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...
Thursday 15 September saw the kick-off of arts festival Musica Sacra in Maastricht. While I was in a traffic jam, Bobby Mitchell played the eighth and final movement of Frederik Rzewski's piano cycle The Road, who himself was present. It also marked the conclusion of last year's festival, which was dedicated to 'the road', the journey made by pilgrims ...
TING! is a pitch-black anniversary spectacle by Scapino Ballet Rotterdam. But the NITS give the evening luster. Large billboards along the entrance to the Ferro Dome in Rotterdam still hint at the colourful history of the 70-year-old Scapino Ballet. Once inside the round gas holder, however, choreographer Ed Wubbe cuts straight to the chase with a world dipped in sombre tones. A...
Last weekend, more than 500 monuments in the Netherlands could be visited for free during the annual Open Monumentendag. Each year, this special day has a theme, this year it was 'Icons and Symbols'. After a thorough restoration, Hilversum's Studio 2 in the Muziekcentrum van de Omroep also opened its doors after 85 years. During the same week, a pop-up exhibition...
The 70th audition of the Gaudeamus Music Week ended Sunday 11 September in TivoliVredenburg with the presentation of the Gaudeamus Award. Director Henk Heuvelmans presented the prize for composers under thirty to American Anthony Vine (1988). The prize money of five thousand euros is intended for a new composition, to be performed during a subsequent edition. The jury, consisting of...
The main auditorium of Enschede's Wilminktheatre is empty, as is the orchestra pit. On the immense stage the set for the prologue of Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos. Theatre technicians discuss lighting and supertitling cues, everyone looks relaxed. Including director Laurence Dale. It is four o'clock Friday afternoon, two weeks before the premiere on 10 September. Earlier that Friday, the prologue - which...
Last year, arts festival Musica Sacra was all about 'the road', inspired by the many pilgrim routes that lead to holy places. This year, Maastricht is all about the 'sacrifice of love'. At first sight, an anachronistic theme, which seems at odds with sentiments in our current society. The aggression against asylum seekers, the ruthless pursuit of profit by...
When you go to a concert, you think about the music, the ensemble, the soloist and/or the conductor. Maybe you look up something about the composer but you never think about the programmer who made the concert possible. Astrid in 't Veld is someone who thinks about the range of concerts on offer years in advance in order to help you with...
Brexit has given an extra charge to many programmes at the Fringe. But what is British anyway, and where do you belong?
'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...
In Dance Around The World, ex-dancers Jan Kooijman and Ish Ait Hamou travel the world. Because dance connects. That makes for television that is more fun than you think. The programme, now being trialled in 3Lab, is a kind of cross between Top Gear and Looking for God. Were you already bombarded to death with celebrities looking for religion...
What is a memory worth? A first kiss, for example: how much poorer are you if it is forgotten? In hard euros. Such questions Greg Nottrot likes to ask his audience, and we, his grateful listeners, gladly join in his money thought experiments. The man who, with Oscar Kocken, came up with the revolutionary concept of the live talk show Order of the Day, now makes,...
Two very different forms of political theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe: feminist varieté and an immersive mode at the Maidan. You'll be throwing bricks before you know it.
The Amsterdam Fund for the Arts would love a central 'vibrant dance venue' in Amsterdam. But surely such a Dance House has just been torpedoed? It was striking: in the Introduction to Dance to the grants awarded by the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK) for the 2017-2020 grant awards, they note an "ardent need" for a "dance house": a central place for development, production and the...
Tim Honnef is one of the few Dutch with a performance at the Fringe. How did he end up here?
Since its inception, the NJO Music Summer has spread its wings. It started in 2001 as a summer course for music students who were allowed to work with internationally renowned musicians, composers and conductors. Since then, the NJO Music Summer has grown into an unmissable, audience-friendly festival, covering the entire province of Gelderland. On Friday 19 August, it takes a step across the border to Overijssel,...
Jetse Batelaan is one of the greatest theatre innovators of this still young century. His star rose in 2003, with a show in which five unique actors made reality theatre, and vice versa. Now, 13 years later, Batelaan has been the boss of one of the country's best youth theatre companies for some time, pushing the boundaries of that industry once again. And that...
It has been eagerly awaited for weeks: the Night of Poetry. For the thirty-fourth time next month, poets and audience gather around the stage for a night of verses and music. Regular presenter Piet Piryns, now fused with the event, looks back and ahead. He remembers it well, his first...
How to avoid choice stress at the Edinburgh Fringe bursting at the seams on all sides? We conduct an experiment: a day on the flow of flyers.
Friday afternoon, 5 August 2016. The weather is nice. In the intercity to Den Bosch, I read a book I couldn't finish on holiday. I can't manage it this time either: Den Bosch is always closer than you think. Again, the walk from the station to the Joseph Quarter takes less time than Google Maps indicated to me. That came...
The world is changing quite a bit and it's nice when artists do something with it. Festival Boulevard gives Lizzy Timmers the opportunity to make an attempt. That attempt, performed in a somewhat run-down cultural centre in a real Bossche power district, is quite something. Backurk is the name of this semi-documentary performance. Timmers has immersed herself in young, well-educated, well-integrated Turks who have come to the Netherlands to...
Amazing how more than a thousand performers at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival are willing to try their hand at the most difficult genre: comedy
Sometimes, people are so angry politically that they furiously turn down the chance to become the country's boss themselves upon hearing the word 'prime minister'. Oscar Kocken, the cheerful host and creator, together with Daan Windhorst, of 'Het Torentje' noticed this last Friday. He was trying to warm up a passer-by to his performance, in a tent on the...
Last year the hit of Stadsfestival Zwolle, to be seen again this year at NJO Muziekzomer: the opera Ik vertrek by Lucas Wiegerink. The NJO Muziekzomer kicks off its new edition today, 4 August, with the publicly accessible dress rehearsal of The Mother of Black-Winged Dreams by Hanna Kulenty. I wrote about this opera, in which protagonist Clara is besieged by inner demons, here last week....
They totally agree with us, the employers in the performing arts sector. These company and theatre directors and other managers of dwindling coffers, gathered in the Dutch Association of Performing Arts (NAPK), are circulating a letter today, calling on the Lower House to review the system of subsidies. After all, now the middle class is falling between the cracks. Has happened before, and...
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