All about politics, policy, society and how those things relate to culture and art.
The feature-length French animated film is on the rise. To emphasise this, Michel Ocelot, one of the pacesetters, has been invited as guest of honour by the Cinekid children's film festival. Tonight, he was also presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award, which he accepted with a modest protest. As an animation filmmaker, Michel Ocelot (1943) still considers himself an adolescent with much to discover.
The discussion was and is endless, but now we have figures. Thanks to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science's new 'key figures', we now know how much the state (all of us) are spending for the opportunity to experience art: per inhabitant, the state spends 38.90 per year on subsidies for dance, theatre, museums, youth theatre, opera and orchestras. So that's just over 3 euros a month. Indeed something to get into each other's hair about, we think.
PUNCH! is a fantastic festival. It shows how much beauty, news and surprise emerge when the line between dance and performance is dissolved. PUNCH! promotes a refreshing view of the world and shakes loose entrenched interpretations. The young dance makers and performers show tremendous originality and creativity that you will not only enjoy watching, you will go...
Theo Wesselo and Maxim Hartman made themselves immortal with their iconic TV show Rembo & Rembo. The two come closer together in their exhibition Sex Sells. Now on show at the Amsterdam gallery Friend of Bavink, until 12 October. Lucas van Eck and Daniel Bertina spoke to them, just before the opening...
Amsterdam, 8 October 2012 During the well-attended Classical Music Day at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ the prize winners of the competition for women composers were announced this afternoon. The day was organised for the 11th time by Music centre Netherlands (MCN), which will cease to exist on 1 January. Thanks to an anonymous bequest, explicitly intended for women composers, three prizes could be awarded.
Minister Bijsterveld of OCW is going to ask the country for advice. A so-called internet consultation was launched this week on her ministry's intention to abolish Cultural and Artistic Education for Havo and VWO pupils. 'The Field' can now respond, so we suggest you make your views, and especially your substantive arguments known to the ministry, via this link:
The big question was how many of those seven Golden Calf nominations Plan C would manage to cash in. To everyone's surprise, this petty crime comedy that attracted less than 7,000 visitors in cinemas had garnered even more nominations than
This week, the curtain officially fell on the Theatre Emabassy, a club of inspired people who had Dutch artists collaborate with artists in developing countries such as Honduras, Bhutan and Congo. The resulting performances were only sporadically seen in the Netherlands, but every now and then a project made a broad impression here too, such as a 'On Hope of Blessing', played by real fishermen, but from Mali.
The final applause after the premiere of Götterdämmerung stormy, is an understatement. It seemed as if the completely sold-out auditorium wanted to surpass the primal forces extracted from the Gelders Orkest by Ed Spanjaard. History was made here: on stage, by the soloists and choir, in the orchestra pit and behind the scenes, for six hours and 20 minutes.
The Film Academy can be satisfied. The two juries that handed out the three student awards at the Netherlands Film Festival on Monday night had also looked at graduation work from other Dutch academies with a film section. But in the end, all the lucky ones were students of the Netherlands Film and Television Academy, as the Amsterdam programme is called in full. Magnesium again. The Tuschinski Award for best graduation film, this...
The crop of feature-length documentaries screened at the Netherlands Film Festival is good. They are extraordinary stories, sometimes startling, sometimes penetrating, sometimes fodder for much discussion, and almost all very beautifully filmed. We wish the jury much wisdom. The nominated documentary 'The Rules of Matthijs' is interesting for everyone, but should be compulsory reading for social workers,...
We never actually pat ourselves on the back, but so once every few years it is allowed. For instance, when you are 'top story' within an hour on the global twitter story website 'storify.com'. Of course, we often have a sudden surge in visitors, and certainly last September was a top month with 15000 visitors, but something like that, more than 500 visitors in not even an hour....
Perhaps expectations were simply too high at the premiere of George Sluizer's 19-year-old, and now completed Dark Blood. Because, of course, it is entirely appropriate that the Netherlands Film Festival has taken the opportunity for a fine retrospective of Sluizer, one of the Netherlands' most distinguished filmmakers with the world as its purview. Maker of the blood-curdling...
What a festive opening film it was! The Dutch Film Festival's choice of Nono, the zigzag child had of course to do with the fact that Dutch family films will be specially put in the festival spotlight this year. But even apart from that theme, it was an unmissable kick-off. Because we may like to grumble that the weather was not...
A while back, there was fuss in the Netherlands about the BUMA, the club that collects copyrights for musicians and publishers. Money had been lost in speculation and a director was engaging in nepotism. These cases do not appear to be isolated. At least, they are also mentioned in an overview of all known cases of abuse of power and corruption at collecting societies worldwide.
The Theatre Museum's entire collection has been saved. The archives of such luminaries as Wim Kan and Louis Davids, as well as 50,000 theatre reviews, 30,000 theatre posters, 146,000 photographs of 22,000 performances, 26,000 portrait photographs of 2,450 theatre-makers and an extensive audio and video collection will be housed at the University of Amsterdam.The move is possible now that the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW), with the ever-money-hungry State Secretary for Culture Halbe Zijlstra, is no longer seizing the reserves of the Theater Instituut Nederland (TIN).
'Pearls' is an exhibition with the limitlessness, fantasy and dreamlike vistas that come with a fairy tale. Associations with the pearl roll in all directions. Those who wander around in 'Pearls' forget for a moment everything to do with sober everyday reality. Pearls appear everywhere. The works of art accompanying this exhibition are scattered among the fixed...
What could be the matter with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Gergiev Festival - the official name to emphasise its international appeal anyway? As soon as you enter concert hall de Doelen, you immediately get the feeling that you have arrived at an ordinary, weekday concert, even though Valeri Gergiev is on the posters. No decoration of the large rooms...
Unruly Gallery, a tiny underground art gallery on Amsterdam's Cliffordstraat, presents the group exhibition We, the Artists. Featuring portraits of artists created by other artists. How self-referential do you want it to be? Very worthwhile nonetheless. Unruly Gallery is one of the few artist-run galleries in Amsterdam with a refreshing do-it-yourself attitude. The gallery was set up by Niels Meulman and Adele...
Theatre company the Utrecht Games, city company of the Netherlands' fourth largest city, is on the brink of bankruptcy. It was recently revealed that the company led by artistic and business director Jos Thie has a deficit of €2.1 million. Correspondence that has since surfaced shows that it was already clear in May this year that problems were getting out of hand. That was a month after the Utrecht subsidy advisory committee issued its laudatory opinion, and a few weeks before the Council for Culture issued its very thrifty advice.
It is now official. Magnesium, with which Sam de Jong graduated as director from the Film Academy, was already praised in several publications earlier this year. So it did not come as a complete surprise that yesterday afternoon, during the drinks on the roof terrace of the Film Academy, the Kring van Nederlandse Filmjournalisten announced that Magnesium declared itself winner of the KNF Prize for best...
It had to be a party, because there has been enough shouting and complaining and it doesn't help anything anyway. After a year in which the theatre sector in particular felt the hard hand of Mark Ruttes happy crisis policy, awards had to be handed out again. So the already not-so-huge crème de la crème of the Dutch theatre world gathered again for the gala at Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg. It was a valiant attempt at optimism, while
Quite a few VVD people were angry with us, because last year we made the Rotterdam alderman for culture caught stupid: she argued that cultural institutions did not need to open during the week at all, because hard-working people only had time for art on weekends anyway.
To be seen from Friday 7 September in the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg foyer: this dancing copy by the artist Leonard van Munster. A nice combo of dance, technology, theatre and art, we thought.
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