The 74e edition of the Holland Festival concluded last weekend with the performances Transverse Orientation By Dimitris Papaioannou, Age of Rage of ITA-Ensemble and Pierrot Lunaire by Marlene Monteiro Freitas. The festival collaborated with two associate artists, Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and French-Austrian theatre maker Gisèle Vienne. Twenty-three companies played one hundred and eleven performances in twenty-five days. The festival presented seven world premieres and co-produced eleven international productions. An extensive context programme was presented around the performances and concerts, partly online, which reflected on the current themes within the festival and showed what is on the minds of the makers.
Holland Festival in corona time
The Holland Festival has chosen to organise a live festival in September 2020 in the belief that it is important that audiences and performers can share a physical experience. Bringing audiences and many creators and performers together (live), in different art forms and from different perspectives in an international context, the festival sees as its main reason for existence. Because of the corona pandemic and related government restrictions, it was uncertain until the last minute whether the festival would be allowed to go ahead, even though the organisers were working towards a live edition as much as possible. The Holland Festival received permission from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science on 21 May to start under conditions of Testing for Entry on 3 June.
Visitors
The festival, which was able to sell less than 30 per cent of its total venue capacity due to the one-half floor measure, welcomed 15,000 visitors to its theatres and concert halls. The festival presented six streams (partly live) that together attracted more than 3,250 viewers from forty countries. The context programme with eighty-six activities provided another approximately 3,500 viewers/listeners/visitors.
Associate artists
The festival collaborated with two associate artists: Ryuichi Sakamoto and Gisèle Vienne. They showed new and existing work. In consultation with them, the festival's artistic team invited makers associated with them or of great interest to them. The festival co-produced the new performance Time by Sakamoto, which had its live world premiere at the festival and could be seen worldwide as a stream. Vienne showed the renewed work Kindertotenlieder and her most recent production L'Étang, also a co-production of the Holland Festival.
Striking performances
Other work that stood out was The Sheep Song by Belgian theatre company FC Bergman. In co-production with the festival, they presented a modern fable about finding identity. As is often the case with a festival production, the performance elicited many reactions. The Planet - A Lament by Indonesian director and filmmaker Garin Nugroho, scheduled to open the festival in 2020, could still be shown and garnered much admiration. New to the Holland Festival was the Dutch duo Boogaerdt/Van der Schoot, who presented the installation Fremdkörper presented, where visitors could attend a ceremony inspired by ancient Greek sleeping rituals. Performance artist Phia Ménard, also at the Holland Festival for the first time, presented a powerful wordless performance on the constructions of man in the Purification Hall. At the Bimhuis, the experimental, Japanese rock band Kukangendai showed a contrarian sound that put the listener on edge. The Swiss-Georgian producer and composer Alexandre Kordzaia was inspired by Sakamoto's music and brought with the concert Kordz x Sakamoto the Muziekgebouw in raptures. The highlight of the festival will be Dans la Forêt by Massimo Furlan and Claire de Ribaupierre, a nocturnal walk through the forest. Due to circumstances, this performance will take place in September 2021 at the Smithuyser Forest in Hilversum.
Online: podcasts and video
The festival, together with The National Opera and Staatstheater Hannover, presented the first act of Soft Valkyrie by US composer David Kanaga, a contemporary podcast version of Die Walküre by Richard Wagner, starring Stephen Fry, Claron McFadden and Attila Csihar, among others. The podcast will remain listenable until 2023. The second and third acts will appear after the summer.
All introductions to the performances were created and presented as podcasts by De Groene Amsterdammer with four presenters from their own ranks. The Conversations with various creators, which, like the podcasts, remain available on the festival website, give a nice insight into the artists' experiences.
The seventy-fifth edition of the Holland Festival will take place in June 2022.
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