The decision will be official in mid-September, but behind the scenes it has already been made. The Netherlands will have a very small basic cultural infrastructure for the performing arts, and a very large fund that anyone who wants to make theatre, dance, mime or music must apply to. I asked around a bit recently, and so that's what it's going to be. That way, politicians can't...
After the sudden death of her loved one, trans woman Marina must fight for her right to grieve and mourn. Sebastian Lelio shows her as an amazing woman who can do without an LHTB label. He told more about it in Berlin.
Perplexity all round. How could D66 possibly vote against a minimal repair of the draconian cultural cuts of both Rutte cabinets? After all, only ten million is involved. That while party leader Alexander Pechtold, as culture spokesman, has been hammering on for an extra 10 million in every meeting for the past year. But exactly that happened last night. During the campaign, D66 went much further: from...
Of the 100 days in which Kassel is transforming itself into 'the world museum of contemporary art' this year, as it does every five years, 20 days have already ticked away. This has certainly not happened silently. The formula that artistic director and chief curator Adam Szymczyk and his staff have unleashed on Documenta has brought a large number of fans to their feet. For me.
Radio Kunststof is one of the most successful early-evening programmes on our national disaster channel Radio 1. That success is partly due to its great formula: a long conversation with a more or less well-known figure from the arts and media corner. However, much more important reason for that success is the broadcast time. Between seven and eight in the evening, very...
Setan Jawa is the latest film by prominent Indonesian director Garin Nugroho (b. 1961). It is a 'silent' film, shot in black and white by Teoh Gay Hian. It was shown at the Muziekgebouw aan t IJ during the Holland Festival last weekend. The music to the film is played live by Rahayu Supanggah Gamelan Orchestra and the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra. Inspired...
American composer Julia Wolfe (1958) has a thing for the social history of her homeland. Steel Hammer reflects on the unequal struggle of man versus machine, as described in the folk ballad John Henry. Anthracite Fields zooms in on the hard life of miners in Pennsylvania. She won a Pulitzer Prize with it in 2015. The full-length oratorio is experiencing two July...
Struggle is by far the word that falls the most in the video triptych 'The Tempest Society'. The struggle for a dignified existence, the struggle for papers, the struggle with a system that does not want to give you rights. Refugees struggle with these issues day in and day out, year in and year out. In this video triptych, Moroccan-French director Bouchra Khalili (Casablanca,...
Endless chatting at the kitchen table. While cooking. That's all they do, the brother, the sister, the ex, the two daughters-in-law and the mother of the Gabriel family. About recipes, about the old piano. About Thomas, the brother who died of parkinson's, about his wife, who due to informal care had no time to renew her doctor's degree. All very casually, without...
Boris Charmatz has been a guest at many editions of the Holland Festival with impressive, provocative, socially engaged, finely composed and conceptually strong dance performances: Aatt enen tionon and Con forts fleuve (both in 2001); 50 years of dance (2010), Enfant (2011) and Manger (2015). His latest choreography, danse de nuit, premiered in Geneva last September. During the Holland Festival...
You have punk. You have performance art. Best Gaap, because often little remains of that ferocious wildness that dominated the European scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Marina Abramovic we now see mainly as that silent lady on that chair opposite her long-lost lover. We have forgotten that she once offered her audience razors to cut her...
The wind blows harder there than elsewhere. The light is greyer there than further afield. London's south bank, for years 'the other side' of the English capital's posh city centre, has been the subject of several waves of renewal in the last century. It began in 1951 with the construction of concert hall 'Southbank Centre', followed in 1976, after years of wrangling, by the building in the same...
The 57th Venice Biennale brings the world together and the art world to Venice. This year, the biennial art event is bigger than ever. Here you will find out what is 'trending' in contemporary art. Everyone thinks something of this event and we live in a time when everything and everyone is held up to the yardstick: 'Have you been there?....
Vincent Macaigne is uncomfortable. He looks around nervously every time the waitresses run past with trays full of clinking glasses and slam the doors. He has barely slept, and the previous evening he had walloped the audience of the Swiss Theatre Vidy with his brutal, inimitable performance En Manque. Braced, he sat down for the interview. "Sorry, I...
Sheila Sitalsing went to work as a journalist after studying economics. After the weekly Elsevier, she joined the Volkskrant, in which she now has a column three times a week on page 2. Sitalsing won the Heldring Prize for best Dutch columnist in 2013. She also appears with some regularity in the foam & ash section of the TV programme Buitenhof....
The SER report published on Friday 21 April rubs it in nicely: the cultural sector is on the verge of collapse. It is even worse than a year ago. This shows that the patience of a PvdA culture minister over the past four years has not helped. Indeed: Halbe Zijlstra's multiplier of misery is doing its job entirely as expected....
Earlier this year, Mircea Cărtărescu, Romania's greatest writer, was a guest at the Winternachten festival. Writer Mira Feticu, who was born and grew up in Romania and even received lectures from Cărtărescu as a student, interviewed her former compatriot and professor for A Quattro Mani. A beautiful conversation about their homeland, truth, literature and poetry. 'My books are...
Every five years, the art world is turned upside down. Then it is time for the fourteenth Documenta. At that time, the German city of Kassel turns into a veritable Mecca for art connoisseurs and art lovers, snobs and connoisseurs. And, of course, tourists looking for that other Efteling. This year's Documenta has a sizeable Dutch contribution. But there is more: for the...
This documentary about a Palestinian zoo in the occupied West Bank is a welcome addition to the stereotypical images from the media. Yet behind this open-minded approach, there is also an unmissable metaphor. Who is most trapped, the animals or the Palestinians behind Qalqilya's city wall?
In Aan het eind van de dag, Nelleke Noordervliet's new novel[ref]Nelleke Noordervliet (1945) made her debut in 1987 with the novel Tine or the valleys where life dwells. She subsequently wrote many novels, novellas, stories, essays, plays and columns. She also holds various administrative positions in the cultural sector[/ref], seventy-year-old Katharina Mercedes Donker is speaking. This ex-minister and...
For those who like to be around art, politics has become a bit more fun again, since 15 March. Since the 2017 elections, Thierry Baudet has been in the House of Representatives. Thierry Baudet knows a lot about art, he thinks, and we will come to know it, too. In fact, Thierry Baudet is the best thing about art these days...
Initiated by Pierre Audi in 2016, the Opera Forward Festival questions the future of musical theatre. The 13-day festival offers (young) creators and singers a chance to explore new avenues. For the second edition, Audi himself directed And You Must Suffer, a music-theatrical version of Bach's St John Passion. This production by Muziektheater Transparant and the early music ensemble B'Roque experienced its Tuesday 28 March...
A dance performance for youth (6+) recently caused a stir. Pupils from groups 5 to 8 of the Islamic Aboe Daoedschool in Utrecht visited IJspaleis (6+) by dance theatre group plan d-. At a dance of two penguins in love, one of the teachers requested that the performance be stopped. This scene was not considered suitable for the pupils, the explanation said. It...
You can dream of a better world, but why not take action yourself? Journalist Rachel van de Pol (33) decided to do a good deed every day for a year, from asking for a doggy bag at a restaurant to ragging the neighbours' windows or handing out ice creams to construction workers at...
There is sound; a notion of impotence; a programme without a head or tail; there is power, chatter, compassion; there is nothing but also a vista, blurred image full of action and opposition. Moreover, the language seems a bit overwrought here and there. Of course, incoherent drivel can be cosy, or moving. Under circumstances, meaningfulness may be possible, but it will not...
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