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Pascal Schut. Photo: Hans Gerritsen

The audience speaks: Pascal Schut and Davide Cocchiara best dancers of 2013

The winners of the Dans Publieksprijs 2013 have been announced. On Friday 14 February, the prizes, divided into seven categories, will be awarded at The Hague's Theater aan het Spui. Besides winners Pascal Schut (Introdans) and Davide Cocchiara (The Red Piece), they are choreographers Conny Jansen Danst for the performance 'How Long is Now' and Isabelle Beernaert for the performance 'Red, Yellow & Blue'.
Conny Janssen is further presented with the Oeuvre Prize for her influence on Dutch dance. The dan...

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World premiere in Berlin of Dutch 3D experiment Above Us All by Eugenie Jansen

Contrary to what some expected a few years ago, 3D in artistic film is still a rarity. So when something pops up in this corner again, it immediately makes one curious. And I don't mean Cathedrals of Culture, the 3D film project by Wim Wenders and five other filmmakers starring buildings. That Wenders is a 3D believer we already knew.

I mean that other 3D premiere at the Berlin festival: Above Us All by Dutch Eugenie Jansen....

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Breaking: Rotterdam art fair changes name for fear of trousers factory

You can still eat a raw egg in English, but you can no longer use the word RAW for almost anything to do with style. Therefore, the RAW Art Fair is to be renamed next year. Sources at the organisers of the Rotterdam Art Week Art Fair confirm that this may have avoided a dragging court case.

Peter Eötvös writes DoReMi for violinist Midori

For years he was a conductor who also composed, but after operas such as Le balcon and Angels in America Hungarian Peter Eötvös (1944) is now a composer who also conducts. On Friday 21 February, he leads the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra in Vredenburg Leidsche Rijn in the Dutch premiere of his Violin Concerto No 2, DoReMi, which he composed in 2012 for Japanese violinist Midori. - I spoke to him last week.

Art Rotterdam Van Nellefabriek

The 15 toppers of contemporary art in Rotterdam, for those who missed it

Art Rotterdam is the leading contemporary art fair in the Netherlands. This year, as many as 96 galleries presented artworks by many more artists. Added to this, the same fair featured a video art section under the title Art Rotterdam Projections, a section of affordable art at WeLikeArt! and a section that featured as many as 92 artists featured in 2012 were honoured with a start-up grant from the Mondriaan Fund. The Van Nelle factory was bursting at the seams from it.

Nymphomaniac Vol. I in Berlin: half an hour longer, still the same film, still just as good

Lars von Trier is present at the Berlinale, wearing a T-shirt with the Cannes logo and the text 'persona non grata'. This refers to the riot at Cannes after his failed joke about Hitler. Since then, he has said nothing to the press. So we see on the monitor in the press room on Sunday afternoon

World premiere of deceased Ten Holt

Tonight, Feb 14 honours the North Netherlands Orchestra at the Oosterpoort in Groningen Simeon ten Holt, who died in 2012, with the world premiere of his orchestral work Centri-fuga, which he completed in 1979. It has never been performed to this day and will be christened tonight by conductor David Porcelijn. After the interval, Ten Holt's magnum opus will also be heard Canto ostinato for four pianos, performed by Sandra and Jeroen van Veen, Fred Oldenburg and Irene Russo. Earlier this week, other pianists also performed it at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. 

64th Berlin Film Festival opens with Wes Anderson's eccentric tragicomedy Grand Budapest Hotel

Imagine an old-fashioned sophisticated comedy, but filmed with modern speed, in the colourful and baroque style of a richly detailed comic strip full of plots and escapes, rounded off with a perfume of melancholy. That's when you come close to The Grand Budapest Hotel, the new film by Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic Mr Fox, Moonrise Kingdom) The Berlin Film Festival (6 - 16 February) thus secured an opening with a festive yet unconventi...

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4 reasons why the arts are going to lose a lot more. Municipal culture congress wrongly optimistic

It was ball in Rotterdam on Thursday, 30 January. At the Municipal Culture Congress, a few hundred officials, local politicians and arts organisations gathered to talk about where they could help each other. It was supposed to be a positive day. There had been long enough complaining and arguing: look ahead, hopeful into the future. Even if the worst is yet to come.

5 lessons from a Tilburg riot: superficial newspaper determines superficial cultural politics

Regional newspapers hardly do any real cultural journalism anymore. We know this because it was the reason we once founded Culture Press. Just how bad things are now, five years later, with art in the region and the way newspapers deal with it, was evident this month in Tilburg. A local journalist from the Brabants Dagblad had written a piece on questions raised by a PVV MP in the province. In the news story, this former sports journalist qualified...

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Municipalities pass on most cuts to the arts

Culture cuts have now reached 450 million euros. The Lower House earlier decided on cuts of 200 million. The cut in the municipal budget by the same Lower House now leads to a further cut of 250 million euro. This is calculated by research firm Berenschot in a report to be presented in Rotterdam on Thursday 30 January.

There are positive outliers. Utrecht, the fourth largest city in the Netherlands, is not cutting back further on culture. Daarme...

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Reinbert de Leeuw defies limits of orchestra in Saturday Matinee

Reinbert de Leeuw turned seventy-five last September, but already in May the VPRO honoured him with three full-length broadcasts on Radio 4. Together with Aad van Nieuwkerk, I made a selection from his best recordings of Kagel, Ustvolskaya and Louis Andriessen, among others, about which I also let him speak. This was followed in September by a real Reinbert festival and his own magazine. The magazine not only highlighted him... 

'The Dutch themselves do not realise what has been built up in this country.'

The cuts to arts have prompted many people to stress that art should be socially and politically relevant. For Samuel Wuersten, artistic director of the Holland Dance Festival, social and political relevance is a broad concept. It does not have to mean that art takes a stand against current issues. The way dance is rooted in society is much more important to Wuersten. This is reflected in Holland Dance Festival ...

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Video: why women don't play a role in art history, and how to (not) fix it

A sitcom they already have. Women. Girls is a resounding success, so who better than slightly snobby Girls star Jemima Kirke to explain why women have been kept out of art? Indeed. No one, they thought at the rather innovative Tate, and so they had her explain in a cheerful but also aptly-named way where things went wrong between the art world... 

Research shows: music taste is a matter of appointment and habituation

That we have a scale the way we do, and that we perceive certain chords as beautiful, is because we have learned it. And what we have learned is the result of agreements. In music, as in fine art or theatre, there is no absolute ideal to which artists should aspire. No absolute beauty, no divine spark, no heaven to which we all long to return, just a set of agreements.

43rd Rotterdam Film Festival celebrates 25 years of Hubert Bals Fund with opening film Qissa

9,000 euros was the amount with which Indian director Anup Singh's Qissa got off the ground a decade ago. That money came from the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) affiliated Hubert Bals Fund (HBF), which has been supporting filmmakers in developing countries for 25 years now. Last night, Qissa opened the 43rd edition of the Rotterdam festival. This makes the port city the world capital for independent film for ten days, as business director Janneke Starink said at the ...

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Ballet gala Dancers' Fund '79 photo Antoinette Mooy

6 Tips for a successful gala. (Ballet gala of the Dancers' Fund '79)

A gala should be festive. So the Ballet Gala of the Dancers' Fund '79 Foundation was festive. On Monday 20 January 2014, the fund's 17th gala took place at the DeLaMar theatre in Amsterdam, Joop van den Ende's glamorous ballroom.

A few tips for a successful gala.

1: Know who is giving you an award
The fund set up by Han Ebbelaar and Alexandra Radius thirty-five years ago is doing a huge service to the dance world. Almost every Dutch talent can be on...

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Video: 3 times swearing and ranting for the good cause and Heleen Mees

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: 

[Tweet "Tirade: Long uninterrupted monologue, recruiting, pedantic and sometimes abusive (filippica)"]

Come they:
Jan van der Wal against his stalker
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eTd1DK3KlM
About Heleen Mees by ...

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To hear Andrès Neuman speak is to want to buy his book #WU14

During Writers Unlimited, writers often mingle clandestinely among the common folk. And especially the younger, international authors, unlike the Adriaan van Dissen of this world who cannot take a step without being buried in a scrum of literary groupies. So it can happen that you find yourself drinking beer several times with someone who suddenly, completely unexpectedly, turns out to be a genius author. Like Andrès Neuman.

Neuman - small in stature, diabolically g...

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Show with substance is like good sex with a storyteller

 "A good book is a man seducing me is like sex with a stranger." Anne Provoost, the securely Flemish-talking essayist managed to shake up P.F. Thomése and Hermamn Koch for a moment. In a debate during Writers Unlimited, she made a plea for the not-true story, and did so in a metaphor that rather stirred the imagination. She quoted her own work "Fiction and Power" in which reading indeed becomes a rather physical affair:

"Your lich...

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Antjie Krog and Andries Samuel drive a tractor over your heart #WU14

"Of course she can write!" seems the mother of the award-winning South African poet Antjie Krog ever having exclaimed. "Because I can do it too, right? There's nothing special about that."

Blood creeps, even for Krog. After a ten-year career as a successful architect - and secretly grinding on words - her own son debuted Andries Samuel with the crushing, heartbreaking collection of poetry Wanpraktyk (2011). 

Writers Unlimited brought mother and son together on stage. Late at night. For the first time ever. And Wende sang to them. And god almighty how beautiful that was. By the way, you have to take it from us, because on pain of caning, pitch & feathers and fines from here to Siberia, it turned out that it was forbidden to film Wende singing (but we did, and the film was online for a while, but has now been removed from the internet).

Through Facebook, writers return to origins #wu14

It's because of Facebook. Says Ton van de Langkruis, artistic director of writers' festival Writers Unlimited: "You can no longer be that anonymous figure bombarding the world with hermetic texts from a locked attic room. The market is no longer for it. Your main means of communication is facebook. There you have to be open to questions, you communicate with your readers. We are back in the village square where the first stories were once told."  

With 'Like me' being the fest...

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