'I know what you're banging on about!' The tattooed athlete who is still chilling after her pole dance workshop playfully shouts it at her friend, who has landed a solid left direct on my boxing glove. 'Well and truly,' she calls back. She smiles kindly at it. I know I don't have to take her slaps personally....
Theatre Festival Boulevard is a highlight of the festival summer every year. Because there are no barriers and because it carries the casual atmosphere of the city in every fibre. But it goes even further. Here are my seven learning moments: 1: Boulevard is more accessible than the city itself Some people find it verging on the hysterical, but...
With his slavery novel The Underground Railroad, American writer Colson Whitehead broke through worldwide. His impressive new book The Nickel Boys is once again about a gruesome page in recent American history. Torture, rape, even murder: at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, it was the order of the day. For as many as 111 years, the...
The Theater aan de Parade is slowly but surely starting to become the blot of cultural politics in Den Bosch. The outdated theatre has too low ceilings, too much plush, asbestos and past to still be a credit to the Brabant provincial capital. Viktorien van Hulst, director of the now 35-year-old Theatre Festival Boulevard, made a point of saying during her opening speech on 1 August that the...
It is, so in his normal clothes, a cheerful, spontaneous guy who walks up to me in the hotel lobby where we have arranged to meet. Jeremy Dutcher the Canadian singer who is one of the main guests at this year's Amsterdam Roots festival, hardly shows any traces of the jet lag he must have undoubtedly sustained from his flight, which took off a few hours earlier...
Calm and peace are but a thin layer covering the chaos of war and other violence in the world. In an extensive and richly varied themed programme, Eye shows how filmmakers have captured that in stories.
A survey shows that Dutch filmmakers are very concerned about the production conditions and quality of Dutch feature films. The Filmmakers Initiative wants to spark discussion and propose solutions. A symposium as a kick-off.
'Would you like to see my smurfs?' From anyone else's mouth such a question would sound strange, but with Nicolien Mizee you are not surprised. After all, the Haarlem-based writer's books are often a tad strange and absurd, and above all witty. The interview tape is already off, the tea is finished, and Mizee pulls out a kind of maquette...
What exactly was said remains unknown for now. That there was considerable discussion is clear. In any case, the result is clear: the Philharmonie Zuidnederland (which does not want to be written with capital letters) is back in business with the arts education projects in North Brabant. The brass band and kettle music, with which the Limburg-Brabant merger orchestra earlier announced all the little kids, together with three smaller youth theatre institutions, in...
Slowly but surely, the very latest in virtual reality (VR) is finished and we can start thinking about what you want to show, rather than how. Whereas at the first VR festival I still got whooping headaches from bad glasses, now I can be mesmerised by the beauty of the Amazon or beautiful animations. Movie theatres like Eye...
Zundert's flower parade, a piece of unique folk culture (since 1936!) in which the - non-native - Dahlia plays a leading role, had a tough time this year. Due to the drought, there were fewer flowers than other years and so improvisations had to be made by the hundreds of volunteers who, every year, make the village where the memory of Vincent van Gogh is alive and well again...
Robert Beck, the protagonist of Benedict Wells' debut novel Becks last summer, hopes, as a near-forty-year-old, to make his dream come true after all: a career in music. Wells (34) knows what it is to go all out to pursue your dream. He turned a difficult childhood into literature, and he became damn successful at it. Over the past...
With Toost, the Netherlands has gained a food truck festival that does not visit the capital cities but rather the smaller towns. This sometimes causes local friction, but almost always gratitude. And for a consumer who feels not stripped down but taken care of for a change. Halfway through our conversation, Toost Foodtruck Festival organiser Kris de Pee (30) is tapped on the shoulder by the...
Tightness. A feeling of oppression prevails when watching the new (mini)series from HBO's stable, Sharp Objects. The series launched this week, but I got to see a few episodes in advance. HBO's Sharp Objects is a film adaptation of the book of the same name by Gillian Flynn, author of, among others, the exciting Gone Girl. With Sharp Objects...
"In the Netherlands, we are actually on holiday," say Daphne (40) and Ilja (26), laughing. They are travel experts, with Japan as their core destination. "I visit a few festivals every summer, but whether I'm really a festival-goer? Not so much, I think." Seven years ago, Daphne was last to Lakedance, now she is "getting up to age" and got to go for...
The Film Academy presents the graduation films of the 2018 batch. Feature films and documentaries with many small, personal subjects. Awards for best documentary and feature film, for best screenplay and commercial, and for best film score. Frans Weisz appointed Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau.
Johann Sebastian Bach and Kate Moore in one concert programme. With this choice for the fifth episode of her 'Cello 020' series, cellist Lidy Blijdorp once again outdoes herself in originality. And the effect of this choice is phenomenal. Enhanced interaction Not only does she bring together works by two completely different composers, she further enhances the interaction by playing their...
The miracle happened right at the first location. On a bare piece of dune in front of beach café Oscars there are rocking benches. From one of those benches I looked, swaying, over a slope of marram grass, then a couple of terraces and beyond that the sea. As it was a weekday, but summer warm, some bathers had already settled into beach chairs. Crowded it was...
Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven will 'do something' for the Metropole Orchestra this autumn. She made this known in a letter to the House of Representatives today. Literally it says: 'I will include the solution to the Metropole Orchestra's problem in my consideration around the deployment of the 2019 coalition agreement funds tranche. My consideration in this regard is that in the coalition agreement,...
The Drenthe village of Erica was rocked on the last weekend of April by the cosy noise festival Pitfest. And that attracted a motley mix of people. I walked around there for a day. A golf cart zooms across the roundabout of the 4-star resort in the outskirts of the Drenthe town of Erica. To the right of the tarmac are tightly mowed golf courses, to the left is a plot of land...
Subscribe to our free newsletter. Because you can! Here's why. Holland Festival, Poetry International, a summer full of art. And meanwhile, a whole new arts system is being put together. The Netherlands is eager to get outside, experience music, experience art and eat food trucks empty. And flipping the subsidy system. It is a...
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...
The 47th Rotterdam Film Festival opens with Jimmie, a flight story upside down. Director Jesper Ganslandt on filming with his infant son and the connections with his debut Falkenberg Farewell.
On Saturday 2 December, Australian-Dutch composer Kate Moore (b 1979) will receive the Matthijs Vermeulen Prize for her composition The Dam. The prize money is €20,000, made available by the Performing Arts Fund. The prize was established in 1972 and named after the Dutch composer and critic Matthijs Vermeulen (1888-1967). Until now, it invariably went to men, some even getting it two...
Despite his advanced age, German composer Aribert Reimann (1936) is still very active. In October 2017, his opera L'invisible had its world premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, based on a play by Maeterlinck. On 14 December, the first performance of his cycle Die schönen Augen der Frühlingsnacht will already be heard at Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ. He composed it for soprano Mojca Erdmann and...
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