All about politics, policy, society and how those things relate to culture and art.
The last opportunities for grant applications for 2013 and beyond closed today. Numerous mergers have been announced, new collaborations, high-profile relocations (Amsterdam in particular is emptying out). Many arts media now also carry news about those plans. News that is often presented as fact, while in almost all cases these are wishes. Applications are even fewer than ever...
Many students studying at Dutch art schools are not from the Netherlands. At the request of PVV, supported by the government parties VVD and CDA, State Secretary for Culture Zijlstra is now investigating whether enough of these students also go to work in the Netherlands after their studies. Halbe Zijlstra made this commitment during a general consultation on the sector plan for professional arts education,...
A national arts education plan, guaranteed permanent extra money for arts education and a cultural passport for all children, which also records their cultural experience: a few recommendations from the Henley study, commissioned by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport. While Dutch MPs are still grappling with the reorganisation of arts education, England gives...
In Amsterdam, Holland Festival, Theaterfestival, Toneelgroep Amsterdam and a few more clubs will 'work closely together'. In The Hague, this applies to Het Nationale Toneel and youth theatre house Stella Den Haag, while in Rotterdam
Copper is expensive, and bronze, the material from which many statues on the street are made, is largely copper. And if it's on the street, you take it with you. Even if it is bolted down. Rodin's Thinker in Laren was sawn down and partially melted down, and the same happened to Simon Carmiggelt and his wife. At Boris van der Ham's request,...
It started with Halbe Zijlstra shouting on TV that no one in the arts could be sure of his life. Then came Mark Rutte with his claim that there are 15 people sitting in the front row in 30 venues in The Hague every night. And then [wp_eStore_fancy2:product_id:1:end]
A website is nice, but often less suitable for quiet reading. And although our mobile themes now seem to work well, it is often still a lot of clicking and searching before you can read everything in sequence. We have now found a solution: ebooks. A handy way to read all kinds of related articles: on...
You can hardly claim it was a surprise result, because for weeks - what do I say, months - The Artist had been mentioned as a surefire Oscar favourite. Still, the crowning of this largely silent French black-and-white film that pays tribute to the end of the silent film era in Hollywood is proof that originality still counts in...
We already wrote extensively about the name change of the Orchestra of the East in the Netherlands Symphony Orchestra (NSO). The curious opera grant application based on a business plan that carries huge risks had our full attention. Regular partner the National Travel Opera was not amused.
It looked like it was going to be something. With a church of huge Lego blocks and a programme that seemed to matter. But alas, Grenswerk, the festival that was supposed to bring the region around Enschede together, is no more. After three years. And it won't stop until 2013, like most art institutions, but already in 2012. Too much had to change for that to happen. The municipality suggested...
Connoisseurs know: often actors spend two months rehearsing a play with only one goal in mind: to recover the freshness and surprise of the 'first reading'. After all, at that first reading, actors hear the text for the first time from their colleagues, read the words aloud for the first time, and everything sounds new and unexpected....
Towards the end of this Berlinale, it could be heard in the corridors that the Danish costume piece A Royal Affair about a nipped-in-the-nippled revolution was surely going to win the Golden Bear. However, the jury did not care about that and designated Caesar Must Die by the Taviani brothers as the best film. The jury chaired by...
Dutch film Hemel was chosen as best film in the Forum section for young cinema by the jury of international critics at the Berlin festival. This is a fine success for director Sacha Polak who delivers her first feature-length film with this drama about a young woman who has lost her way in search of love. Heaven, after a...
Would today's revolution makers even study Shakespeare? In Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die), the competition entry by the Italian Taviani brothers, we witness the preparation and performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Anyone watching this with the world's noise in mind will often feel a shock of recognition. The tragedy about a coup in ancient Rome shows...
He barely showed his face in recent months, rarely engaging in debate with artists or the public. Now that the mega cut in culture is law, and nothing can be changed about it until 2016, we can follow Halbe Zijlstra's victory lap again. Also on twitter.
For more than a decade, Something Raw has been one of the few places in the Netherlands where the question of artistic and social urgency of the body is explored on stage, with all the fun and risk involved. Many performances struggled with the 'impasse of display': have people then become mere things to look at? Porn is the...
It was a 'roundtable discussion', so that is extremely informal. Lower house members of the ministry of OCW's 'lead committee' listen to people from the field. In this case, all people involved in, or leading, arts education. It was an awkward meeting.
It happens regularly that you see or hear something, in the tram, on the train, on the road, on holiday. But also on the street, in your own home. And that you think: what is that? Chances are you are dealing with 'Art'. And that can have all kinds of side effects: pleasure, chills, confusion, sadness, or even indifference, and depression. Art can,...
We were somewhat mildly ironic about it, but hats off, meanwhile, to Toneelgroep Amsterdam's PR department and the audience, who responded remarkably well to the 'choose the reprise' campaign the company launched a few weeks back. We have the hard numbers we feared we would never see. And they are credible. We quote the press release: From 2 to...
Can a filmmaker born and raised in West Germany strike just the right tone in a film set in the former East Germany? I hadn't really thought about that before, but the Berliner Zeitung raised that question in response to Christian Petzold's Barbara, about a Berlin paediatrician who, after requesting to go to the West,...
This week, the National Travel Opera begins rehearsals of Mozart's Le nozze di figaro. In the bin, the brand-new Netherlands Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jan Willem de Vriend. Business as usual, as the two companies have been working closely together for years and are united in the National Music Quarter Enschede. Only: orchestra and opera company have not been talking to each other since last week.
Exactly how Little Red Riding Hood was eaten by the wicked wolf, the fairy tale does not tell. Fairy-tale-telling parents limit themselves to the before and after. And that the evil wolf is cut open by the hunter, freed from Little Red Riding Hood and filled with stones eventually ends up in a well to die is part of the winding down of the happy ending. Enough...
Timo Vuorensola has done it to him. Perhaps reading the name of this Finnish director and music video maker does not light up a light yet, but then you do not belong to the extensive internet fan club that has been closely following the genesis of the potential cult hit Iron Sky for several years. Its world premiere at the Berlin festival is now the...
It saves Liverpool's GGD millions on dispensing antidepressants. And it only costs them a tonne and a half. They spend that much hiring Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra musicians for workshops in addiction clinics. No idealistic preaching, then, as in the countless columns and reactions to Halbes' cultural cut, but hard pecunia and proven effects. In England,...
The 62nd Berlinale opened tonight with Benoït Jacquot's Les adieux à la reine, a French costume piece that does not play by the rules. The dresses worn by Queen Marie Antoinette's servants get dirty and one of the main characters stumbles in her haste and passes out twice. As the film begins we write 14 July 1789, and the...
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