All about politics, policy, society and how those things relate to culture and art.
According to Rotterdam alderman Visser, the current subsidy system is unsustainable. The system, in which cultural institutions submit a plan every four years and thus have to look years ahead, no longer fits with the times. Nowadays, there is a need for flexibility and change, not rigidity and certainty. The alderman said this during the presentation of the sector analysis by the Rotterdam Council
Op het zesde PopArts festival geen buitenlandse voorstellingen. Laten de bezuinigingen zich gelden? Het festival programmeert om het jaar internationaal en dit jaar blijft het dicht bij huis. Met Nicola Unger waren er de andere Nederlandse ‘usual suspects’ als Duda Paiva en gastkunstenaars van de Ulrique Quade Company. Maar in de De Krakeling en het Ostadetheater zijn ook jonge makers…
Net als kinderen moet je je publiek soms een beetje opvoeden. Als ze iets doen dat je prettig vindt, beloon je ze daarvoor. Gedrag dat je minder graag ziet wil je juist ontmoedigen. Toch doen veel theaters precies het tegenovergestelde met hun reserveringskosten en last minute acties. Het is al jarenlang een trend. Bezoekers besluiten steeds later dat ze een…
The General Court of Auditors, a high college of state that independently audits government spending, is blowing the whistle on Culture Minister Bussemaker. Indeed, in an interim opinion, published on 12 February, the Court of Audit states that nothing at all is yet clear about the real consequences of the previous cabinet's cuts. That cabinet, with the widely beloved Halbe...
This Saturday, 14 February 2015, Reinbert de Leeuw will conduct the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra in Polish composer Henryk Górecki's (1933-2010) Fourth Symphony at the NTR Saturday matinee. Górecki established his name overnight in 1992, when the CD of his Third Symphony shot to the top of the classical charts like a flare. The recording of this Symphony...
In Amersfoort, one art hall is empty and one art hall is full. KAdE, only recently completed and already successful, was dismantled five years after opening and moved to another, even newer building, across the railway line. However, the city council does not appear to have been properly informed about the financial consequences of this move and is now stuck with and noose of at least 10...
Altijd gedacht dat kunst iets was van creatieve wildebrassen, geobsedeerde autisten, ondanks zichzelf geniale knutselaars? Fout. Kunst is iets waarbij ‘sterke communicatoren’ de dienst uitmaken. Als het tenminste aan minister Jet Bussemaker ligt, en aan haar o, zo vooruitstrevende idee om kunst vooral nuttig te laten zijn. Voor de maatschappij. Kijk maar naar de horrorvideo hierboven. Waar we bang voor…
You can watch television again without guilt. After a two-and-a-half-year conflict, television broadcasters, producers and cable companies are coming to terms. This is going to make for a lot of happy TV, because after two years of waiting, the makers, actors and writers of television programmes will finally get the money they were entitled to all this time. And more. So does the lobby just make sense...
Last week, the Metaalkathedraal was celebrating. This 'creative breeding ground' in the picturesque no man's land between Utrecht and Leidsche Rijn can, thanks to a loan from a bank, grow into something that might become great fun for the neighbourhood, but also for people on the other side of town. The Metal Cathedral is an initiative of two artists. They...
#1 Salzburger Festspiele / Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz / Katie Mitchell, The forbidden zone (theatre/performance) - Dutch premiere 11 February, Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam British director Katie Mitchell is this month's 'arsonist' at Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg. With performances that are as scintillating as they are transgressive. The forbidden zone is about areas long off-limits to women: science and war. The...
Contemporary choreographer Sibi Larbi becomes the new director of Ballet Flanders in Antwerp. A striking and unorthodox choice. Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, meanwhile, may stay away from De Munt in Brussels. What's up Belgium?
A few months ago, the Council for Culture advised Minister Bussemaker to maintain the law on fixed book prices. And that while the functioning of the law has not been proven at all. For enterprising booksellers, this law is a block. This law earned erotic department store Christine le Duc a €15,000 fine. They came up with a playful...
Ingres, Cimabue, Memling, Tiepolo, Goya, Van Eyck, Constable. Purely top names in art history and works by many of them hardly hang in Dutch museums. But now they do. The Mauritshuis in The Hague is showing no fewer than 36 works from the famous Frick Collection in New York from 5 February. And that museum has never before lent so many art treasures. Therefore, the Mauritshuis has...
After a nerve-wracking final and precise assessment of votes, the winners of the 2014 Dance Audience Award have been announced. Favourite Dance Performance is FADO of International Dance Theatre, Favourite Dancer is Merel Janssen of Introdans Ensemble for Youth.
Municipal cultural politics are often about 'bricks and mortar'. People put up a cultural building and then pray/hope that fantastic things will happen there, which the city council, in turn, has no money for/power over. Take Enschede. In a council meeting in which it was decided to reinvest in cultural bricks by means of a €475,000 loan, there was actually some unrest. No, not about those bricks, but about...
Just over a month earlier than usual, the Holland Festival is presenting its new programme this season. There is every reason for this. With the arrival of Ruth Mackenzie as artistic director, a fresh wind is blowing through the festival. Annet Lekkerkerker talks about the changes in the video below. The presentation of the brochure - finally readable thanks to a new design - shows...
Radio Netherlands World Broadcasting no longer exists. The subsidy was withdrawn because no one in the VVD knew what it was: shortwave. And because the PVV, which was also in government at the time, finds everything scary that contains the word 'world'. Bad for those who miss calls from the ANWB emergency centre at breakfast for the Alpenkreuzer, even worse for...
We write day 6 of the IFFR and take an intermediate view. In the deluge of films, the short films (1 to 60 minutes) always fall away a little in attention. This is a shame, because there is a lot to discover within this format. We list for you. 1 - The IFFR is the festival with one of the...
Film and film criticism. Image versus the word. But what happens when the critic starts using visual language too? Well, something like this, for example: Transformers: The Premake, by Kevin B. Lee. Romance or amour fou It seems so obvious in today's digital online world. Is the video essay an answer to the crisis, perceived or otherwise, in art criticism? Film critics...
How do you get back home mentally after a war? David van Reybrouck in conversation with Stefan Hertmans and Ian Buruma Carrots, potatoes, maybe some celery and a dash of lard, this was the monotonous winter diet of the underclass in rural Flanders in the late nineteenth century. But, outlines professor and guest speaker Louise O. Fresco in her opening column, these days it is the...
De kinderen stellen zich één voor één voor. Ze bouwen sets, maken muziek en spelen scènes. Er is een catastrophe op handen. Ze speculeren losjes: word het een nucleaire of biologische aanval, een vliegtuig of een raket, een tsunami of een bombardement? In Next Day, afgelopen weekend bij Theater Frascati te zien, oefenen zij op een aanval van ‘aliens’. Dat…
He had had a TED training. It couldn't be otherwise. Bart Moeyaert, poet, writer and multiple award winner, sometimes literally wriggled into numerous corners to warm up the Dutch literary guild to his plans for 2016. That year, for the first time in a long time, the Netherlands will host the Frankfurter Buchmesse again, the Art Basel of the literary world....
'Do you not agree with me that many of you - like members of Roman Catholic curia - are already trying to make yourselves immortal and indispensable? That you are suffering from severe mental and spiritual petrification?' Kees 't Hart measured himself a papal role on Sunday 18 January, when delivering The State of Dutch Literature,...
Zelden twee vrouwelijke kunstenaars aan een tafel gezien die meer van elkaar verschilden dan Dominique Goblet en Leela Corman. Twee vrouwelijke striptekenaars, aan weerszijden van Peter Breedveld die elk jaar als kenner van het comic genre wordt ingevlogen op Writers Unlimited. Corman, naast striptkenaar ook danseres, schrijft haar verhalen in een vrij herkenbare stijl. Indrukwekkende verhalen, historisch, zoals haar laatste…
Writers Unlimited's Friday night kicked off with an Islam debate. In no uncertain terms, religious historian Karen Armstrong argued that Islam and jihad are not the same thing. There are only 41 jihads in the entire Quran, most of which are the peaceful struggle to help the poor when one is destitute oneself. But after the Paris attacks...
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