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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...
The 'Access to Culture' advice presented by the Council for Culture on Friday 25 January 2024 is causing quite a stir. The newsletter we wrote about it on Substack was eagerly received, even though it did not ask, let alone answer, all the questions raised by the advice. Since, at 230 pages, it has also become a rather voluminous document, it...
The tenth and final Critic's Choice programme at IFFR: anything that provokes conversation.
In The Plains by Argentine writer Federico Falco, a writer returns to life in the country after breaking up with his lover. This makes for a beautiful, wistful novel about grief, origins and the nature of life itself. 'No single word tames grief. No word dispels it. No word can truly express it.' Those thoughts...
People do not have equal access to culture in the Netherlands. This is because the supply of culture varies greatly from region to region. Also, artists or cultural institutions do not yet have an equal chance of financial support everywhere. There are calls for change from the cultural and creative field. Therefore, at the request of the State Secretary for Culture and Media on 26 January, the Council for Culture...
It was a chilly Thursday evening before Christmas 2023 and a grim atmosphere hung in the wedding hall of the old Utrecht city hall. Where during the day countless Utrechters were saying yes to each other, two partners were now facing each other. They no longer looked at each other, each had gathered their own supporters. Angry words rang out from one, bewildered words from the other. Members...
Industry news. The music sector needs to be safer and more inclusive. That is the industry's own conclusion after Movisie's survey of nearly 1,000 music professionals. In it, more than 50% of respondents said they had experienced cross-border behaviour during their work in the form of discrimination, aggression or sexual abuse. During Eurosonic Noorderslag in Groningen, Taskforce launches...
In his life and work, the well-known presenter Joris Linssen (1966) experiences a lot and meets many special people. He has compiled the life insights he gained in his recently published book If you go with the flow, you will stand still. 'If you dare to choose adventure, you will be rewarded for it.' 'From taking risks, you get...
'Nina Hiddema and the supervisory board have concluded that this is a natural time for Nina to step down.' Nice sentence in the press release that appeared in the mailbox on 15 January. De Reisopera, the Enschede-based opera company that performs operas especially for everything outside Amsterdam and Maastricht, is bidding farewell to director Nina Hiddema after two years. Whether it...
de Nederlandse bioscopen en filmtheaters verkochten in 2023 in totaal bijna 32 miljoen bioscoopkaartjes. Lang niet slecht. Barbie trok de meeste bezoekers, De Tatta’s was de grootste Nederlandse trekker. De Nederlandse filmpers had eind december al Aftersun van Charlotte Wells als beste film gekozen, terwijl Sweet Dreams van Ena Sendijarević, ook een overtuigende Gouden Kalf winnaar, als beste Nederlandse titel uit de bus kwam. Intussen bezorgde in Amerika de staking van scenarioschrijvers en acteurs de filmindustrie aldaar een zwaar jaar.
"There is a fear among the artistic middle class of oversimplification, as if working-class people are not smart enough for art. I find that really insulting. My great-grandfather would be offended." I found this combative quote in The Mill, an extremely successful local news site for the Greater Manchester Area, a kind of northern English Randstad with a few million inhabitants. It...
"In America, when you put two guys on stage, the audience expects them to beat each other up, or fuck each other. In this play, neither happens, but in the theatre it's almost always about two men fighting or fucking." Legendary words from Samuel D. Hunter. He wrote the play 'A Case for the Existence...
The sacred must of Andrea Voets: "I really am the very hardest customer of my own work" by Cultural Press Agency A good conversation with composer, harpist, electronic music maker and podcaster Andrea Voets. Read on Substack "I never thought just playing music was enough." Andrea Voets (34) is a rising star in the arts, but can't be pigeonholed into a...
The recording studio and residency site of Antwerp's Sound In Motion/SIM under construction is why the Belgian cultural sector is miles ahead of that of the Netherlands in one important respect. Magic word is: residency. Do It Yourself From Antwerp, the couple Christel and Koen, both marinated in the DIY ideology of punk, have long been bombarding city and world with concerts...
You must be a white man of a certain age. Some of us are so fed up with being blamed for everything that they voted PVV or worse in the last elections out of sheer desperation. That is why it is good that playwright Erik Snel, himself a white man of a certain age, has written a play about the archetype of the Dutch...
"In the short term, the threat comes from black-racial activists and their leftist slaves. A very small group of activists with an obsession with skin colour have opened the frontal assault on the symbols of Western culture. They claim to speak for all of black Holland. This must eventually end in reparations because of slavery and job quotas against whites, like in South Africa....
In North Brabant, the annual provincial subsidy for professional art will go down by €629,000 a year from 2025. Whereas prestigious, and very vital, organisations like Boulevard, Bosch parade and Matzer could count on an amount of 8.25 million until now, from the new culture plan period it will be only 7.6 million. The Brabant cultural institutions, united in The Art of...
It is one of my worst guilty pleasures. Egg salad from the better-filled mayonnaise manufacturer from Twente, with a close second to their tuna salad. I can't get enough of those. And now let them have both of those on the table at Het Kerstdiner in Theater Kleine Willem in Enschede. Chic is different, but in the...
"Listening, not always understanding, but trying to go along with (the black) voices ensured that, in my opinion, there was a beautiful text at the heart of the performance Ik zeg toch sorry." If a short preface to a play has as much meaning as this quote by Raymi Sambo, the text itself must offer much more....
I used the word 'revolutionary' when a camera crew from Theatre Rotterdam asked me what I thought of Closed Eyes. I don't know if my otherwise extraordinarily enthusiastic response will make it to the final edit, but a day later, that feeling is not gone. What Alida Dors, artistic director of Theatre Rotterdam, has shown is a revolution in the world of...
Our intended prime minister wants to abolish almost all cultural subsidies. Only art that can be properly understood by 'real Dutch people' still deserves financial support. Wilders targets cultural subsidies from an ideological background. Anyone visiting the exhibition 'Art in the Third Reich - Temptation and Distraction' at Museum Arnhem cannot escape seeing disturbing comparisons. Wilders sees art as a...
It may sound somewhat dramatic, but fans of Dutch youth film may feel that this is the end of an era. I just read the mail with the sad press release that writer, radio producer and film and television producer Burny Bos (1944) died on 1 December. It was not entirely unexpected. Last year (and not before...
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...
1. During 9/11, I was in Salamanca with two friends. The day Geert Wilders managed to amass 37 seats (thank you VVD and normalising media), I was in Rabat, attending the Visa for Music music conference, with which the European Jazz Network (one of the best-functioning networks within European cultural funding, I say as a new kid...
It was 2000 and Wim Kayzer, of the VPRO, brought a series of television evenings that went against everything commercial. It was called 'Of Beauty and Consolation' and featured evening-long interviews with people like Jane Goodall, J.M. Coetzee, Karel Appel and George Steiner. Intellectuals, artists, thinkers. On 23 November 2023, the day after 22/11, when the Netherlands held an open...
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