We could say something derogatory about Belgians and arithmetic, but we won't. Firstly, because the Belgians have disbanded themselves and, secondly, because there is nothing wrong with the Flemings' ability to calculate. At least, those Flemings who have calculated at the Flemish Theatre Institute how the subsidy money for the arts is spent. In Flanders. And it turns out that.
After the cry, now the official piece. With a fitting, tad Den Uyl/Van Agt-like title: 'Less where it can be done, better where it must be done.' But let's not laugh too hard. It is quite brave what they have done. Gitta Luyten, Marianne Versteegh, Joke Hubert, Henk Scholten, Siebe Weide and Ben Holvast, together as bosses of arts umbrellas and cultural sector institutes also...
Art costs money. The current Rutte administration has hammered that into it: it's expensive, no one but a small club of insiders goes there, and either way those are leftists or pseudo-leftists who can easily pay for it themselves. So much for the government's opinion. The opinion of the art world can be guessed: it is...
We had done the necessary research work ourselves, and then it turned out that something had also been sent to the House of Representatives, which contained many more figures. We asked for those figures and were shocked. After 2012, when the current arts plan expires and after a year of inaction and wait and see for the whole sector a...
Jeffrey Meulman, director of The Dutch Theatre Festival TF, reacted to Rutte's statements in Buitenhof, which also seen on this site his. He then received a letter back
Interesting things are happening these days. The digital revolution is beginning to have traces of a real revolution. No one has yet set themselves on fire, as in Tunisia, but more and more people are taking to the virtual streets to overthrow the old powers: after the record companies, which let themselves be overwhelmed by people downloading, and the newspapers, which let themselves be overwhelmed by people searching freely for information, it now seems to be the turn of book publishers.
We were at a debate day in The Hague that was as inconspicuous as it was historic on 13 December 2010: it was about the budget of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the (first?) Rutte government, and that was the budget in which, at the request of the supporting party PVV, the amount to be cut in the arts budget was set at 200 million, with heritage and museums having to...
"It cannot be ruled out that previous choices made by the cabinet, such as on the VAT increase and the sharp cut in the Music Centre of the Netherlands Broadcasting Corporation, together with the announced cuts will cause irreparable damage to the cultural sector." Of course, even though Halbe Zijlstra has thankfully banned the term "Leftist Hobby" when it comes to culture, the distinguished gentlemen...
They researched it. And so it turns out to be true. You can also use sustainable light bulbs on stage. And that saves energy. Whether this will immediately get rid of the government's idiotic revenge cuts remains to be seen, because 200,000,000 euros is quite a lot of energy-saving light bulbs. But the start is there. From the press release of the Association of Stage Technology: With...
What she does is vulnerable to the point of confrontation. Theatre-maker Lotte van den Berg has such a personal view of the world that, outside the safe context of theatre, it can come across as absurd. Or alienating. On Sunday 26 September, she returned with the members of her Dordrecht-based location theatre company OMSK back from a four-month stay in the Congo capital Kinshasa. A full house in Rotterdam's Gouvernestraat then got to be there when they unpacked their bags a few hours after landing.
An intimate living room conference among living works of art. That is the best way to describe 'House without a maid, a "conversation, performance and installation project" by Jorge León and Simone Aughterlony at Huis Sonneveld. In the former garage of the 1932 modernist villa, a select group of women gathered for two days to discuss the phenomenon of the maid. In other rooms of the imposing...
'So, Dr Lacan, are women more susceptible to madness? ... Is the man susceptible to hysteria?' In 'Deserve', part of Jorge León and Simone Aughterlony's triptych about the maid, the makers dig deep, very deep. They follow the intriguing line of the great debunkers in our history of thought: from Hegel's master-slave analysis through Marx and Freud to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Core of...
Things happen in places like this that cannot bear the light of day. We are deep in Rotterdam's container port, among the neon-lit transhipment yards and dark warehouses. In one of those raw warehouses are two truck trailers. One is set up as an illegal sewing workshop, the other is filled with earth and rubber tyres. They form the backdrop for Hungarian theatre-maker Kornél Mundruczó's performance 'Hard to be a god'.
The show tells the fairly inimitable story of Karoly, who wants to make symbolic torture porn to blackmail his father with it. That father once raped his sister and is now an MEP. Three women are lured to this sewing studio under false pretences to participate in those videos. Things do not end well for them, partly because the foreign film director has rather sadistic tendencies, damaging the ladies to the point of rendering them useless.
Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg is velvet red. Theatre Bellevue, the beating heart of the Amsterdam Fringe Festival, whorish pink. The Amsterdam Fringe, that means performances in more than 25 places. In theatres, but also on location. From 2 to 12 September 2010 Henk de Jong for The Dodo and performing arts trade journal TM in search of the pearl of the Fringe. Here he keeps a diary, and a longer article by him will appear in the next issue of TM.
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