Fewer audiences, but fuller halls for @hollandfestival 2013

69,500 visitors, at least 5,000 fewer than previous editions, but the halls were fuller. With 82% audience occupancy, the Holland Festival organisers are satisfied with the 2013 festival. Whether that higher occupancy rate, apart from the smaller number of performances (14 fewer than last year) is also due to smaller halls, is impossible to find out from here, but the fact that the large Theater Carré, with its many unsellable low-visibility seats, was also hardly used this year will certainly have helped.

An adventure it certainly was, the 2013 Holland Festival: after all, there had been major cuts in funding, and with it the possibility that the festival would sink back into the malaise it had fallen into in the late 1990s. At the time, every year there was a cry that the festival had become redundant. At the time, the Netherlands' most prestigious festival was also unable to keep up with the world's best due to lack of money. Thanks to an increase in government funding in the previous decade, it was able to climb back up from the valley, becoming a national and even international leader.

The usefulness and necessity of the Holland Festival is now no longer in doubt, and artistic director Pierre Audi should be proud of that. Next year, he bids farewell after a period in which he has put the Holland Festival on the map as a festival of leading international music theatre. This year too, it was mainly with music, dance and musical theatre that the festival scored with audiences and reviewers.

Unforgettable are the performances of The Wild Duck from Australia, When the mountain changed its clothing of Heiner Goebbels and the Mahlerlieder, performed by an Austrian humming orchestra. Disturbing and inescapable were The Pyre and Exhibit B. Contested the performances of Jan Fabre and the Berliner Ensemble. Musically, Brooklyn Babylon in particular managed to move with a beautiful combination of streetwise music, and effective street painting.

The Cultural Press Bureau attracted significantly more visitors this year with the articles we published. In the end, over 15,000 visitors managed to find our previews and reviews. The pieces were also well read, as evidenced by the average visit duration of over three minutes per page.

You can our coverage read here.