Does your town suffer from vacancy? Is the city centre poorly accessible? Are you looking for a tourist attraction or a unique logo? A cable car solves all your problems. Your municipality can still benefit despite the great interest from all over the Netherlands in this new means of transport. But above all, don't listen to me, but to everyone before me. Clean and sustainable alternative In Groningen...
From 19 to 23 October, more than two thousand music professionals gathered in Santiago de Compostella for the 22nd World Music Expo (WOMEX). I was there and came back with mixed feelings. My first music fair experience was the WOMEX in Rotterdam. In 2001, the Maas city was the cultural capital of Europe and thus had extra resources at its disposal. The Berlin organiser of...
Zvizdal, the documentary theatre portrait of Pétro and Nadia filmed by Berlin between 2011 and 2016, is not only in Paris, Ghent and Athens. This moving story can also be seen in the Netherlands until 11 November 2016. Near the place where an atomic experiment failed in 1986, Berlin and Zvizdal tell a moving story about an old peasant couple. They remained as...
10 days of Festival Boulevard. I threw myself into it. I saw 14 performances, saw a lot of corners of Den Bosch (and Tilburg) up close and experienced more different theatre than usual in six months. I also ate more chips than is good for me, drank more beer than usual and enjoyed eavesdropping on conversations of...
The hero who does not know his own strength (Wildman); a mad scientist who goes too fast for everyone (Galileo); a dream empress who gives thanks for the fairy-tale wedding and steps out of her role (Sisi); guinea pigs who rebel against the popularity contest they are caught up in (Guinea pig!) and an ugly duckling who accepts the chaos, but doubts that the chaos...
Let's talk about breasts (m/f). Or, if that's a bit too confrontational: the tendency of young up-and-coming acting talents to get naked on stage. And then do something with juice. Of fruit mostly, or just water, or oil and glitter. At Festival Boulevard yesterday, for the third time in a week, I had...
Being the best at your craft, and then not in one craft, but in three or so. That, too, is what makes an artist an artist. Ben Duke is a great artist. He is a gifted dancer, a phenomenal actor and a cum laude graduate in English literature. It is therefore logical that he wrote the greatest poem in British history, the...
Friday afternoon, 5 August 2016. The weather is nice. In the intercity to Den Bosch, I read a book I couldn't finish on holiday. I can't manage it this time either: Den Bosch is always closer than you think. Again, the walk from the station to the Joseph Quarter takes less time than Google Maps indicated to me. That came...
Project Cloud, the latest experiential artwork by Bossche city artist Lucas de Man, may need a disclaimer. Anyone entering the seven-storey work had better not do so in the company of a solid existential crisis. The visitor before me did, and still needed a very good talk with a psychological counsellor afterwards. Who...
Once upon a time there was this film, Ladri di Biciclette, Bicycle Thieves in Dutch. Italian director Vittorio de Sica established a totally new film movement with it in 1948: neo-realism. Amateur actors pretty much played their own lives at the bottom of the social ladder. Engaging, inspired, raw and confrontational, especially at the time. Little people, caught in the spiral of social...
Sometimes, people are so angry politically that they furiously turn down the chance to become the country's boss themselves upon hearing the word 'prime minister'. Oscar Kocken, the cheerful host and creator, together with Daan Windhorst, of 'Het Torentje' noticed this last Friday. He was trying to warm up a passer-by to his performance, in a tent on the...
I experienced by far one of the most impressive theatre experiences of my life on Friday 5 August 2016. I was a guest at 'Zvizdal - Chernobyl so far, so close' by the Flemish company Berlin, in co-production with Het Zuidelijk Toneel. I saw this 'documentary installation' in an empty factory hall in Den Bosch, where the work is a beautiful resting point in...
Adding three tonnes a year is cause for celebration. But Viktorien van Hulst, at the helm of the Bossche Theatre Festival Boulevard for the second year, had to restrain herself in her opening speech. Because the subsidising Performing Arts Fund does not give money to a large number of well-performing fellow institutions despite a positive assessment, the suffering in the performing arts exceeds the joy. Torn is called that....
Boulevard flags fly everywhere in Den Bosch in the sunshine. The office of the 32-year-old Theatre Festival Boulevard on Sint Josephstraat is a jumble of people walking in and out. The beaming director, Viktorien van Hulst, has bags under her eyes like a festival director should have three days before the opening.
Festival Boulevard kicks off on 4 August. The traditional reason to come back from holiday in August has a fuller programme than ever this time. With lots of youth theatre. We'll help you get started in advance.
There are many reasons not to go on holiday. It costs money, you come back more stressed than you went, the food is no good, it costs tons of CO2 and it doesn't increase mutual understanding between countries either. Reason enough, then, to just stay here and enjoy the free time given to you by the boss, or by yourself if you are self-employed. Without being barked at by airport staff.
Calm has returned to the North Brabant Museum in 's-Hertogenbosch. After more than 400,000 people saw the successful and widely acclaimed Hieronymus Bosch exhibition, the halls are now light and quiet again. No more opening hours from early morning to midnight. Just, peace and quiet. Although the Jan Fabre mosaics hanging there now are disturbing. Mosaic Panels 2016 is...
Marketing strategist Halbe Zijlstra has failed. His valiant attempt to use a 'Giving Act' boosting donations from small individuals to arts institutions has backfired. Since 2011, contributions made by ordinary households to cultural institutions fell from 32 euros, to 28 euros on average in 2014. This is according to the survey 'Cultural institutions in the Netherlands: Changes in giving behaviour, donations, fundraising and income between 2011 and 2014', which was presented in a small gathering on Friday 10 June.
The garish signs KEUKENHOF keep on whizzing past café Foolish Business, on a very sticky Tuesday morning. Hordes of tourists throng behind them, ready to spend money on picturesque pictures and unique experiences. My interest today is in the opposite, the desolate 19the century colonies in Drenthe, then called 'Dutch Siberia'. To me, Drenthe is known as ' a cyclist's paradise' but writer Suzanna Jansen wrote the 2008 bestseller The Pauper's Paradise about, in which she meticulously traced her family's history back five generations.
She is wearing a summery blue dress and is in transit to the 'crime scene' of our conversation, Veenhuizen, to drive past her 'favourite places' with RTV Drenthe. This is a tad ironic, since she knows Drenthe mainly through her ancestors, who lived and died under miserable conditions in the colonies.
15 June 2016 goes there in Veenhuizen theatre show The Pauper's Paradise premiered in the courtyard of the Gevangenis Museum, about 'one of the most dramatic hidden histories in the Netherlands'.
As many as 1 million Dutch Descend from Veenhuizen clients[hints]From the registers reveals that Ruud Lubbers, Geert Mak and Alexander Pechtold, Thea Beckmann, Anton Pieck and Bert Haanstra, among others, are related to paupers from the 19th-century poor colonies[/hints].
The Cinéma Arabe festival (from 19 April) is showing a rich palette of new work from the Arab World. Interview with director Hany Abu-Assad who sets a new tone with The Idol. And he has plans for a film about William of Orange. 'That will be my parting gift to the Netherlands.'
Hieronymus Bosch is back. With a special exhibition in Den Bosch - in case anyone has forgotten - and with enormous attention. The exhibition is widely acclaimed and star-studded. It is already being called 'the exhibition of the year'. Newspapers were full of it, documentaries filled the TV screen and the opening was...
Thursday 21 January sees the start of the ninth edition of the Storioni Festival, dedicated to the five-hundredth anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch's death. Free after his famous triptych Garden of Earthly Delights, the musicians of the Storioni Trio and Frank Veenstra, artistic manager of Muziekgebouw Eindhoven, chose the theme 'Dreams and Demons'. Composer in residence is Poland's Krzysztof Penderecki, who became famous...
With the death of Pierre Boulez on 5 January, modernism seemingly came to an end, but the two-year-old Ursula Mamlok (1923) is still alive and kicking. Although the German-American Mamlok hopes to turn 93 on 1 February, she is steadily composing.# In 2009, she wrote Aphorisms II for two clarinets, in which, as in all her pieces, she manages to couple atonality with a warm-blooded...
Only Maastricht, Den Bosch and Enschede were able to enjoy Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors. Far too little for an opera that has only been seen in our country twice before (in 1988 and 1965) but has everything it takes to win a young audience for the genre ánd is the December opera par excellence. Especially when the mini-opera is so...
The Lower House caused serious problems for culture in the Netherlands a few weeks back. In a noble attempt to save a few festivals and a youth theatre, SP, D66, CDA and PvdA caused chaos. They passed a motion instructing our culture minister to still set aside money for a few festivals and an extra...
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