All about politics, policy, society and how those things relate to culture and art.
The exhibition Taking Stock shows the results of an artistic research project that took place from January to March 2020 in Cairo, Egypt. The project is a response to the closure of the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art. The closure prompted an examination of a series of events in central Cairo and Egypt's cultural scene. Taking Stock is...
With the contemporary composers Kaija Saariaho and Rebecca Saunders, jazz pianists Brad Mehldau and Vijay Iyer, the groups Musikfabrik, The Gurdjeff Ensemble and Ensemble Modern and guitarist Julian Lage, festival November Music rolls out the red carpet for a great diversity of top international composers. There is also another Bosch Requiem, this time composed by Hawar Tawfiq and performed by philharmonie zuidnederland....
As in the animation sector, the book trade is hugely diverse. Within the Netherlands, around 4,500(!) publishing houses operate. From cooking and baking to self-help, from fact to fiction, an awful lot is written and published in the Netherlands. But there is also a publisher, World Editions, which does operate from the Netherlands, but focuses on the English market. They translate existing...
Je Maintiendrai. Holland's motto of arms ('Ik zal handhaven') adorns the beautiful hall of Utrecht's old Post Office, now Library. The motto also watched over the premiere of the performance 'Solomon's Judgement' with which Ilay den Boer now returns to the public. After all, he was not here for a while. He worked for just under a year at the IND, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service,...
From Thursday 2 to Sunday 12 September 2021, the Netherlands Theatre Festival will show the best productions of the past theatre season. The Netherlands Theatre Jury, headed by jury president Hadassah de Boer, selected the eight best theatre productions of the moment. Today, the jury announced its selection. The full selection can be seen during the upcoming edition of the festival
We once started this series because we disagree horribly about some things, but in practice things turn out differently. In episode 14 of this fascinating series of insider conversations about theatre and whatnot, we talk about a few Holland Festival performances and look ahead to the festival summer. As it turns out, the...
Over the past year, the global pandemic and reignited Black Lives Matter protests have had a huge impact on our daily reality. A Funeral for Street Culture seeks to explore and make visible the sense of loss and other consequences of these events within art and culture. The group project, curated and initiated by Metro54 and curator Rita Ouédraogo,...
Motion design and animation are often used in the visualisation of a leader. Behind the scenes of television programmes, a lot of work goes unseen. We offer an insight into everything that makes a programme. This often starts with an idea that is developed into a concept. Television design Someone who is very good at developing these concepts is Siety
It is very easy not to dwell on things. For instance, I learned at school that we sailed to the East to get nutmeg and pepper. Stuff that just rolled off the trees into the boats there and that we could sell very expensively here. Sugar, another thing. That came to us from plantations just like that,...
The 74th edition of the Holland Festival closed last weekend with the performances Transverse Orientation by Dimitris Papaioannou, Age of Rage by ITA-Ensemble and Pierrot Lunaire by Marlene Monteiro Freitas. The festival collaborated with two associate artists, Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and French-Austrian theatre maker Gisèle Vienne. Twenty-three companies played one hundred and eleven performances in twenty-five days. The festival presented seven world premieres and co-produced 11 international...
Marjolijn Vencken will become the new chair of the supervisory board of Cultuur+Ondernemen, the knowledge platform for entrepreneurship in the cultural sector, from 1 July. She succeeds Steven de Waal, who is stepping down from his chairmanship after the full eight-year term. Marjolijn Vencken has been a member of the supervisory board since 2015. An experienced public affairs adviser, she...
Saturday 26 June at the Holland Festival, a special evening around two music films by Frank Scheffer: the documentary Inner Landscape and the opera film Si Fan. Supplemented by a short live performance by Chinese musician Wu Wei. This will present a musical journey from the seventh-century Tang Dynasty to contemporary electronic music. An evening with unexpected perspectives.
Someone cried the other day that bands were dead. That in a world of digital convenience, loop apps and samples, there was no place left for boys and girls with a guitar, a rickety drum kit and possibly a piano. Last night, while real men were watching football, I sat in Amsterdam's BIM house watching a band. It made me overjoyed. Kukangendai, on...
Last week, Theatre Festival Boulevard announced the first performances as well as the theme 'Hack the horizon'. Today at noon, online ticket sales start for a large part of the programming. The programme is still under development and will be announced through online channels in the coming weeks. Fans can buy tickets for Jan Martens/GRIP, Nastaran Razawi Khorasani,...
The Charlotte Köhler Stipend 2021, an incentive grant for literary talent, was awarded to translator Lisa Thunnissen on Wednesday 16 June. In the Van Deysselhuis, she received a certificate and cheque worth €5,000. Lisa Thunnissen receives the stipend for her translations of the work of South American authors such as Eduardo Halfon, Aura Xilonen and Raúl Zurita. The jury,...
Rotterdam and theatre, quite tricky. I should know, I was born there and it was a subject of several working groups during my Theatre Science studies in the 1980s. Since the last theatre reform, a merger where independent performers would work together to provide all the special theatre in Rotterdam, but...
The Night is back! Last year, unfortunately, we had to skip because of untidy corona developments, but this year the 38th edition of the illustrious Night will still take place. For now, still in a modified form, as there is no green light to sit in a full house again on 2 October at the moment. During this 'limited edition' in...
Whether we want to speak only of 's-Hertogenbosch from now on. Apparently, a last vestige of decency has bravely survived in the provincial capital of Brabant. Nazmiye Oral, master of ceremonies at a party at Den Bosch's citadel on 9 June, forgot right the first time. City marketers and old nobility fight hand in hand for a respected name to trump the vernacular....
In the dead of night on 9-10 June, the restored Golden Coach was hoisted over the roof of the Amsterdam Museum in a wooden box. A special and spectacular moment that took place in the middle of the night because the tram lines had to be shut down for this major operation. Everything went well and the Golden Coach was lifted last night....
We are a bit done with sex, drugs & rock'n'roll in culture. At least, not in what is presented through our galleries, film screens and venues, but in how that comes about. Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven has asked the Council for Culture for advice, and the Council is going to set up a commission to do so. This was just announced via...
'In order to strengthen the position of self-employed workers, a regulation could be revisited that would make it easier to enter into several short-term contracts throughout the year with interim retention of benefits.' There is a lot of useful stuff in the Culture Council's opinion published today, but this sentence made me the happiest. Not so happy yet...
Today I must write about A.L. Snijders, the totally idiosyncratic inventor of the Very Short Story. I have admired his work ever since I discovered it through Vrijstaat Austerlitz (1997-1999), a literary magazine that ran for only four issues. Those are probably the best literary magazines, the fewer issues they cover the better. Arjan Witte and Tommy Wieringa, two of the founders...
Swart Gat/ Golden Age (Dunguu olo - katibo-ten) is a theatrical installation about Amsterdam's slavery past and Maroon culture from Suriname. The concept is by Tolin Erwin Alexander, Berith Danse and designer Bartel Meyburg. The theatrical installation, which has lost none of its urgency, has been further finished and will start again in summer 2021! From 17 June (19 June...
Theatre Festival Boulevard 's-Hertogenbosch will take place from Thursday 5 to Sunday 22 August 2021. The 37th festival edition features over 120 different performances, concerts, performances and installations in theatres, at unique locations and in the Zuiderpark. We also move into the night with Fomo Fatale, club nights with steaming sounds. The Zuiderpark serves as the new, spacious festival centre, including the...
For the fifth edition of Theatre on Tour, Concordia and Wilminktheatre and Muziekcentrum Enschede are looking for location theatre makers. In the festival programme, we have reserved two special locations: the Redemptorist Park, on the border between the Netherlands and Germany, and the quay of the Enschede Rowing Association Thyro. On 18 and 19 September, Concordia and Wilminktheatre and Muziekcentrum Enschede will organise for the fifth...
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