Less supply of subsidised art is good for the country. Antoinette Laan, culture spokeswoman for the governing VVD party, has thought so for at least eight years. Back in 2011, then still as alderman in Rotterdam, she stated that she did not understand why art institutions were open on weekdays. After all: everyone was at work then and so couldn't come and have a look anyway. Listen here...
Speaking of bubbles. In the middle of Den Bosch, on the parade square, there are three mega-play blocks you can enter. They are mini theatres, brainchildren of designer Theun Mosk. In one of them, you come across a very large plastic bubble in which young, mostly naked, people move. The audience stands on either side of the bubble feeling uncomfortable. Partly because the naked young people...
We have sound from the opening. A speech, interviews with three of the four guides and lots of fine sound from a busy festival square in Den Bosch. Listen in, and above all, come and see for yourself. With your family, on an adventure or as a pearl diver. Or all at once. There is water for everyone, and air conditioning where needed.
What does Billy Wilder have to do with Mad Men and Breaking Bad? Or with a football team in a cave? Everything, it turns out. The filmmaker, who died in 2002, appears to be far, far more important to our visual culture than someone like Alfred Hitchcock. At least: it is beginning to look very much like that. Eye, the striking film theatre and museum in Amsterdam, is from now until...
The miracle happened right at the first location. On a bare piece of dune in front of beach café Oscars there are rocking benches. From one of those benches I looked, swaying, over a slope of marram grass, then a couple of terraces and beyond that the sea. As it was a weekday, but summer warm, some bathers had already settled into beach chairs. Crowded it was...
'You simply cannot, as a big company, just bring journalistic theatre.' So says Jeroen de Man, who now directs the watery spectacle performance Ondine at the National Theatre. 'A bit of diversity is just fine.' So not everything in The Hague has to be as socially relevant as The Nation of Othello. Sometimes it can also just be about the...
When you first see Lenny Oosterwijk, you don't think: ha, a gallery owner. Somehow, you expect a more posh look with that. But the man who founded Galerie Untitled in 2011 in Rotterdam Noord comes from a different background. He is a photographer and art director and worked for a time at the most stolen magazine....
What lies on the ground, spread over a white sheet? Hard to determine. Shrapnel? Aircraft parts? Battered remains? Upon entering A Tale of a Tub, the impression is unsettling, and slightly overwhelming. A crime scene, but unclear who, what or where it is about. They appear to be plants, but magnified and cast in bronze. But that see...
Jan Baeke has been associated with Poetry International as a programmer for many years. In this podcast, I talk to him about the programme and the theme of this 49th edition: The Nation of Poetry. It's about nationalism, of course, but also about identity. And about what role poetry plays in that. And then, of course, it's not primarily about folk songs. We...
Wijbrand Schaap speaks in the kitchen of The Cooperative (where it is remarkably busy), with Tony Minnema and Emile Ripke. They are the initiators and the names behind Theatreflix, a website on which, like Netflix with TV shows, theatre shows can be seen. For now, they have a base from their own work, as Tony Minnema himself has a fairly thriving business in...
On Tuesday 17 April, Gerard Alderliefste performed at TivoliVredenburg. This time, the interpreter of French chansons had left his guitar and piano at home. This evening he was there in his capacity as an addiction doctor. On behalf of the Landelijk Medisch Spreekuur Partydrugs, he talked about the long-term consequences of party drugs such as XTC, MDMA, GHB and Cannabis. He was there at the invitation of Unity.nl, a voluntary organisation...
For many a theatre lover, watching from the bench will be swearing in church. The atmosphere in the theatre and direct contact is missing. Totally true, and yet the advantages of sitting comfortably, watching when you want, subtitles and the on-demand W.C. break are also worth something. While enjoying a fireside chat, you're not looking at the back of anyone's head....
Rather listen than read? Listen to the podcast here! (With lots of extra quotes from Ab Dijksterhuis) Money makes horribly happy. And that doesn't stop at 1 tonne. Those who earn half a million are considerably happier than those who earn 2 tonnes. The ING boss who would get 60 per cent more salary would also have become very much happier as a result. This...
With a 500-million-year-old pebble, Jonathan Harris began his lecture. IDFA presents the first international retrospective of this artist. As IDFA's chief guest, Harris gave the 'Master Talk' on Friday, about his life and work. His remarkably analogue vision was also the common thread during Sunday's well-attended DocLab conference. Fundamentally analogue Harris, who once started out in computer science...
I treated myself to one of those noise-cancelling headphones. The thing produces anti-noise to filter out highway, refrigerator and air conditioning from my daily life. So that I can listen to podcasts better. Podcasts like The Dead Society's. In which I am reminded again how important background noise from highways, air conditioners and rustling trees is. Radio journalist Carine van Santen...
Sheila Sitalsing went to work as a journalist after studying economics. After the weekly Elsevier, she joined the Volkskrant, in which she now has a column three times a week on page 2. Sitalsing won the Heldring Prize for best Dutch columnist in 2013. She also appears with some regularity in the foam & ash section of the TV programme Buitenhof....
Henk van der Waal is a philosopher and poet. His collections have been awarded several prizes and nominated for several awards. In 2012, his philosophical essay Denken op de plaats rust. Design of a philosophical attitude to life, and now the philosophical dialogue Mysticism for the Wicked has been published. [bol_product_links block_id=”bol_58f89055ec618_selected-products” products=”9200000060486849,9200000075985970″ name="vanderwaal" sub_id="huydinck" link_color="003399″ subtitle_color="000000″ pricetype_color="000000″ price_color="CC3300″ deliverytime_color="009900″ background_color="FFFFFF" border_color="D2D2D2″ width="250″ cols="1″ show_bol_logo="0″ show_price="1″...
In this period before Easter, Johann Sebastian Bach's Passions seem almost inescapable. But the alternatives are on the rise. Last week, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Groot Omroepkoor presented two highly successful new Passions. Alternative passion Tomorrow bring the AVROTROS Friday Concert Deus Passus by German composer Wolfgang Rihm. It will be performed by the Groot Omroepkoor and the Radio Philharmonic ...
In Aan het eind van de dag, Nelleke Noordervliet's new novel[ref]Nelleke Noordervliet (1945) made her debut in 1987 with the novel Tine or the valleys where life dwells. She subsequently wrote many novels, novellas, stories, essays, plays and columns. She also holds various administrative positions in the cultural sector[/ref], seventy-year-old Katharina Mercedes Donker is speaking. This ex-minister and...
Wednesday 5 April kicks off the fifth edition of the biennial World Minimal Music Festival. For five days, the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ will be filled with hypnotic rhythms, trance-inducing melodies and conjuring drones. Alongside well-known works by pioneers such as La Monte Young and Terry Riley are new compositions by Kate Moore and Bryce Dessner. There will also be performances by the Master...
Machiel Bosman is a historian and writes history disguised as literature. His book Elisabeth de Flines was nominated for the AKO Literature Prize and the Libris History Prize in 2008. This book De Roofkoning, prins Willem III en de invasie van Engeland was also nominated for the Libris History Prize. In this podcast, a conversation with the author who gave us...
Annelies Verbeke broke through in literature in 2003 with her debut novel Slaap! She writes plays, scenarios, short story collections, novels and novellas. Her novel Dertig dagen (Thirty Days) won Verbeke the F. Bordewijk Prize, the NRC Book Award and the Opzij Literature Prize. And now there is a new collection of 15 stories entitled Halleluja. In these stories, the characters discover that each...
'Many opera productions still assume a nineteenth-century vision of the world,' says German composer Moritz Eggert (1965) in the podcast below. 'But art must be relevant to our own times; the answers of then are not the answers of now. Our current problems are largely rooted in our colonial past, in our exploitation of other countries ...
'My father was secret agent 007, long before James Bond' Tomas Ross is the Dutch grandmaster of the faction novel, a genre in which fact and fiction intermingle. His first thriller, The Dogs of Betrayal, about the South Moluccans' struggle for freedom, was published in 1980. He now has over 70 titles to his name and also writes scenarios for...
Simon McBurney is a real theatre nerd. Exceedingly interested in mathematics and physics, he enjoys nothing more in the theatre than building technical illusions. He is also an in-demand actor and director, who, when he has a performance at London's Barbican Centre, gets a visit from Kate Bush, who humbly comes to congratulate him on his work. This year, he is,...
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