All about politics, policy, society and how those things relate to culture and art.
Imagine an old-fashioned sophisticated comedy, but filmed with modern speed, in the colourful and baroque style of a richly detailed comic strip full of plots and escapes, rounded off with a perfume of melancholy. Then you come close to The Grand Budapest Hotel, the new film by
It was ball in Rotterdam on Thursday, 30 January. At the Municipal Culture Congress, a few hundred officials, local politicians and arts organisations gathered to talk about where they could help each other. It was supposed to be a positive day. There had been long enough complaining and arguing: look ahead, hopeful into the future. Even if the worst is yet to come.
While we send the heaviest possible delegation of straight men to Sotchi to support Putin's human rights policies, Australia sends a song by Rufus Wainwright. In effect, Australia is thereby undermining a law against gay propaganda in Russia.
Regional newspapers hardly do any real cultural journalism anymore. We know this, because it was the reason why we Culture Press once founded have. How bad things are now, five years later, with art in the region and the way the newspaper handles it, was evident this month in Tilburg.
Culture cuts have now reached 450 million euros. The Lower House earlier decided on cuts of 200 million. The cut in the municipal budget by the same House of Representatives now leads to a further cut of 250 million euros. This is calculated by research firm Berenschot in a report which will be presented on Thursday 30 January in Rotterdam.
Reinbert de Leeuw turned seventy-five last September, but already in May the VPRO honoured him with three full-length broadcasts on Radio 4. Together with Aad van Nieuwkerk, I made a selection from his finest recordings of Kagel, Ustvolskaya and Louis Andriessen, among others, about which I also let him speak. This was followed in September by a real Reinbert festival and his own magazine. The magazine not only highlighted him...
The Source of Inspiration Gala of the Holland Dance Festival is a relaxed exhibition of dance that runs from 26 January to 17 February to be seen during festival. It is the second large dance gala in a week. Can that go well? The final tips for a successful gala.
The cuts to arts have prompted many people to stress that art should be socially and politically relevant. For Samuel Wuersten, artistic director of the Holland Dance Festival, social and political relevance is a broad concept.
A sitcom they already have. Women. Girls is a resounding success, so who better than slightly snobby Girls star Jemima Kirke to explain why women have been kept out of art? Indeed. No one, they thought at the rather innovative Tate, and so they had her explain in a cheerful but also aptly-named way where things went wrong between the art world...
That we have a scale the way we do, and that we perceive certain chords as beautiful, is because we have learned it. And what we have learned is the result of agreements. In music, as in fine art or theatre, there is no absolute ideal to which artists should aspire. No absolute beauty, no divine spark, no heaven to which we all long to return, just a set of agreements.
9,000 euros was the amount with which Indian director Anup Singh's Qissa got off the ground a decade ago. That money came from the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) affiliated Hubert Bals Fund (HBF), which has been supporting filmmakers in developing countries for 25 years now. Last night, Qissa opened the 43rd edition of the Rotterdam festival. This makes the port city
world capital for independent film for ten days, as business director Janneke Starink stated at the opening in the Doelen.
A gala should be festive. So the Ballet Gala of Dancers' Fund '79 Foundation celebrates. On Monday 20 January 2014, the fund's 17th gala took place at the DeLaMar theatre in Amsterdam, Joop van den Ende's glamorous stronghold.
A few tips for a successful gala.
Because Writers Unlimited collaborates with one of the last literary magazines in the Netherlands, and because that magazine is called 'Tirade', the last festival in The Hague included a place for tirades. And what might those be? The online dictionary says:
During Writers Unlimited, writers often mingle clandestinely among the common folk. And especially younger, international authors, unlike the Adriaan van Dissen of this world who cannot take a step without being buried in a scrum of literary groupies. So it can happen that you find yourself drinking beer several times with someone who suddenly, completely unexpectedly, turns out to be a genius author. Like Andrès Neuman.
"A good book is a man seducing me is like sex with a stranger." Anne Provoost, the securely Flemish-talking essayist managed to shake P.F. Thomése and Hermamn Koch for a moment. In a debate at Writers Unlimited, she made a plea for the not-true story, and did so in a metaphor that rather stirred the imagination. She quoted her own work "Fiction and Power" in which reading indeed becomes a rather physical affair:
"Of course she can write!" seems the mother of the award-winning South African poet Antjie Krog ever having exclaimed. "Because I can do it too, right? There's nothing special about that."
Blood creeps, even for Krog. After a ten-year career as a successful architect - and secretly grinding on words - her own son debuted Andries Samuel with the crushing, heartbreaking collection of poetry Wanpraktyk (2011).
Writers Unlimited brought mother and son together on stage. Late at night. For the first time ever. And Wende sang to them. And god almighty how beautiful that was. By the way, you have to take it from us, because on pain of caning, pitch & feathers and fines from here to Siberia, it turned out that it was forbidden to film Wende singing (but we did, and the video was online for a while, but has now been removed from the internet).
It's because of Facebook. Says Ton van de Langkruis, artistic director of writers' festival Writers Unlimited: "You can no longer be that anonymous figure bombarding the world with hermetic texts from a locked attic room. The market is no longer for it. Your main means of communication is facebook. There you have to be open to questions, you communicate with your readers. We are back in the village square where the first stories were once told."
With a spot-on performance of Mendelssohn's Second Piano Trio, the Storioni Trio concluded last night's opening concert of the Storioni Festival at the Frits Philipszaal in Eindhoven. Spread across six different venues in five cities in Brabant, they will present an ambitious programme, featuring befriended musicians and composers.
The latenight closures of Winternachten at Writers Unlimited are always upbeat. That's because the poets have already loosened up and the audience has drunk a bit more. And this time it was also because of mega-audience favourite (on other occasions) Arie Boomsma. Out of wantonness, the cheerful ratings canon smashed poetry books of the guests of his programme section.
“Luister niet naar de experts, ze hebben het eigenlijk altijd mis.” De kern van ‘Eyes wide open’, het nieuwste boek van Noreena Hertz, is helder. Dat ze zelf deskundige is, en dat haar visie daarom ook gewantrouwd moet worden, is logisch. Dat het gesprek wat ze over dit onderwerp voerde met oud-politica Femke Halsema almaar bizarder werd, was niet zo logisch. Ronduit schokkend was de val die de schrik van alle bankiers ter wereld aan het eind maakte.
Sometimes a Writers Unlimited programme can catch you off guard. Last year, the late-night talk show on literary sex was a hilarious highlight - pun intended - of the festival. This time, the programme dropped Let's talk about sex bar little to laugh at.
Forget the connotations with Salt N Pepa. Indonesian Linda Christanty writes not about 'happy sex, but about bitter sex as a means of power, as a form of coercion and violence.' That made us quiet for a moment.
Fouad Laroui doet niet aan internet. De van oorsprong Marokkaanse auteur en hoogleraar heeft zelfs geen mobiele telefoon. “Ik besef dat ik daarmee behoor tot een kleine elite”, verklaart hij tijdens een debat op Writers Unlimited, “maar ik zie er het nut niet van in.” Zijn tafelgenoten deelden zijn mening niet, en dat is best opmerkelijk. Nog maar een paar jaar geleden beschouwde het merendeel va de internationale schrijverselite de sociale media als iets waarmee zij zich niet hoefde te bemoeien.
In de rijke traditie van schrijvers die elkaars bloed wel kunnen drinken en de ander schuimbekkend met de pen te lijf gaan, orkestreerde Writers Unlimited een ‘polemiek’. Abdelkader Benali verwoordde in dit debat de stem van het volk, en Saskia De Coster die van de elite. Beiden hakten op elkaar in met hulp van moderator Elsbeth Etty. Resultaat: veel onsamenhangend getreiter.
Writers Unlimited is the most fun literary festival in the world. We can know, because we have been there twice now. Whether the comparison with all those 20 million other literature festivals in the world is entirely pure, we don't know. We do know that a lot of the writers who attend Writers Unlimited agree with us. At least during those few days and especially nights in January.
A few reasons.
The UWV stated last Thursday that it has no idea how many people have actually been made unemployed by the culture cuts. From a rather ramshackle-looking research by NRC Handelsblad, which looked exclusively at jobs lost in Amsterdam and only at state-subsidised institutions, found that that category alone had generated 600 clients for the UWV. The rest are beyond the scope of the Amsterdam office.
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