All about politics, policy, society and how those things relate to culture and art.
Modest cheers in the performing arts world. A motion tabled on 18 November by Corinne Ellemeet (GroenLinks), together with PvdA, CDA and D66, forces minister Van Engelshoven to investigate the consequences of the cuts to the Performing Arts Fund before the subsidy is distributed. The House approved this on 26 November. Wonderful, you might say, because if clear...
For De Stadsbron, I interviewed Patrick Nederkoorn, comedian but in a previous life also politician, about his city, Amersfoort: You had a decisive role in politics here for eight years. In your programme, you reckon with that a bit. You argue that you were very much on form, and sometimes sold content where later you didn't... at all.
The culture sector will have to be patient for a while yet. Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven had no intention of changing any of her policies on Monday 18 November, during the discussion of the culture budget in the Standing Parliamentary Committee on Culture. Despite a fairly widely supported desire, especially from the opposition, to do something about the 8.6 million cut in the...
This weekend, gallery owner Henk Logman discovered to his horror that artworks from the Amersfoort Art Loan were being offered for sale on a Belgian auction site. On his facebook page, he reports: 'The extraordinary thing about the whole thing is that the now still living artists were not informed of this. I would at least have expected that to have happened....
Holland Animation Film Festival and the Amsterdam animation festival Klik! have joined forces. The new festival is called KABOOM.
The myth just had to end. Nan van Houte, former director of Amsterdam's small theatre Frascati, has buried Action Tomato. During Requiem for Tomato, on 4 November 2019, she made it crystal clear that this legendary event has been measured too big by our theatre historians. In 1969, when a few tomatoes were sent to the al...
Fifty years ago, some tomatoes and smoke bombs flew through Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg. This will be commemorated on 4 November at ITA, the former Stadsschouwburg, with a gathering for which, according to the many e-mails I receive, not all tickets have been sold yet. Meanwhile, voluminous essays are appearing in the trade magazine and many are wondering whether there might not be another tomato...
From 42 to 18 pages. Actually, that says it all about the new Diversity and Inclusion Code that saw the light of day on Friday 1 November. After all the wooliness and ifs and buts of the original Cultural Diversity Code, the new thing is a miracle of clarity. Is perhaps also necessary, in these times of identity wars, where on the left and...
"When you tell it, it all seems so logical," a good friend said last week, "if a board were to hear this..." Education, every day it is in the newspaper and we debate society-wide dully about the importance of good education, about teacher shortages and class sizes. While the cabinet sits mute in the hope of getting out from under...
What will shake up the cinema world the most in the coming years? The new James Bond film? Or a personal film tip tailored to your previous cinema visits that just pops up on your smartphone? Or perhaps a technical innovation that creates a whole new cinematic experience? Just a few things that loom around the topic of this week's New Cinema conference. A day and a half...
Het gaat weer eens waanzinnig met de Nederlandse theaters en concertgebouwen. De directies, verzameld in de VSCD, slagen er ieder jaar weer in om in het najaar met werkelijk fantastische cijfers naar buiten te komen. Ook dit jaar is het gejuich niet van de lucht. Alles groeit. Het aantal banen, en het aantal vrijwilligers, bijvoorbeeld. (beiden met 3% gestegen in…
On 23 October, website Theaterkrant.nl wrote a piece on the future of the performing arts. A future that is black and gloomy when you, as a creator, count on growth, or even survival at all. In short: so much money is going away from the Performing Arts Fund, that from next year only between 50 and 60 applications can be honoured, in...
The Cinekid youth film festival opens this week with Binti, a catchy, highly topical youth film brimming with optimism. That sounds good, because optimism is what the Dutch youth film can use right now. Too bad, then, that Binti, about a girl from Congo who does everything in her power to be allowed to stay in Belgium with her father, is a largely Belgian production....
Amersfoort is investing in culture again. This is very good news after a period when cuts dominated. So now it becomes extra interesting what the city will do with the extra money. Some research is already under way. Last week, another study was added from an unexpected source. The main outcome: Amersfoort could be a bit prouder...
'We will never be 'the same' enough, we fringe characters: bipolar, borderline, gay, lesbian, indeterminate, narcissistic, autistic, hysterical - and we are all fatally insecure and we all need a hug.' Permanent, seemingly inevitable insecurity is peculiar to the theatre industry. Ramsey Nasr hit that sharply in his speech on receiving his second Louis D'Or. The courage, or sometimes almost masochistic...
'Nothing can make up for the past. But the real, enduring power of the past lies in how it affects our present and our future. What we can do is shape a future history in which we consciously and determinedly carry with us only the best of our past.' Not keep rooting, but cognitive behavioural therapy for the whole of Europe, you might...
Following Denmark, the Netherlands now has its own Dogma manifesto. A modest but also ambitious statement from two young filmmakers who present a surprisingly clear plan after a season full of noise and concerns about Dutch cinema. Whether it is a pebble or a big pebble in the pond remains to be seen. In any case, they are going to do something,...
We treat our cultural heritage too casually. This is evident from the report 'Reserved and Involved', presented on Monday 30 September, drawn up by the Pechtold committee at the request of minister Van Engelshoven. In 110 pages (with pictures), it says that the current design of the Heritage Act leads to arbitrariness and uncertainty. This means that unsavoury situations like...
Our administrators and elected representatives will not openly admit it, but they do not really care about a healthy cultural sector, let alone the position of individual creators and artists. Indeed, making a Fair Practice Code compulsory without increasing the budget for culture is a slap in the face for everyone working in the arts sector. 'Then be...
'Poignant to see how a lack of decisiveness, clarity and leadership - at both the Utrecht municipality and the management of the KLA - could lead to a split and even rupture among employees.' Karin Boelhouwer of the Kunstenbond is stuck with it, and she has a point. The Utrecht Centre for the Arts (UCK) recently went officially bankrupt. A major...
Members of the States General, This year about 72 years ago we had the first Holland Festival. After years of enslavement and tyranny, hope for a better future literally came from above, in the form of Maria Callas. Eyewitnesses who saw the lights in the Stadsschouwburg turn red that day would never forget that image. 72 years later, it seems...
De poppen zullen dansen, de rapen zijn gaar en de poep heeft de ventilator geraakt. Het Amsterdam Museum vervangt ‘Gouden Eeuw’ door het neutrale ’17e eeuw’. Een typisch voorbeeld van oikofobe omvolking en politiek correcte taalzuivering, of een nuttige aanpassing aan een veranderende tijdgeest? Tijd gaat het leren, maar explosief is het wel. Bij mij roept het vragen op. Dat…
This weekend, there was some fuss on Twitter. Something about a Nazi comparison that didn't quite work out. Now there is quite often a fuss on Twitter because of a Nazi comparison that doesn't quite work out, but this time it concerned one of our cultural figureheads. Kees Vlaardingerbroek, artistic director of the NTR Saturday matinee and former head of programming at the Rotterdam...
Amersfoort has some catching up to do when it comes to culture. Festivals like Spoffin, for instance, have no money to pay real fees for performing artists. So they are there with the name recognition as a reward. The same is not true for tennis players, it turns out. Indeed, Amersfoort's alderman for sports decided to enrich this year's atp tennis tournament with a €50,000 subsidy to, for instance,...
'If we continue at the current rate, the fund will be exhausted in the foreseeable future.' This can be read in the 2018 annual report of the Performing Arts Social Fund. Plenty of reason to sound the alarm, indeed. Is this yet another victim of the cabinet's cuts? Not really, it turns out. When you look at the documents in detail, you see mainly that...
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