The cultural sector is sometimes behind, but more often ahead. In the - otherwise very much to be welcomed in terms of content - advice issued by the Amsterdam Arts Council on the future of the local Stedelijk Museum, you can read that job security in the art sector is once again under pressure. Especially for young entrants from 'diverse' backgrounds: 'Preferably, the museum will make greater use of...
Say 'Carlo Gesualdo' and you say 'heavenly music', and 'cruel disposition'. This Renaissance composer's name is inextricably linked to the gruesome double murder he committed on his wife and lover when he found them in flagrante delicto. Who else but The Warm Shop could make an appealing performance of this thought Tido Visser, artistic director of the Netherlands Chamber Choir. So.
The trigger for this story is that relatively recently, the Council for Culture published its sector foresight. The summary opens with the words that 'Culture moves'. A rather euphemistic statement in my view. In this case, it means that the making, spreading and experiencing of culture is constantly changing. The second very obvious observation of...
Where can you indulge as a film lover in the Netherlands? With 54 festival editions in 2017, North Holland appears to be the province where you can enjoy film festivals most often. Amsterdam takes the crown with a whopping 47 film festival editions, according to a study by the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA). Lecturer Harry van Vliet of the Crossmedia lectureship of the HvA faculty,...
Listen to an atmospheric impression and the full interview with Stef Aerts here. Children have the ability to turn adults' worlds upside down. Eleven-year-old JR is really getting into it. On a school trip, he learns how the stock market works and then turns it to his will. In doing so, unhampered by a prefrontal cortex, that part of the brain...
Rather listen than read? Listen to the podcast here! (With lots of extra quotes from Ab Dijksterhuis) Money makes horribly happy. And that doesn't stop at 1 tonne. Those who earn half a million are considerably happier than those who earn 2 tonnes. The ING boss who would get 60 per cent more salary would also have become very much happier as a result. This...
The separation between the Netherlands and Belgium was due to an opera at the Brussels Monnaie Theatre in 1830. During a certain song in the opera De Stomme van Portici, the flame flared and the opera-goers ran out of the hall like an angry mob to chase Den 'Ollander out of town. Such behaviour turns out to be more logical than you...
Cinedans has been around since 2003. Back then, it was a single evening, part of Amsterdam's Julidans festival. Pretty soon, it grew into something bigger. According to Martine Dekker, involved with the festival since the 2011 edition, this was due to the overwhelming supply of dance films: 'From the second edition, filmmakers were invited to submit films,...
I attended the try-out of Metropolis #1 at The Hague's Theater aan het Spui and a week later - because I couldn't believe my eyes the first time - I also went to the premiere. Rarely did I see something so blood-curdlingly exciting on stage. But unfortunately for the wrong reasons. A lot of a-musical notions Metropolis is the...
Culture minister van Engelshoven says it is inevitable that the number of productions in the arts sector will go down. This is necessary to make the labour market for the arts sector healthy. She stated this in an interview after the presentation of her vision letter at Rotterdam's Maaspodium. 'You see that a lot has been produced in recent years to...
In the early 1990s, I am sitting in a small auditorium at The National Theatre in London. Before the performance starts, someone on stage asks if you want to greet the visitors next to you. This immediately creates a different, more intimate dynamic in the auditorium. On a tight stage with only a few props are four actors and an Arab musician. Yoshi Oida...
Late last year, the organisers of an alumni evening for research master's students asked me to defend a thesis from my current position as a cultural leader. It had to be about my position as a literary scholar by telling them about my professional path since graduation. I could frame this article hopefully and hopeful and elaborate on the competences that the...
It all starts at Orange College, of course. A fictional school with very real problems. For Sadettin Kırmızıyüz, the place where he commissions the opening part of Metropolis, a series that should eventually count four episodes. It is one of Het Nationale Theater's biggest projects over the next four years, in close cooperation with Kırmızıyüz's own company:...
Jonas Smulders is among the ten most promising young actors in Europe this year, the so-called Shooting Stars. At the Berlin Film Festival, he talks about his first steps and his ambition to direct.
The previous cultural exploration among playwrights gives cause for further exploration. From the earlier article, we take away that further privatisation only partially captures public money and objectives. See also from elevation ideals to efficiency thinking. We also take away that a public as all-important leads to one-sided popular culture, entertainment and false competition with the free circuit. It all has very little...
In my work, I entice people to come into contact with art. And especially art with a big K. The art that is often marketed as 'difficult' or, in an attempt to get rid of its negative image, as 'vulnerable'. Liberal politicians would perhaps say art that 'doesn't act normal'. It is the kind of...
'Good literacy is a prerequisite for functioning - now and in the future - in our information society and knowledge economy.' This was stated in the press release sent out by KVB Boekwerk last week. The occasion was a SCP study which showed that we in the Netherlands are again spending less time reading than a decade ago. It listed impressive percentages. 'Over...
The (in Flanders) famous portrait painter Pieter Pourbus is from Gouda. You have never heard of him. Soon you will. Museum Gouda is bringing the first Pieter Pourbus exhibition to the Netherlands from 17 February 2018 to 17 June 2018. In preparation for this, you should first visit the Groeninge Museum in Bruges. In the unabashedly burgundy World Heritage city, the exhibition Pieter Pourbus and...
We are going to live smaller. It is not only in the popularity of the TinyHouse movement that young people and seniors can shake hands. We want to de-clutter, but we also want to have less to do with the big bad outside world. This applies to older people, but certainly to those in their twenties. This movement has been going on in the arts for a while. Small ...
More than a million Dutch people feel very lonely, according to the Health Monitor 2012. Among them are an increasing number of young people - all social media notwithstanding. Perhaps we could stop this 'loneliness epidemic' if we realised that none of us is really alone. What we so often forget is that we are directly connected to thousands of others: the people...
On 6 December 2017, the Taalunie Toneelschrijfprijs was awarded to poet, writer and playwright Ilja Leonard Pfeiffer. With his play about Bram Moszkowitcz, titled 'The lawyer', he was the preferred original work among 47 submissions. According to the Taalunie, Pfeiffer's play 'balances magisterially on the fine line between tragedy and comedy, realistic drama and meta-thought, slapstick and emotion....
A collection of makers they are. A collection, but not a collective. What an 'f' can't already make up. So language is quite a thing. And crowdsourcing is quite a thing. These makers collect words from their audience, and give them back in a performance. That's 'BOG.', a still fairly young group trying to use language to make theatre to get us to...
Currently, the amount a performing arts company receives in subsidy depends on the number of times it plays. The Performing Arts Fund, which is responsible for that subsidy, has now investigated the effect of this. That research shows that companies are increasingly struggling to sell performances of a single production. This causes companies to...
With a 500-million-year-old pebble, Jonathan Harris began his lecture. IDFA presents the first international retrospective of this artist. As IDFA's chief guest, Harris gave the 'Master Talk' on Friday, about his life and work. His remarkably analogue vision was also the common thread during Sunday's well-attended DocLab conference. Fundamentally analogue Harris, who once started out in computer science...
I Know a Secret is the twelfth thriller in the series surrounding detective Jane Rizzoli and pathologist-anatomist Maura Isles. Writer Tess Gerritsen reached an audience of millions with it, but longs for more. As the main characters of Tess Gerritsen's thrillers, detective Jane Rizzoli and pathologist Maura Isles have been through quite a bit by now. Yet they are startled by the state of their...
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