Things we do for members and partners.
Dear outgoing Prime Minister Rutte, dear Mark, This is the first time I have turned to you, the first time at all for me to write such a letter. I have to get something off my chest, because I can no longer follow or understand it all. Before I point out what is bothering me, I will write to myself...
All happy families look alike... But the family we get to know in "Dutch Comedy" is anything but happy. On Thursday 1 April at 20:30, De Gemeenschap's show "Nederlandse Comedie" (try-out) can be seen at Concordia via a live stream. The try-out is an upbeat play that deals with intense topics. An emotional group portrait of people who...
Dear outgoing Prime Minister Rutte, Dear Mark, In my capacity as a self-employed person working in the performing arts, I am writing you this letter. This is my first letter ever about the situation of the cultural sector, culminating in corona time. First by way of introduction: we met when I played a Scarlatti sonata especially for you at the TV programme Podium Witteman, and also...
The party may be the biggest loser in the parliamentary elections, but Melody Deldjou Fard is not sitting back. Now that is a bit the standard response of politicians when they face defeat, but Melody's enthusiasm is convincing. We invited her to the podcast, as she was a contributor to Culture Press before she turned...
Male ballet dancers have heroes. Ever since ballet training. A few of them are timeless, like Vaslav Nijinsky, Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. After that, tastes vary, depending on which period you danced in and which style particularly suits you: Anthony Dowell, Peter Martins, Carlos Acosta, or more recently Sergei Polunin and Daniil Simkin. Last week, one of my dance heroes passed away: Patrick...
The Dutch cultural sector is in distress. Halbe Zijlstra's spending cuts ten years ago started a free fall that has still not stopped. The Social and Economic Council (SER) calculated that these cuts of 200 million not only caused impoverishment in cultural supply, but also wreaked havoc on the labour market. 20 thousand permanent jobs disappeared
After more than six years as director, Viktorien van Hulst is leaving Stichting Theaterfestival Boulevard 's-Hertogenbosch and Stichting Bosse Nova. She will start on 1 July as director-director at the Fonds Podiumkunsten, where she will succeed Henriëtte Post. The Performing Arts Fund supports all forms of professional performing arts on behalf of the central government and has an annual budget of 62 million euros available for this purpose. Peggy Olislaegers...
Marion Koopmans, Cécile van Els, Maarten Keulemans et al on everything we now know about covid-19 What do we now know about the coronavirus? Are vaccines resistant to the prevailing mutations? What has the corona crisis done to Dutch trust in government and institutions? And what is the damage to the Dutch economy? In an interactive talk show on Monday 15...
Everyone balks. Let's put that first. And a lot of people are badly affected. Hospitality, retail, schoolchildren and especially students: everything that is not necessary for survival balks. So does the arts. Not all art, of course, especially larger institutions are coming through the corona crisis reasonably well so far. Quiet and closed, but not bankrupt. We can't take that from...
The exhibition The Golden Coach opens at the Amsterdam Museum on Friday 18 June. After a restoration of more than five years, the Golden Coach is back on public display for the first time. The carriage will be on loan to the Amsterdam Museum until February 2022. With this, the carriage temporarily returns to the city that used it in...
At Concordia and the Vestzaktheatre, many performances continue as a live stream. On Saturday 13 March, for instance, Ryan van den Akker (known in musical leading roles such as Cyrano, My Fair Lady, Elisabeth, De Jantjes) will drop by with her performance 'Hiroshima in a child's soul'. A unique, personal narration of a poignant and terrifying story from her childhood. Theatre programmer Ellen Peters: "I find...
Saturday, March 6, the annual Inkspotbattle took place at Concordia. The theme was "Elections (in Corona time)". 10 Dutch cartoonists participated. The only female participant, Renée van den Kerkhof, walked away with the prize. Online visitors could watch the participating cartoonists translate a topical subject into cartoons. An expert jury chose at the end of the...
Marijn (NRC/Theaterkrant) and Wijbrand (Culture Press) disagree quite often, prompting another solid podcast about how to look at theatre professionally. This time, Wijbrand had got excited about the fact that stand-up philosopher Laura van Dolron performed a play for two invited guests each time, professionals mostly, and that they then wrote entire newspaper pages full of...
Big Mouth Billy Bass is a largemouth trout made of plastic attached to a board. When someone approaches - or presses a button - the fish erupts into a gritty rendition of a pre-programmed song, usually Al Green's 'Take me to the river'. At the chorus line, the head detaches from the...
Every Sunday morning is like a lockdown. The city streets are deserted. I encounter only characters from my stories. Two men and a woman with phone numbers on their chests walk around lost. They no longer know who they are or where to go. A retired writer searches desperately for the pages of a lost story....
After Guido Weijers' Fieldlab turned out not to be a superspreading event, and nobody laughed hard enough at Dolf Jansen to infect others, now also good news from our relations in Poland: over the past month, since the reopening of theatres in Poland on 12 February, 55,000 people have already been to the theatre. Plenty of reason for enthusiasm, as it apparently...
The annual Inktspot Battle will take place on Saturday 6 March from 2.45pm. The battle, which can normally be followed at Concordia in the Inktspot exhibition, will, like last year, take place from the participating political cartoonists' own drawing tables and be broadcast live via Concordia's website. As an online visitor, you can watch as the participating draughtsmen...
The Amsterdam Museum has started its weekly AM LIVE talk show again! Thursday 11 March's edition is dedicated to International Women's Day (8 March). The episode will be presented by Margriet Schavemaker and Ghanima Kowsoleea. At the table this edition only women: including Raja Felgata (journalist, editor-in-chief of the annual ranking The Colourful Top 100 and founder...
At the time Covid-19 flattened normal life, Frank Westerman had fortunately already done his research for his new book. To take care of his parents, he was suddenly living 'at home' again for three months, in his boyhood room on the outskirts of Assen. Writing offered him the chance to escape to heavenly realms: Cosmic Comedy is about the human...
Plein Theater and Zehra Handan Aydin will present new editions of the series Amsterdam Talks Sex! from March 2021. In the (online) talk shows, Handan highlights different sides of sexuality by interviewing various experts with their perspective on the subject. Current topics include menopause, queer community, Big Pharma and pills for free sex, trafficking in women and the emancipation of...
Theatre festival Boulevard 's-Hertogenbosch is preparing for its 37th edition. An edition in which the organisation is still reckoning with ongoing measures around the corona virus. To better ensure 1.5 metres distance between visitors, Boulevard is making a new festival centre this year. In the Zuiderpark in 's-Hertogenbosch, we will realise a new meeting place with a spacious layout. In addition...
Wopke Hoekstra, would-be boss of the Netherlands, stood last week on the ice of an ice rink that was closed to all but Sven Kramer. Because of Corona. The CDA frontman received a justified storm of criticism. After Grapperhaus, the country's second top executive who thinks his own rules only apply to others. Last week, Laura van Dolron, played...
For a week or two, the word uncollect has been in my head. An Amsterdam politician suggested selling Roy Lichtenstein's As I opened Fire. Estimated proceeds: 40 to 50 million. With that money, Amsterdam's art sector could be saved and, if there was some left over, work by new artists could also be bought. The politician himself holds...
Shall I just start straight to the point? I am angry with my sector colleagues. Not at all of them, but at a very large proportion. I am angry at all those big youth theatre companies that have figured out from their marketing departments with fat subsidies that a registration for youth theatre is only worth 2.99. So taking the whole family to watch...
The best works of art are failures, and it is up to the public to give them a meaning over which the artist has no control, argued comedian Micha Wertheim in an essay for De Correspondent. We thought that was a good topic for our fourth geek podcast. Marijn Lems (NRC,Theaterkrant) does sometimes clash with people who give him too much in his reviews,...
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