We write day 6 of the IFFR and take an intermediate view. In the deluge of films, the short films (1 to 60 minutes) always fall away a little in attention. This is a shame, because there is a lot to discover within this format. We list for you. 1 - The IFFR is the festival with one of the...
After the brutal attack on the staff of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris yesterday, journalists, cartoonists, politicians and the general public rallied worldwide to defend the freedom of speech. Many a front page of today's newspapers showed the cartoons for which chief editor Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier) and 11 others were brutally murdered by Said and Cherif Kouachi,...
Always start with the good news. The Information Department of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science did a very good job in 2014. They sent one jubilant press release after another into the world. While there was actually hardly any good news to report. About culture. But because there are a lot of lazy journalists, good news often goes in a...
Tonight many drunk screenwriters on the streets, and in Leiden a few very happy older journalists. Lira, the organisation that has to collect money for them from the big, wealthy, and non-paying guys, has won twice. They already had, of course, but the cable companies didn't want to get rid of the gold plating on their luxury yachts. So they ignored the judge's ruling and...
5:Echo, choreographer Nicole Beutler's most recent production, is a curious show. All focus is on two famous pioneers of Dutch dance in the 60s and 70s: Ellen Edinoff and Bianca van Dillen. Yet Echo mainly shows how impossible (and perhaps undesirable) it is to want to revive past glories. Dancer Kelly...
What does the theatre of the future look like? That question Odeon De Spiegel Theatres posed to the FMT Workforce, the online brainstorming environment of our partner Fast Moving Targets. We also brought the message here. Odeon and De Spiegel are two theatres in Zwolle. Well-run theatres, but always looking for the new opportunities offered by new technologies and developments....
Vice we all already know. It is the terror of any medium, online or otherwise, that focuses on youth culture, because with a global network and hefty US dollars, there is no getting around it. Live Nation we already know too. If you attend concerts at least once in a while, chances are good that...
The Holland Festival got a completely unknown new director in the person of Britain's Ruth Mackenzie. At least, to us. The flamboyant, artistically exceptional opera director Pierre Audi makes way for a woman who has presented herself mainly as a manager of festivals and cultural institutions, but whose ideas are anyone's guess. When she was presented, none of the...
We are moving too fast. Politics moves too fast, the news moves too fast, and no one takes the time anymore to spend a quiet time listening to a piece of music, reading a thick book, or listening to and watching slow art for 36 hours at the Bruges Concert Hall. So the concert hall in Bruges is organising a festival with...
This post should have been a video. I was planning to go into my garden with the ipad, to tell you, in the company of my dog Rufus, how important video is in contemporary art communication. And not a good, beautifully shot and rap edited video, but wonky, home-made, not very to-the-point video. Which is very personal though....
Forty roofless hotel rooms, and then hearing your own story back as you see yourself reflected in the distant ceiling. Or: walking behind a guide through the Lombok district of Utrecht, while being provided with an overload of extra information on your headphones. About your guide. Or not. About yourself. Welcome to the universe of Dries Verhoeven, since a small...
Scene 1 - Expectations The main hall of film theatre 't Hoogt was filled with people from the film sector on Wednesday afternoon at the invitation of the Film Fund. The subject of the meeting is the chronically low attendance of more artistic Dutch films. This has been the case for a long time, by the way, and not only in the Netherlands. Should new avenues be explored? Should expectations be...
"Everyone today has a computer in their pocket (smartphone or glass) that gives you considerable computing power and communication technology per person. You can use that computing power and technology, to add augmented elements to entertainment." Just a response to a question. From a theatre. Because that theatre wants to look ahead: What does the theatre of the future look like? That question...
Wijbrand Schaap: 'Next hot issue. Copyright is mentioned in a few passages of the Cultural Exploration. I am also affected by that in various ways. There is, of course, that new author's contract law, which is going to be discussed in the chamber one day, maybe. Nice about that is that the creator's position in that law has been strengthened.' Joop Daalmeijer: 'Rightly so.' Wijbrand Schaap: 'But.
Drama reviews mainly fill a need among artists and journalists. Newspaper readers hardly use them. In London, this has been studied. Only 36 per cent of theatre-goers say they read reviews. Much more value fans place on tips from friends and family. Last Saturday at Amsterdam's De Balie debate centre, there was a discussion between theatre-makers,...
It erupts during the Dutch Theatre Festival and continues even longer. For three weeks, Frascati 4 will be annexed by the live radio show Radio Futura - The Voice of the Future. One of the Radio Futuristas, Heske van den Ende, explains below why you should especially listen in online.
Art has rapidly become unimportant. Artists have been effectively dismissed by populists as subsidy-addicted scum. Media leaves no opportunity to downplay the consequences of the ensuing cuts. Putin is about to bring a third world war to Europe. In Amsterdam on Saturday, September 6, three of the Netherlands' last daily newspaper critics talk to artists about...
By Melle Daamen 'What do you want then?' was a question I received quite often in response to my articles last year in NRC, in which I expressed my concerns about the state of the arts in the Netherlands and especially its future. I argued for a fundamental debate from within the arts sector itself, focusing on the future, including...
This is rather fantastic. The Tate Museum in London offers the opportunity to wander the halls at night, in the dark. To view everything on your own time. By controlling robots from your couch. Viewing artworks online in museums has been possible for a long time. We have the Google Art Project, we have our own Rijksmuseum that...
Being able to write nicely is fine, but the journalists at Culture Press can do more. They have studied to be art experts, have spent thousands of hours in rooms and halls that even you did not know existed and possess enormous drive. How else could this website exist?
Like many of my contemporaries, I have played Jeff Buckley's CDs grey, but know next to nothing about Pakistani Sufi music. Except that it's great. And that Abida Parveen is the queen of that genre. Tonight, this Voice of God and her ensemble are on stage at the National Opera & Ballet.
450,000 euros they need to raise, the 15 culturally optimistic signposts of Public. All but a few were born well past 1980, so they don't suffer from any baby boomer arrogance or generational nit-picking: these are real, young, happy Amsterdammers.
It's still kind of a secret, but the website is already online. Without reference to the people behind it, but then again, we know that. So we can break the news: it CPNB (that book week club) collaborates with the booksellers and publishers on a revolutionary platform for ebooks. This project, titled 'Leesid' should put an end to the chaos of DRM-shit, lots of different readers and tablets and bizarre ownership rules the Dutch electronic book reader still has to live with.
Regional newspapers hardly do any real cultural journalism anymore. We know this, because it was the reason why we Culture Press once founded have. How bad things are now, five years later, with art in the region and the way the newspaper handles it, was evident this month in Tilburg.
Because Writers Unlimited collaborates with one of the last literary magazines in the Netherlands, and because that magazine is called 'Tirade', the last festival in The Hague included a place for tirades. And what might those be? The online dictionary says:
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