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Everyone has seen them before, those pineapple plants from Ikea. Many people keep them in the room for a while, until they die and end up in the dustbin. But for journalist Lex Boon (35), the moment he received such a plant as a gift from his (ex-)girlfriend was a turning point in his life. He became hooked on the crowned fruit and flew...
'Feel IFFR' is the motto of this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam. The emotion behind the image and with the viewer as a guide for our interpretation. The opening film Dirty God is a nice test case. Director Sacha Polak explains why she wanted to make a film about a scarred woman.
The Performing Arts Fund is failing to professionalise and make the music theatre sector sustainable. So says the Council for Culture in an advice leaked yesterday on the future of music theatre in the Netherlands. The advice presented today to the rest of the Netherlands therefore wants to transfer more different music theatre makers and companies from the Performing Arts Fund to the Cultural Basic Infrastructure. This partly...
On Wednesday 16 January, Reinbert de Leeuw will present his cycle Im wunderschönen Monat Mai at Paradiso. A unique opportunity to see him at work once more in his globally believed masterpiece. In 2003, he surprised friend and foe alike with this composition inspired by songs by Schumann and Schubert. Was that not swearing in church? Arnold Schoenberg had the Romanticism...
'I work five nights a week and so I have to find out specifically when I can go to a concert. Sometimes I take time off for it. And then they do say, "hey, are you going to a concert again already?", and I say, "of course I'm going to a concert again". But I don't think it's extreme either.' Petra Gerritsen is process expert
The cinema industry presents its 2018 annual figures. Visits stable at 35.7 million, but Dutch film's market share dropped again, now to 11%. Half of the peak year of 2011.
'When I look in the auditorium at a classical concert now, I do think: it's full now, but in 20 years eighty per cent will be dead. So the bottom has to be fed, and TivoliVredenburg does that well. They do it, for example, with Out of the Blue, which is a programme where you get great food and by a special host
Some people read Christmas stories over Christmas, others the interview supplements of newspapers, and a few do so with policy documents. So, quite a few people have read our Culture Minister's 'Advice Request' in the past few days. I, at least. Those who 'officially' cannot have done so are the members of the Culture Council, because the whole package came...
Never knew I would feel a tear welling up for the fate of a 17th century Council Pensionary. Yet that happened on Friday 21 December, at the premiere of '1619, make it short...'. With this final volume, author Erik Snel puts a crown on his trilogy on the Eighty Years' War. Was volume 1 (1600, battle of Nieuwpoort) mainly a cheerful accumulation of...
The first time Belgian writer Bart Meuleman's father starts talking about his origins, during a car ride, it hardly leads to an in-depth conversation. But it does lead to a tilt. 'My father became someone else,' Meuleman writes. 'Issues preceded everything he ever did, or omitted to do, or said, or concealed as a father. They had moulded him into...
It took about a day for the PVV Enschede branch to discover the message. Quite fast for a club that is usually not very interested in art. Anyway, this one detail at the presentation of the regional culture index was of course grist to the mill of the far-right local party: Region Enschede has the biggest mismatch between amount of subsidy and...
Anyone wishing to pass through the gates of Thebes must solve the riddle of the Sphinx. Those who fail die an irrevocable death, their bones fading into the charnel field around her. Oedipus challenges her, determined to save the city. 'Name someone or something more powerful than Fate!', oracles the Sphinx from her single-engine plane. 'Man!', jubilates Oedipus. To which.
'Indecent and rude,' is how Miep van Diggelen, former chairman of the board of the Performing Arts Social Fund (SFPK), calls the actions of the board of that same fund. That board, or at least about five members of the seven-member board, decided - outside the official meeting - to withdraw a subsidy application they had initiated earlier, without having read it. The promising...
The Utrecht Centre for the Arts is bankrupt after a long ordeal. It was cut back. There is no more room in the Netherlands' fourth city for a large, centrally organised music and culture school. Nor for pottery, painting and video filming. The city council has found a solution. For the soon-to-be homeless UCK students, the municipality thinks...
According to those in the know, he is a master of glass creations: Dale Chihuly. Dynamic, colourful and fascinating. It is not just glass art, but installation art. The world-famous American artist's works are a feast for the eyes. Sensations of light and colour. Although the name may not ring a bell right away for most people, there is a good chance...
Dance pioneer Lucinda Childs is actually the reason I went to Modern Girls. I am a lover of that. Of her work. But as a bonus, I got Regina van Berkel. With Frozen Echo. Why is it important for Introdans to bring a programme of work by female choreographers only? Huh? That's the feeling I got. With Van Berkel's Frozen Echo. Right from...
I had so promised not to write anything about it, that meeting of Kunsten 92 about the regional profiles. After all, I still have to write a few Saint Nicholas poems for good friends, and they deserve all my attention. So for now I'll just write in rhyme. Because someone has to do it. There are now seventeen region profiles from urban regions to villages with a thousand souls, Because...
In 1920, Erich Wolfgang Korngold experienced triumphs with his psychological opera Die tote Stadt. The work was performed in more than eighty cities at the time, with unanimous critical acclaim. The opera then disappeared from the stage for a long time but is nowadays performed again sparsely. So it is good that the Nederlandse Reisopera is bringing this almost forgotten piece back to the stage....
A Quattro Mani's pop-uprecent Afke Bohle takes on the challenge of reading a book with her sons. After good experiences with Suzie Ruzie, The Green Hand series by Susan van 't Hullenaar and Tori by Brian Elstak in collaboration with author Karin Amatmoekrim. This time they plunge into Lobke and the Light, a read-aloud book with a mission. Finding words 'Where can...
Eight cultural institutions started the first Zero Waste Expedition Culture this year. During this expedition, the first steps were taken in terms of waste separation and waste prevention. The Maaspoort in Venlo, Kunstlinie Almere Flevoland, Luxor Theatre Rotterdam, Museon, Paradiso, Tivoli/Vredenburg, the Zuiderzeemuseum and the Van Abbemuseum are the frontrunners in the expedition, setting an example for their...
'How many realities can we handle? For me, that is the theme of 2018. Those ladies from North Korea who were cheering, for example. But it was also in Halbe Zijlstra who had lied about Putin's dacha.' Greg Nottrot, theatre maker from Utrecht, had set out for this year to create an end-of-year performance that would capture the zeitgeist well....
A good selling book earns an author an average of 10 to 15 per cent of the selling price. Bestsellers go towards 20 per cent. But how much does it really yield? KVB Boekwerk, the research arm of the Royal Booksellers' Association wanted to find out. Jurriaan Rammeloo presented the first preliminary results of his research on 27 November. Not something to be very happy...
Paul Lightfoot, artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater, announces his departure from 2020. A remarkable decision. Just recently, the energetic leader was on stage at Zuiderstrandtheater to properly wave off Gerald Tibbs, former artistic director of NDT2 to his retirement. But there are some questions. 1: Why the day after a departure of his own...
'Yes. I envisioned our trip differently. We were going to look for little people and big rats, dwarf elephants and giant storks, for what is considered normal and what is not.' When Frank Westerman (1964) finally visits the Indonesian island of Flores in the research for his book We, Man in the company of his daughter, they come across the mass graves in which the...
We work out at the gym, diet like crazy and get screened for diseases as a precaution. Modern man does everything he can to get as old as possible. Wouldn't it be better to come to terms with the fact that we are mortal, American writer Barbara Ehrenreich wonders in her book...
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