More than 120 million books have sold bestselling author Wilbur Smith - two thousand Wembley stadiums full. His steady recipe - violence, magic, mystery, adventure, hunting and sex - has kept his readership enthralled for more than half a century. To keep his output high, he has recently started working with co-authors. Only the 'Egypt novels', which include his new book Pharaoh, he writes himself....
Yesterday, the chamber made €10 million available for the arts. This brings the tally of government cuts to at least €190,000,000 still. This hard-won extra is the last thing that could be asked for. Everyone agrees, the new system has been definitively embraced. The protest has made itself redundant now that the compromise has been made. And what have we got...
IDFA's tenth DocLab shows the state of the art in interactive documentaries, virtual reality and other media art. Juggle the artist's body or experience what it is like to be (colour) blind.
'It took me 18 years to make a new recording,' Croatian pianist Ivo Pogorelich (1958) says with a modest smile. 'Just as much time as it takes a baby to come of age.' It is Wednesday, November 2. A special moment, because on that day Pogorelich's CD-less new recording of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas No 22 and No 24 will go on...
Zvizdal, the documentary theatre portrait of Pétro and Nadia filmed by Berlin between 2011 and 2016, is not only in Paris, Ghent and Athens. This moving story can also be seen in the Netherlands until 11 November 2016. Near the place where an atomic experiment failed in 1986, Berlin and Zvizdal tell a moving story about an old peasant couple. They remained as...
There are very, very many artists and creatives who did not start out as entrepreneurs but need or want to get into business. Their number has only increased since 'the Halbe Zijlstra period'. I know them, I mentor some of them and last but not least, I am one myself. The perfect occasion to take some continuing education to me....
This play is going to cost me a lot of friends, but it needs to get out. After all, the theatre industry is doing badly. And I can see more and more clearly where that is due to. And for once it's not Halbe Zijlstra. Or the VVD, or the population, or the Netherlands in general, or the zeitgeist. And it's not because of Netflix either...
'What is the relevance of dance?' Since the conference The Relevance of Dance in March 2016, this question has been haunting my mind. That weekend, the main topic of discussion was the relevance of dance as a performing art to watch. An approach that left me unsatisfied, because my main interest myself is to know what the relevance of dance as an activity...
At the Magazine Media Café at the Amsterdam debating centre De Balie, journalists, publishers and freelancers discussed the phenomenon of distributed content. What is it and what can you do with it? Distributed content: a new online phenomenon Distributed content is actually reverse publishing. You offer content (stories, photos, video) where the reader is, instead of the reader...
'At the time, under the influence of the populists, we perhaps went too far in our attack on art subsidies.' So declared Jeroen Hatenboer, VVD member and culture alderman of the municipality of Enschede, during the annual Paradiso debate at the end of the Uitmarkt 2016. In the context of the current cabinet's sorry campaign, quite an interesting footnote, and entirely appropriate in the upcoming...
Tim Honnef is one of the few Dutch with a performance at the Fringe. How did he end up here?
The Netherlands is commemorating the MH17 disaster this month. Two years on, the question of guilt is still not unequivocally answered. The protagonist of Pieter Waterdrinker's novel Poubelle has less trouble with that: who holds himself mostly responsible. A conversation with correspondent novelist Waterdrinker: on modern European history, the Russian mentality, Great Literature and the shit of contemporary Europe.
Wine Dierickx ( Wunderbaum) and Ward Weemhoff (The Hot Shop) are an artist couple and we will know it. Engaging and with humour, they take us into their private lives or that which we think that is their private life. Know after all, we don't do it.
Is the language of poetry still free from ideology and manipulation? Or is it nonsense to think that poetic language escapes framing, the ideological loading of words? That is the main theme of this year's Poetry International poetry festival, which kicks off on Tuesday 7 June.
In times of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, what power does the novel still have? Every so often, fiction is declared dead, but the International Literature Fesitval Utrecht (formerly City2Cities), which takes place this coming weekend in the former post office on the Neude, wants to show that novel pessimists are completely wrong. Nine highlights from the programme. PJ Harvey The Literature House, like last...
Writing cost him his marriage, he is being shadowed by the secret service and risks being arrested in Angola. But José Eduardo Agualusa, who has a chance of winning the 2016 Man Booker International Prize with his new novel A General Theory of Forgetting, does not hesitate to put down his pen. 'I won't let myself...
Hello Darkness is the theme of the international literary festival Winternachten, this coming weekend in The Hague. It takes guts, in a time when everything has to be fun and cosy and we prefer not to spend our free time dealing with misery or 'heavy topics'. That is why we love Winternachten, because that festival really goes...
It will be the big task for companies and interest clubs in culture for 2016: how do we improve the image of 'the sector'? Next year - I predict - no expense will be spared to improve the culture sector's image. There will probably also be a study on how to improve that image. This...
There is usually no 'master plan' behind the best and worst things in life. Of course, 25-year-old Adele's 'come-back' has been carefully orchestrated, from the tentative release, to the title of the first song, the wave of spontaneous covers around the world and the announcement not to go on spotify (for now). In fact, the orchestration is so obvious that...
The Lower House caused serious problems for culture in the Netherlands a few weeks back. In a noble attempt to save a few festivals and a youth theatre, SP, D66, CDA and PvdA caused chaos. They passed a motion instructing our culture minister to still set aside money for a few festivals and an extra...
In the IDFA-themed programme Seamless Reality, artists explore the boundary between documentary and virtual reality. Experience the audio scent sensation or take a selfie in words.
Some think dance has nothing to do with politics. German theatre maker Helena Waldmann clearly thinks otherwise. Waldmann makes socially engaged dance theatre and uses her work to point out the 'social sore spots' of different cultures and sees transcultural similarities in them. Made in Bangladesh is a haunting and poignant performance that draws a parallel between the poor working conditions...
As I wrote in my earlier article about the Nederlandse Dansdagen, choreographer Loïc Perela won this year's Nederlandse Dansdagen Maastricht Prize. It earned him 12,000 euros to put into his new project HASHTAG. The award has helped some previous winners on their way (Monique Duurvoort, Joost Vrouenraets, Erik Kaiel, Muhanad Rasheed, Joeri Dubbe,...
Early this year, alt.country darling Ryan Adams posted a short snippet of a Taylor Swift cover on twitter and facebook. More was said to be on the way. A joke? A clever ploy to get the tens of millions of 'swifties' as Taylor's fans call themselves to listen to his music too? Neither, it turns out, now that Ryan Adams' 1989 is on the digital shelves: there will be...
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