Future 400

This fourth episode of the Future 400 podcast is all about theater and dance. Battery Dance, New York City’s longest running public dance festival, is hosting the Dutch-Turkish choreographer Rutkay Özpinar as part of the Future 400 exchange. And the new play by Dutch theater director Ira Kip, ‘Kings… Come Home’, is a reflection on the impact of being uprooted.

Both Kip and Özpinar are searching for a global conversation that brings disparate cultures and histories together on the stage. “The reason why we dance is not just the music,” says Rutkay. “In every culture you can find dance, from a prayer to a celebration.”

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Design your look, design your life. Rambler Studios is a creative platform for raw talent. It offers young people a safe space where they can discover what they’re good at and find a sense of belonging – and maybe a career in street fashion.

Started by Carmen van der Vecht in Amsterdam in 2010, Rambler Studios has branched out to New York’s Lower East Side. It operates there under the wings of the Henry Street Settlement, a philanthropic institution dating back to the late 1800’s. In the same basement in a social housing project where he himself learned to sew, fashion coach Andres Biel helps kids create and realize their own ideas – “with some help from TikTok!”. On both sides of the Atlantic, the young people in the program say: “The most important thing I’m getting here are life skills.”

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‘From the Streets to the Heart’ is the second episode of my Future 400 podcast. It looks at work by Dutch and American photographers who are part of the annual international photo festival Photoville in Lower Manhattan. “Even though they are an Atlantic apart, there is a shared sensibility here.”

Dutch photographer Ernst Coppejans delves deep into the lives of LGBTQIA+ people living on the streets in New York. Kennedi Carter, a young Black photographer from the South, dresses people of color in a combination of her own imagining, of garb from colonial times and contemporary streetwear.

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This is the first episode of Future 400, a four-part podcast series marking the moment that the Dutch set foot on Manhattan 400 years ago: ‘New York Before New York’. We start by looking at New York before it was New York, hearing the voices of the people who already lived there: the Lenape.

When the Dutch colonists set foot on the island of Manhattan, four hundred years ago, there were already people living there: the Lenape. Historian Russell Shorto curated an exhibition for the New York Historical Society to tell the other stories about the town of New Amsterdam – and invited the Lenape to react with a powerful letter to an Unknown Ancestor. And Pauline Toole, New York’s Commissioner of Records, tells us about the wonderful stories of real live people of many faiths and nationalities living in New Amsterdam that can be found in the city’s 17th century archives. 

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