SAVE HJS SIGN THE PETITION!
Dutch text HERE
Please note – we are not asking for donations at this point
For 25 years The Henny Jurriens Studio (HJS) has been an essential part of the professional dance infrastructure of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Europe. Our subsidy request to AFK Amsterdam for 2021-2024 was judged 100% positively! Unfortunately, due to shortage of funds, it was only partially honored.
This means we may be forced to stop our activities in 2021
What will disappear?
HJS organizes more than 750 activities per year which benefit thousands of professional dancers, teachers and musicians. HJS offers professional training, workshops, and masterclasses in a wide variety of styles and areas within and related to the ballet, contemporary dance and urban genres. In addition, we arrange performance opportunities for dancers and choreographers, workshops for schoolchildren and much more. We have a modest subsidy from Amsterdam and a small overhead, but we play a grand role in the professional dance community!
HJS is the only institution of its kind in the Netherlands.
- Professional dance artists from more than 45 countries and often working in Holland train at the studio. For them training is not a hobby but an essential activity needed daily to keep them in shape for theatre performances.
- HJS is source of employment for more than 50 dance teachers and many dancers every year.
- Choreographers scouting for dancers drop by, or regularly teach or rehearse in the studios.
- The studio serves as a networking and information center, essential for the sector.
The subsidy we have (35% of our total revenues, the other 65% we earn from tuition fees) is used to keep the prices affordable for professional dancers and it also allows us to bring internationally known teachers and choreographers to Amsterdam. With the subsidy HJS makes the city an international cultural destination – an important priority according to the city’s cultural policy.
Without the full subsidy we will have to stop our activities.
If HJS stops it will have a direct effect on the quality of dancers and performances in Amsterdam and the rest of the country, and the international reputation of the city as a cultural magnet, especially for the dance field, will be lessened.
With this petition we ask the Amsterdam City government to find a way so that HJS can receive the full amount of the subsidy request, which has been approved by AFK Amsterdam, but because of lack of sufficient funds, cannot not be paid to us.
Please help ensure that HJS doesn’t close down but continues to support the dance community by signing this petition.
Ted Brandsen, Director Dutch National Ballet, says this about HJS:
For the past 25 years, the Henny Jurriëns Studio has played a vital part in the development of the contemporary and independent dance world in Amsterdam and far beyond. It is an important center for dance training, a meeting place and platform for learning and exchange for dancers, choreographers, teachers and dance artists of all sorts, and a crucial hub for dance in Europe.
Offering the broadest spectrum of professional dance training imaginable, HJS lives and breathes creativity and the search for excellence and for new ways of communicating with the body, welcoming dance practitioners from a great variety of backgrounds.
In a city where there are many independent dance makers, but no formal dance house or production center, HJS is the place where different artists from all over the world maintain and develop their artistry, learn from one another and find jobs and performance opportunities, and where dance makers find dancers and inspiration.
Ohad Naharin, choreographer , Founder Gaga Movement Language, artistic director Batsheva Dance Company, Israël
The Henny Jurriens is a unique institution has been providing excellent opportunities for dancers and choreographers for 25 years. I am writing with great concern for its future, Its loss would be a great blow certainly to The Netherlands but also to the international dance community.
Sincerely, Ohad Naharin
Akram Khan, choreographer, artistic director Akram Khan Company, London, UK
HJS is simply… a space. But its function is many. It is a sacred space, a creative space, a nurturing space, an explorative space, a reflective space. And more importantly, it is also a space for a community of artists, who continue to question the narratives that we live by, but also examines our place in the world.
And I have always believed that a space where bodies are allowed to express and question what it means to be human, is absolutely necessary for all of us, as a society and as a civilisation. But if this space is discontinued and disconnected from the very artists that are nurtured there, then we will not have that community to remind us of the immense importance of the connection we have with our bodies…… And if you don’t feel at home in your body, you will never feel at home in the world.’
Jubal Battisti