New resource for home-watching film buffs: Cinéart's Directors' Collection
Distributor Cinéart, which specialises mainly in European arthouse, presents the Directors' Collection. New and old work by leading film authors.
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Live music brightens up vaccination venue Jaarbeurs
From 5 May, the XL vaccination venue at the Jaarbeurs Utrecht will be brightened up several times a week by performances by Utrecht music ensembles. Utrecht has a very diverse musical life that is eager to serve the city. The Netherlands Bach Society kicks off on Wednesday 5 May. Utrechters receiving vaccinations must wait 15 minutes after the jab. GGD region of Utrecht...
Museum directors: is their role as figureheads and media artists becoming more important than as art history experts?
Dutch museums, partly due to the recent digital Museum Week, have been able to retain a large part of their audience. There is - reports the Museum Association on its website - a slight turnover though. And the hitherto loyal public will not find their way to museums automatically and to the same extent. But the picture is that the...
The first year of the corona crisis is described, and it makes for a wonderful book.
TivoliVredenburg is a building like a festival. countless stages, bars, a café and a restaurant, hundreds of people at work, thousands inside on a night. I always came there too little. But when I did get there, it was a party. A building run by and attended by super-motivated people with only one goal: as much music as possible for as many people as possible. Until...
Plein Theater presents the livestream The Lion's Den on 4 May as part of Theatre After Dam - In collaboration with PACT+ (ROCvA)
Young people from Amsterdam East, led by theatre-makers Berith Danse and Isa van Dam, delved into the history of Amsterdam East and ARTIS at the time of World War II. Their research forms the basis for the livestream The lion's den. In Amsterdam Oost, the traces of the Second World War are indelible. Palpable in the trip-stones in the...
It is not too late to make a European Cultural New Deal central to recovery funds
Recently, US geopolitician Joseph Nye1 drew attention once again to the fact that transnational culture is one of the great forces of the European project. For those looking at the European Union from the outside, this common culture is evident, but we, citizens of the Union, are less and less aware of it. Moreover, we tend to...
Concordia still continues to show theatre performances
In the coming weeks, you can enjoy the following livestreams at Concordia: Storyteller, Shaffy, Next Generation, Most Beautiful Songs and Cameretten finalists. More information about the performances below. BOI AKIH - Storyteller Theatre programmer Ellen saw this band at Podium Witteman a while back and thought it was so cool that she immediately booked them. Especially for this evening, there will be a...
Nerd podcast #11: Samora Bergtop on white criticism with white critics Marijn Lems and Wijbrand Schaap
'We think we can think diversely, but ultimately there has to be an exchange in that thinking. Then you also have to let other perspectives come in. So you don't have to come up with it all by yourself.' Samora Bergtop has views on theatre criticism and how it could come out of its white bubble. Marijn lems and yours truly enter the conversation
Also in my mind, 'Journey through the night' is due for a 35th printing
The 35th(!) edition of Reis door de nacht, the classic novel written by Anne de Vries, was published recently. As a ten-year-old boy, I sympathised intensely with the war adventures of Jan de Boer and his family members. The book is also a metaphor for my own struggle against darkness. It is a lovely spring day. In the ditch, a duck swims with her...
Holland Festival presents scalable programme: It's about time.
A night walk where, for once, it is not about talking to each other, or exercising the muscles, but about being very aware of where you are. Mindfulness as a theatre experience, then, and if all the coronagraph remains against us, the only part of the Holland Festival that can go on live because of sufficient distance and outside. It needs to be that bad...
HOLLAND FESTIVAL 2021 with associate artists Ryuichi Sakamoto and Gisèle Vienne
From 3 to 27 June 2021, the 74th edition of the Holland Festival will take place in and around Amsterdam. This year's associate artists are American-Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and French-Austrian theatre maker Gisèle Vienne - notable artists with wide-ranging interests, as evidenced by their collaborations with Hollywood directors, techno artists, visual artists and rock bands. During the...
Free producers have been saved, but some more than others; self-employed people seem especially solidary.
Is the government generous and generous for once, it's no good again. You could say that after I received questions from various quarters about the corona grant for free productions announced by the Performing Arts Fund last week. The amount in question is €27 million, for a total of 251 producers, so an average of a tonne per application. With that...
Support for rapid test society pilots proves extremely shaky
'The task force is critical of the costs and the course of events surrounding the assignment to the Open Netherlands Foundation. Parliamentary questions have now been asked about this; we await the minister's answers to these.' So it is somewhere at the bottom of Kunsten'92's weekly update, but it is clear. That whole pilot with quick tests evokes rather mixed feelings. The interest group...
Follow The Money confirms suspicion: VNO-NCW oversteps boundaries in setting up cultural sector pilots
Last Friday, we reported on the rather mysterious and lacking in transparency surrounding the pilots to reopen theatres and museums. The questions we asked in that article have now been partly answered thanks to the efforts of 3 contributors to Follow The Money (FTM), and the answers they found are not reassuring. Just a recap:...
Jeffrey Meulman from Theatre Festival to Verkadefabriek: 'We need to develop an alternative circuit again'
When Jeffrey Meulman (52) took office as director of the Theatre Festival in 2005, it needed to become more audience-friendly. Instead of a presentation of 'the most important theatre', the board that appointed him wanted to make a celebration of the most beautiful theatre. Meulman went to work, successfully, but the most important thing he did was to establish a 'fringe': an alternative...
Commercial interest in test events hurts confidence. That test result is already in.
Rather unexpectedly, it was announced this week that cultural and entertainment venues will be test sites for reopening society next month. It came rather out of the blue, as everyone was still working on petitions and other pleas to reopen cultural buildings. After all, they have their corona protocols in place there better than the Albert Heijn on my corner....
UTRECHTSE PODIA HEROPEN EVEN FOR TRIAL EVENTS - EKKO, De Helling, TivoliVredenburg, Stadsschouwburg Utrecht and Podium Hoge Woerd will present eighteen 'pilots' for live audiences in April
From 19 to 24 April, Utrecht venues will finally - temporarily - open their doors to the public. Pilot events, 'pilots', are taking place all over the Netherlands this month. TivoliVredenburg, De Helling, EKKO, Stadsschouwburg Utrecht and Podium Hoge Woerd are also trying out how testing for access at coronaproof programmes works. Pilots will take place in the cultural sector in April
Platform BK: Deferred work means deferred money. The artist cannot buy food from that.
What we feared at the beginning of the coronasteun appears to have become reality. The generous support money for culture should also reach the small self-employed in the arts via the institutions, but that is now happening too little. Of course, there are fine examples, such as the large subsidised arts institutions in Groningen and festivals like Boulevard and Holland Festival that support self-employed...
Open Call: Living on the Border: Concordia is looking for young inspired creators for a theatre project this summer!
Theatre Concordia is looking for young makers who are inspired and feel like turning a plan or idea into a theatrical product. The theme of this second open call is Living on the Border. The chosen submissions will receive guidance and a Masterclass, a starting budget of 750 euros and a place in our summer programming. During the first Open Call Never...
Dear Mr Rutte: Why should music schools stay closed? Why so arbitrarily?
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...
'A structural show of love for the arts and culture from The Hague is needed in the Netherlands.'
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...
Nerd podcast #7: Wijbrand and Marijn on cultural politics and losing elections. Special Guest: Melody Deldjou Fard
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...
Patrick Dupond danced in No Man's Land (5 March 2021)
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 cultural sector can and must emerge stronger from this crisis. And that starts with political vision and ambition.
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
TivoliVredenburg and Utrecht University look back on one year of corona in live talk show
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...
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