Respect for the many resistance fighters against slavery connects Romana Peace in 'Time will teach us' with anger at 'the system' in which exploitation continues, and with the pains in her personal life. Lokay, a teenager still, flees from the plantation on St Maarten, is caught again and physically punished by the white owner: a breast cut off, she bled almost to death in hellish...
Het Amsterdam Museum heeft samen met de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands Institute for Conservation+Art+Science+ (NICAS) en Naturalis Biodiversity Centre onderzoek gedaan naar de herkomst van het goud van de Gouden Koets. Lang was onbekend waar het bladgoud waarmee de koets is verguld vandaan kwam. De samenstelling van het goud is in een uitgebreid onderzoek vergeleken met monsters uit Suriname en Zuid-Afrika.…
Het getuigt of van enorm lef, of van grenzeloze naïviteit, om een musical te maken waarin een slavenhandelaar in Afrika door een liedje bekeerd wordt tot een leven in liefde en respect voor de medemens. Toch is Yemandja, het stuk dat in een decorloze uitvoering werd gebracht in het Holland Festival, eigenlijk precies dat. Ik zou het ook kunnen uitleggen…
Who should apologise for the history of slavery and what happens when apologies are made? Theatre group Aluin and Raymi Sambo Makes are jointly creating the theatre performance Ik zeg toch sorry about the history of slavery. The premiere is next June during Oerol. After the summer, a theatre tour will follow from September to December 2022. I say sorry anyway is an exciting fusion...
Inmiddels heeft iedereen die een beetje bekend is in Nederland wel meegedaan aan een show waarbij geheimhouding essentieel is. Dat kan gaan van het relatief onschuldige verborgen houden van de winnaar van De Slimste Mens tot de extreme geheimhouding die onderwerp is van Wie Is De Mol (WIDM) en die uiteindelijk leidt tot de wurgcontracten die aan talentenshows als The…
Vandaag maakte Koning Willem-Alexander bekend dat de Gouden Koets voorlopig niet gebruikt zal worden. De gerestaureerde Gouden Koets, die na een restauratie van ruim vijf jaar nog tot en met 28 februari in een glazen behuizing op de binnenplaats van het Amsterdam Museum staat, zal wél weer te bezichtigen zijn. Het Amsterdam Museum opent namelijk de poorten naar zijn binnenplaatsen…
Op vrijdag 26 en zaterdag 27 november 2021 organiseert het Amsterdam Museum een Engelstalig symposium over het Nederlandse koloniale verleden en de manieren waarop deze geschiedenis wordt behandeld en vorm geeft aan hedendaagse praktijken in culturele en academische instellingen. Het Amsterdam Museum organiseert het symposium samen met ASCA, NIOD, Rijksmuseum, The Black Archives, Universiteit van Amsterdam, NMVW & Vrije Universiteit en Stadsarchief Amsterdam.…
The Dutch Slavery Museum has moved a step closer, now that the Arts Council (Amsterdam) and the Council for Culture (Rijk) have issued an opinion on the exploration of a direction group presented earlier this year. This satisfies official procedural due diligence, although establishing the necessary museum in this way seems likely to take at least as much time....
Better to die standing than to live kneeling. The statement is fresh in memory after the murder in the Lange Leidse Dwarsstraat, as a mantra in praise of Peter R de Vries, his fearlessness, non-conformism, straightforwardness and honesty. This same statement jumps out even from the first paragraphs of the introduction to the biography of poet Jef Last, written by Rudi Wester.1....
It is very easy not to dwell on things. For instance, I learned at school that we sailed to the East to get nutmeg and pepper. Stuff that just rolled off the trees into the boats there and that we could sell very expensively here. Sugar, another thing. That came to us from plantations just like that,...
Swart Gat/ Golden Age (Dunguu olo - katibo-ten) is a theatrical installation about Amsterdam's slavery past and Maroon culture from Suriname. The concept is by Tolin Erwin Alexander, Berith Danse and designer Bartel Meyburg. The theatrical installation, which has lost none of its urgency, has been further finished and will start again in summer 2021! From 17 June (19 June...
A good friend calls me, sounding like he wants to share and check something important. He was talking to his sister this week about the Nieuwsuur headline: Black Lives Matter: Was it a turning point or a hype? His sister stumbles over the title and notices that important parties are left out of this item and that stings. On the...
On Tuesday 30 June and Wednesday 1 July 2020, Aan tafel can be seen at the Maaspodium, Rotterdam, a performance on the history of slavery as part of Keti Koti. It is the third year in a row that Maas is trying to make this painful part of history palpable through theatre. The performance will be made (coronaproof) and performed by Sue-Ann...
Shortly after Alfred Birney was awarded the Libris Literature Prize in 2017 for The Interpreter of Java, he ended up in hospital with a heart attack. In his new novel On Hold, Birney's alter ego Alan Noland is in hospital waiting for open-heart surgery. He was just starting to feel fit again after his five-way bypass surgery and two years of patching up...
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...
On 3 October, the opera Harriet by Hilda Paredes will premiere, dedicated to legendary African-American freedom fighter Harriet Tubman (c. 1822-1913). In the mid-19th century, she escaped from a slave existence, after which she risked her life to free many peers via the so-called Underground Railroad. After years of wrangling, the US Department of the Treasury decided in September 2018 to take Tubman's effigy and...
Steve McQueen is an artist who narrates big and difficult topics in a physically tangible way. Hunger strike, sex addiction and our discomfort with male sexuality, slavery. These are the things we would rather not see anymore, not want to discuss and certainly not want to feel. In his feature films, McQueen manages to strike a balance between the aesthetic and the physical ...
Whether the artists performing on DWDD got paid for their performance. Esther Ouwehand of the PvdD did not know. She was not the only one, at the roundtable session on Wednesday 25 April on the labour market in the cultural sector. None of the MPs, fund managers, trade unionists present knew. So we asked on facebook and twitter how it was even done....
Poets Danez Smith and Patricia Lockwood once broke the internet with their virtuoso wordplay. Smith with a frothy tirade about ineradicable racism and police brutality in America (Dear White America) and Lockwood with a heartbreaking/funny poem about her rape (Rape Joke). Both have outgrown their hypes. They have secretly been doing a fantastic job for years, using Twitter, YouTube, paper and stage...
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...
Goede timing blijft altijd lastig. Net nu de middenstand klaar staat voor het Sinterklaasseizoen maakt de Raad van Toezicht van Kunstencentrum Witte de With bekend dat de naam gaat veranderen. Die naam kwam ter discussie te staan in de golf van publieke opwinding over appropriatie, unionistische beelden en genoegdoening voor het slavernijverleden van Nederland. In eerste instantie leek het te…
[This post was already online under the title 'Save us from the Transition Office', but has been modified in a few details] While you are preparing for a well-deserved holiday, people in the arts sector are working on a new model. That new model is needed because the old model is no longer adequate. That old model, and we are of course talking about our...
One of the highlights of the year is always the presentation of 'the figures' by the Association of Theatre and Concert Hall Directors (VSCD). As it happens, these are unabatedly positive. For years. And so for years it has been a challenge to find out why those positive figures are so difficult to reconcile with the picture of reality. That not at all...
In art, you work because of your passion, not because of the money. That's so, that was always so. In art, it's even suspicious if you care about money. And if you do worry about money once, it immediately comes out rotten. Are you going to shout about culture, march der your...
Het veelbesproken The Birth of a Nation over een Amerikaanse slavenopstand krijgt een preview op twee Nederlandse festivals. Debuterend regisseur Nate Parker leende brutaalweg de titel van beroemde en omstreden klassieker.
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