20 per cent more visits to museums thanks to the museum year card. This will earn museums a sloppy 14 million euros extra this year. The jubilant press release about the study by a renowned agency does not lie. Or does it? After all, six months ago featured in NRC Handelsblad still read that the Museum Card Foundation was in cash trouble.
We kept a liveblog. Nice and old-fashioned, from the days when every month there was uproar somewhere about the government's handling of art. Now there is peace in the tent, as the PVV sardonically points out, because 'The Left' is now the bearer of policies devised by the PVV. The PVV predicts a black future for 'The Left' once the PVV comes to power.
Protests abound again tonight at a concert conducted by Valery Gergiev, this time at London's Barbican. Many of the protesters are demanding that the orchestra emphatically distance itself from the Russian star conductor and speak out openly against gay legislation in Russia.
According to NRC Handelsblad Culture cuts became fatal for 'only' 11 theatre institutions. In doing so, they assume groups that actually dissolved themselves. In their overview, however, they overlook the companies that voluntarily dissolved themselves by merging with another company. In addition, there are a number of institutions that disbanded before the new round because it was already clear that they would not receive any money. If we do count those, we come to at least 34 companies. That is already 25% of what was on offer before the cuts.
Dancer Ellen Edinoff died in her hometown of Amsterdam on Tuesday at the age of 70. Ellen, together with her husband Koert Stuyf, formed a unique dance couple in the 1960s-'70s that reactions in extremes. The Dutch dance world came of age partly thanks to them.
On the day that a vote was to be held in The Hague on the new Spui Forum, it has been announced that Robert van Leer is leaving as business director of Nederlands Dans Theater. Van Leer is resigning for purely "personal reasons", according to the press officer of the renowned dance company.
The Council for Culture, recently reinforced with new members with a lot of management talent and business acumen, has to accept defeat. Indeed, culture minister Jet Bussermaker is disregarding a key pillar of the council's latest advice.
This was a possibility not many people initially thought of. After all, after her tropical years as director of the Amsterdam debating centre De Balie, Ellen Walraven was in need of some more substantive work and peace and quiet on her mind, So we suspected that she would stay on in
I did it just like that. Proclaimed a show as the most important theatre innovation for 20 years. That's daring. Even though I made the term a bit more vague in a subsequent tweet, because, yes, there has been quite a lot of innovation in recent years, left and right in theatres. So let's stick to 'the last few years'. And then...
On Wednesday 1 August 2012, the Performing Arts Fund will announce the results of the lottery that granting arts subsidies has now become. Huge cuts are looming: companies and makers that by now seemed to be a permanent part of the Dutch arts landscape will disappear. Exactly what it will look like, we know
"A beautifully drawn portrait, sublimely expressing a mixture of cunning, intransigence and power-seeking, Implicit and without text." So says the Inktspot Prize jury about the drawing Sigfried Woldhek made for the NRC of 30 March 2011. Pictured is Henk Bleker, former CDA party leader candidate and state secretary for former nature. Woldhek, who has been...
That frightens us quite a bit ourselves. We knew that the Cultural Press Agency was doing pretty well, but we didn't really think a reach of more than 100,000 people was possible. After all, we had done nothing in the way of marketing. Just posting content and not giving away free tickets. And only once something with a bare female breast in it. Enfin....
The story continues. On 1 July the VAT increase came into effect, on 8 July NRC quoted Halbe Zijlstra as saying that "it was not the most mature scheme" of this cabinet, words he later nuanced during parliamentary questions. In late August, the Berenschot report came out with startling figures: the VAT increase would mainly cost the Netherlands money rather than generate it. Meanwhile, the Music...
Pim van Klink is his name. He has been popping up everywhere lately. Especially when the malicious subsidy orientation of the cultural sector needs to be pointed out, every medium calls Van Klink first. Last week, he once again threw his hobbyhorse into the henhouse in the NRC and was invited to join Buitenhof. And according to our trench-coat-clad...
Arts organisations are subsidy-addicted and so we are withdrawing subsidies. The VVD's approach is clear. On the exact how, they appear to need to think longer about that, now that there is so much opposition from the country. Cold Turkey, the treatment proposed by tolerance partner (nice word in this context) PVV, could well result in deaths. To...
That's going to be fodder for chambers exegetes, though the question is whether it will make any difference. But Halbe Zijlstra says he did not say that the VAT measure "was not the most accomplished measure in the coalition agreement. Although that is what that interview with him in NRC Handelsblad of 8 July 2011. At the time, everyone thought that was a funny
Imeanwhile, the website has been updated, but since this post prompted that update, we are leaving it up.
Always good to support a new initiative. That's why we also welcomed the constructive plan from
Interesting things are happening these days. The digital revolution is beginning to have traces of a real revolution. No one has yet set themselves on fire, as in Tunisia, but more and more people are taking to the virtual streets to overthrow the old powers: after the record companies, which let themselves be overwhelmed by people downloading, and the newspapers, which let themselves be overwhelmed by people searching freely for information, it now seems to be the turn of book publishers.
We were at a debate day in The Hague that was as inconspicuous as it was historic on 13 December 2010: it was about the budget of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the (first?) Rutte government, and that was the budget in which, at the request of the supporting party PVV, the amount to be cut in the arts budget was set at 200 million, with heritage and museums having to...
The Marathon Effect is well known: put spectators together in a theatre for half a day or more, preferably on uncomfortable seats, and hand them over to a couple of actors with a play. Success seems assured, and the ancient Greeks already knew that. So that there would be no discord surrounding the monster project I Demoni, the Dostoevsky adaptation of Peter...
Image by Andrew B47 via Flickr Photo: Chris Vanderburght It was time for a real theatrical hit at the Holland festival, after the rather lukewarmly received British-American Shakespeares of Sam Mendes' Bridge Project. And clap it did with Rechnitz by Elfriede Jelinek dooor the best actors of the Münchener Kammerspiele. Karin Veraart of De Volkskrant was deeply impressed: ...Not...
Martijn Padding has done something special with Beethoven's 10th. He turned the piece that the deaf composer never really wrote in its entirety into an experience that, as Volkskrant reviewer Frits van der Waa put it, made you feel what it sounded like between Beethoven's ears. According to the NRC, it sounded Impressive: the sphere of creation stripped of all heroism, as if you were passing through two centuries of...
Curlew River Photo: Bertrand Stofleth For every independent journalist in the Netherlands, there are about 15 information officers. It is therefore obvious that these spokespeople largely determine the image in the media. Could that be why in the newspapers and television programmes surrounding the Holland Festival, the announcements are far more numerous than the critical reviews? A look at the...
Those who missed it, like our Beatrix, will increasingly realise that something important happened, Tuesday 1 June, at the opening of the Holland Festival. Egyptian beauty Amal Maher performed an hour and a half of classical Arabic music at Carré, making her first small step into the Western mainstream. We ourselves were from The...
Wilfred Takken muses today on the character Jacques in the Shakespeare comedy As You Like It. The actor Stephen Dillane turns it into a wonderful Bob Dylan in The Bridge Project, says NRC reviewer Takken: When Dylan was once asked if he considered himself the "voice of a generation", he replied, "I'm just a song and dance man. Everyone laughed, but...
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