Amsterdam still has some frayed edges in industrial heritage, but they are rapidly diminishing in size. The left bank of the IJ is slowly but surely turning into an affluent residential area. The NDSM wharf is still just a small postage stamp in an otherwise exceptionally pleasantly populated flat forest. Further east, there is still room. Behind the Jumbo, at the marina, there is still a hall complex left where artists and creative businesses can do their thing. 

Trajal Harrell (you can pronounce that name however you like) is this year as associate artist of the Holland Festival settled in the spaces of Likeminds, in an earlier life the home of Dansmakers Amsterdam. Old industrial heritage, with big rolling doors and all. The space now complies with all safety and health standards, but the surroundings still have that pleasant looseness that belongs to breeding places and frayed edges. 

Revived legend

Harrel is now using that place to revive a legend there. He has turned Likeminds into a kind of modern copy of Asbestos Hall, the place where Butoh was born in 1962 Tokyo. Butoh was modern dance that revolutionised the heritage of Japanese theatre bound by rigid rules and traditions. 

But more was happening in Asbestos Hall, we learned in an interesting 'talk' given between two performances. It was a place where anyone with an idea could get involved, there were performances, lectures, art exhibitions. Exactly how it went on, we don't know. Hardly any recordings have survived; we have to rely on the stories of those who experienced it. Stories that, as we know, gain in romance with each new retelling. A bit like Berlin's Berghain, where everyone also seems to have been, but rarely anyone new is admitted. 

Three visitors

Last night, I visited the reconstruction of Asbestos Hall. You can sign up for such 'visits'. In each case, you get short previews of work Harrel is making with his team of movers. In his signature Vogue-related movement language, we see successively a piece inspired by a famous play by Koltès and a danse macabre set to a rousing mix of pop songs. A true copy of Asbestos Hall it is not, Harrel says at the start, because there only about three or four visitors at a time could attend the creative bursts. Not the nearly 150 of today, 65 years later and on the other side of the world.

All sorts of things are happening around the presentations, and the Saturdays at this Holland Festival end with DJs, dancing audiences and performances by mostly young artists. It is the moment when things sometimes get gritty and a little uncomfortable, exactly as it must have been for the first visitors to Asbestos Hall. But different, of course, because different place, different time. 

No idea

The best thing about the leap to 'north' that the Holland Festival undertakes with this is that the audience is different, the atmosphere more ragged, the loftiness arises in a different way. The festival, around which still circles a legend that it is all posh and elitist, now makes it very clear that that image has nothing to do with reality. 

Though that won't easily sink in with visitors who stick strictly to their tastes and genre preferences. If you don't come anywhere other than ITA or the Concertgebouw, you will miss out on a lot of valuable stuff. A festival like this is most fun when you go and see for yourself something you really have no idea what to expect. Such is what this reinterpretation of Asbestos Hall offers.