cetera. Hoewel de Grote Kerk in Zwolle aanzienlijk meer dan honderd personen kan toelaten is het concert al helemaal uitverkocht. De gelukkigen die een…
2.6 billion euros. It is a sum so large that it means nothing to anyone. It is less than the tax support KLM gets, though. Today Kunsten 92, the arts-wide lobbying organisation, in an unprecedented collaboration with all interest groups and industry associations, brought out that that 2.6 billion is the damage to the arts sector caused by the restrictive measures....
Following the publication of social science books such as In the Garden of the Beast, Sex and Lies and the Prix Goncourt-winning novel A Soft Hand, French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani (39) has become an important voice in French literature in recent years. She was appointed ambassador of French language and culture by President Macron and by the...
With the million-seller The Shadow of the Wind, the first part of the four-part The Graveyard of Forgotten Books, Carlos Ruiz Zafón established his name as a writer in one fell swoop. His novel The Labyrinth of Spirits, published in late 2017, was the culmination of a year-long showdown with himself. Not long after, he fell ill; in early 2018, Zafón was told that...
Animation Festival Annecy 2020 is online. The Black Women in Animation panel addresses the paucity of black role models for young viewers in the animation world.
In the Theatererkrant, 445 theatre makers posted an open letter addressed to Toneelgroep Oostpool, calling on creators and players to stop being afraid and report abuses to https://mores.online/. Summary of the foregoing: there were several complaints of sexual harassment by Oostpool's artistic director Marcus Azzini. An investigation ensued and Azzini...
The Council for Culture acted in violation of all policy agreements, its own advice and rules when it reduced the subsidy for the Holland Festival by over five hundred thousand euros. The Holland Festival, which is in serious trouble as a result, is now expressing its anger in a letter that went to the Lower House today. The organisation even speaks of "improper administration": a...
Cabaret artist Hans Dorrestijn is known as a gloom and professional grumbler. But in recent years, Holland's blackest joker has less and less to complain about: he has had great success with his nature books and his cabaret shows, and won several awards. This week he turns 80, but he does not want to stop - his new book Wensvogels has just been published. In nine candid questions
'We did get quite a kick out of spectators at the beginning: "How dare you treat the actors like that? First you put a mask on them, then you steal their voices and make them playback!'' Richard Jansen couldn't care less. He is part of the creative team as sound designer
Je neemt filmklassiekers als Dracula en Star Wars, speurt hun Arabische remakes op, en edit deze fragmenten op een live soundtrack waarin de Arabische popgeschiedenis samensmelt met elektronische muziek van nu. Dit, in het kort, is het recept van de dynamische samenwerking tussen muzikant Rayes Bek en videoartiest Randa Mirza, beter bekend als Love & Revenge. Met hun meeslepende show…
In the pre-corona world, Garin Nugroho would open the Holland Festival with his performance The Planet - A Lament. It would no doubt have been as impressive an experience as his Setan Jawa staged in 2017. We would be enchanted by his dancers and purified by the story. In the stripped-down online version of the Holland...
Wat is de overeenkomst tussen blokfluitiste Lucie Horsch, pianiste Nynke Eekhof, hoboïste Dorine Schoon, zanger Tim Akkerman, deze Muziekverteller en nog vele anderen. Wat bindt hen behalve de muziek? Zij doen hun mond open. Geven inzicht in het leven achter de schermen. Door van zich te laten horen in kranten (Eekhof en Akkerman), op platforms, binnen organisaties en via blogs…
First of all, I would like to thank everyone who made it possible for me to receive the Dutch Music Prize here today. Not only all the people who have helped me during the years of my trajectory and given me so much inspiration and motivation, but also everyone who has supported me from an early age in my...
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