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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...
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...
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,...
Did you know that one in 10 Dutch people suffer from severe loneliness? The subject is more topical than ever due to the corona crisis and yet we find it hard to talk about it with each other. On Wednesday 31 March at 8pm, TivoliVredenburg and city lab RAUM present a candid interview with Flemish psychiatrist Dirk de Wachter by Rachel Rosier....
Even in corona time, there is plenty for a culture consumer to enjoy. Take last week. On Sunday (before the big snow started), my wife and I took a walk to downtown Amersfoort. There, a stall not only sells the city's tastiest Latte, but there are also a few....
Movementalist and Plein Theatre present 25, 26 and 27 February Aceleratio Sneak Peek Streams as a sneak peek of the performance installation Aceleratio that will be on show at the NDSM Fuse in May 2021. In the last three of the series of six 'sneak peek' live streams from the Plein Theatre, viewers get a look 'under the skin' of the performers. Intimate, fragile...
Last year, he became the second Scot ever to win the prestigious Booker Prize, and that too with a debut novel. The unexpected success of Shuggie Bain has a bittersweet edge for Douglas Stuart (44). For the story of maverick Shuggie, who loses his hapless, single mother Agnes to drink, is based on his own childhood. Shuggie grows up...
On 24 December 2020, the provincial hearing and objection committee issued an opinion to the Provincial Executive of the province of North Brabant in response to eight submitted objections. Then -only a month later- on 26-1-2021, a communication dated 26-1-2021 from the Board of GS to Provincial Councils and a press release to the cultural institutions that submitted an application 2021-2024 appeared....
'There is no other sector in the Netherlands that is as controlled and regulated as the cultural sector.' D66 MP Salima Belhaj sighed this towards the end of the debate organised by the assembled cultural sector lobby clubs on Monday 8 February. 'It takes an incredible amount of work, time and especially money. And the basis is distrust.' The most culture-friendly party of...
It is almost Christmas. Miss Kate and Miss Julia are giving their annual ball. One by one the guests appear, there is dancing, eating (greasy brown goose, marinated rib eye, pudding), there is apprehension about Freddy Malins who is bound to appear drunk again, and Gabriel gives a short table speech as usual. Gabriel fears his speech will be too pompous. He...
We asked him a few questions about his experiences and influences. What is your experience with animation so far? 'As a child, I liked drawing comics. I made the comic Kaas-Trek with a friend, a kind of persiflage on Star-Trek, and we would sell it to classmates and buy sweets from them. Who framed Roger Rabbit I remember as...
Maybe it's the snow, and my little dog that made me so happy. Maybe it's the sledding children in 'The Pit' of Lunetten, and maybe it's the lameness that creeps up on me after so many valiant attempts to keep up the fun of art in times of Corona. But I sat through the first minutes of VPRO's Onstage...
On Friday 12 February 2021 from 12:00-17:00, the Amsterdam Museum, together with its various partners, is organising the Refresh Symposium on the Amsterdam art climate. A symposium in which makers such as Bas Kosters, Massih Hutak and Raquel van Haver together with representatives of cultural institutions such as NDSM-werf, AFK and Amerpodia will critically examine the art climate in the city. The symposium...
News arrived this week that Andreas Fleischmann, the highly esteemed director of Amsterdam's DeLaMar Theatre, has now officially become director-director of Stichting MusicalMakers, the foundation he had set up last year, a day before the deadline for grant applications for four-year state funding. And that is not allowed.
It schmaltzes. It rattles. It is set in Brabant. And my name is underneath it, with 'free to' as a sham in front of it.
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