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The Netherlands' most intimate film festival can be found in Leiden: #LIFF15

10 years ago, it all started. A group of recent graduates of Leiden University found that their dear Alma Mater [hints]Latin for nurturing or caring mother. Alma mater refers to the university or sometimes the school where someone received their education. In ancient Rome, the term Alma Mater was used for the mother goddess; in the Middle Ages, Alma Mater referred to... 

Emperor Constantine and the great upheaval in Rome

The man with the firm jaws and vacant, upward-looking eyes is not particularly attractive. His face does appear on all the posters around town. However, it is something other than this robust stone head against the black background that triggers you, on the poster of the exhibition at the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. That is the tilted O of the... 

The 5 concerts not to miss at Musica Sacra

From Thursday 17 September onwards, Maastricht will be dominated by four days of arts festival Musica Sacra. Started in 1983 as the European Festival of Religious Music, other art disciplines are now also presented, in atmospheric churches and other historical venues. This year's theme is 'The Way', loosely inspired by the pilgrimage route to pilgrimage site Santiago de Compostela, with the central question of whether... 

Montecelio, M.C. Escher, March 1924, East Indian ink on paper, © The M.C. Escher Company BV, Baarn

Newly discovered and unique: unknown Escher on display in The Hague #escher

Museum Escher in het Paleis has acquired an unknown early work by M.C. Escher. The museum announced this today. In the print, a depiction of the Italian town of Montecelio, the famous graphic artist experimented with a variety of techniques. The museum is delighted. Because it's not every day you find an unknown but important Escher anymore. It must have been quite a marriage,... 

Crushing Benvenuto Cellini by Terry Gilliam

Even before the final notes of Benvenuto Cellini had sounded, the audience erupted in loud cheers and cheers last night (12 May). So Monty Python director Terry Gilliam's team pulled out all the stops to make this first opera by Hector Berlioz an unforgettable experience. That his dadaesque staging evokes memories of the joke-and-roll approach of the... 

We had coffee with the uncrowned king of Iranian war photography

Moshen Rastani (1958) grins broadly, looks at me penetratingly, gestures, and puts his hand on his heart. "What is happening now, here, between you and me, in this conversation. That's what matters to me. We meet face to face. We communicate. Through each other's faces, we can visit the other's secret world. Such a camera is just a tool to make that contact."

Rastani was thrown into photography by the outbreak of the Iraq-Iran war. He emerged...

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Glass pendant in the shape of a face (4th-3rd century BC)

By the way, that city did not need to be destroyed at all: 7 myths about Carthage debunked in Leiden

The bad news is: most myths about Carthage are nonsense. The good news is, the reality is at least as fascinating. Until 10 May 2015, the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (RMO) in Leiden is showing the multifaceted history of a port city in present-day Tunisia, and once formidable rival of the Roman Empire. It simultaneously offers a glimpse... 

Spaghetti 'Thyestes': classic roots work fiercely in a new preparation

In Rome, they have known what good food is for 20 centuries or so. Bloodletting is everything. Seneca, a Roman of the better sort, wrote plays in which bloodshed was elevated to an art. Audiences feasted on them, just as they feasted on Seneca's recipes in Shakespeare's time, 1,500 years later, and as we feast on Game of Thrones on TV now. It can't be gory, can't be cruel enough. We like that.

Simon Stone is an Australian wonderboy, at least in theatre. He mixes the casu...

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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.

La Grande Bellezza and Borgman best films 2013 according to Dutch film press

Members of the Dutch Circle of Film Journalists (KNF) and other film critics have named the Italian tragicomedy La Grande Bellezza as the best cinema film of 2013. According to the same critics, Alex van Warmerdam's Borgman is the best Dutch film of this year, the KNF announced.

Paolo Sorrentino's La Grande Bellezza received the most points after a record 91 Dutch critics cast a vote. The film, about a 60-year-old journalist looking for...

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Figaro! Figaro! Figaro! Reisopera on tour with Rossini's masterpiece on order

'Give me a shopping list and I will set it to music,' the Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini is said to have said. Perhaps apocryphal, but fitting for the man who composed faster than musicians could rehearse his scores. Where Wagner needed a lifetime for 14 operas, Rossini wrote triple that. In barely fifteen years.

Along with Bellini and Donizitti, Rossini is the master of bel canto opera, and these three composers wrote in more or less the...

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Blogging vs demons #wu13

"We don't use social media because it's cool," says Tunisian internet activist Sami Ben Gharbia. "But in a dictatorship, it is the only way to inform people about what is really going on. To fight the demons in society. I am not a techny Became because it's fun. I just needed useful knowledge about internet codes, to improve my civic activism possible."

'It felt a bit like the first time sex: way too direct, rushed, overactive and largely based on insecurity': Ivo Dimchev in battle with Franz West's wearable art

"What the fuck should I do with this?" was choreographer and performance artist Ivo Dimchev's (1976) first thought when confronted with the artworks of Austrian artist Franz West. After Dimchev's solo performance Some Faves (2010) in Vienna, West, a multi-awarded creator of bizarre sculptures and objects, sought contact with the choreographer. He asked him to make an improvised video based on his... 

Berlin 2012 - Shakespeare knew it all

Would today's revolution makers even study Shakespeare? In Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die), the competition entry by the Italian Taviani brothers, we witness the preparation and performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Anyone watching this with the world's noise in mind will often feel a shock of recognition. The tragedy about a coup in ancient Rome shows... 

Culture in the Christmas package, Orientalis stops and all of Nijmegen-West without a library

Delightful news from the world of Christmas packages. 1/3 of interviewees said they did want to find a cultural experience in the Christmas package, as they visited a cultural actvity less often than they would like: 43% because of the crisis and 35% because of lack of time. Respondents said they would go more often if they got a discount. The proposed merger of... 

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