The Holland Festival is the Netherlands' leading festival, showcasing the best of what is being made internationally and nationally on the bigger stages.
The 77th edition of the Holland Festival closed on 29 June with a minute-long standing ovation for Georgina Verbaan who showed a phenomenal acting performance in the The Second Woman, a performance by Anna Breckon and Nat Randall, in which she played the same break-up scene for a full 24 hours with a hundred most non-professional counterparts. The day before, Victor Pilon closed...
Today, the Holland Festival presents the groundbreaking performance The Second Woman by Australian theatre-makers Anna Breckon and Nat Randall. In this theatre marathon, actress Georgina Verbaan plays the same break-up scene no less than 100 times over the course of 24 hours, each time with a different opponent. This extraordinary performance will take place on the stage of ITA (Internationaal Theater Amsterdam) and will be streamed live at Pathé...
"I didn't hear a song I didn't know." Over white wine after Trajal Harrell's The Romeo, the lady was quite grumpy. I might add that I hadn't seen a move I couldn't have made myself. And yet that did not make me cranky. On the contrary: rarely have I been so happy and relaxed...
This is what charisma looks like. Arthur Verocai, now 79, tall and lean, stylish jacket around bony shoulders, only has to look into the hall once to overwhelm the audience. In the Concertgebouw's main hall on Tuesday night, the Brazilian legend stood in front of the Metropole Orchestra to belt out work from his scarce albums. He hardly needed to...
One of the lesser-known and therefore hidden gems of this Holland Festival can be found in the Transformatorhuis of Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek. In that space, a single artist spends six hours every day shovelling 40 tonnes of sand from one pile to another. It sounds strange, but those who are there make something very special
Probably the most famous murder of a woman for what she is is that of the fictional Carmen, a free-spirited young Spanish woman with a fear of commitment. Opera composer Georges Bizet immortalised this character from a French story by Prosper de Merimée, making the crime of passionel a common term for what is none other than femicide. That habit of men killing women...
Jet fighters, drones, thunderstorms with accompanying flooding and lovely babbling brooks with the occasional bird in a pine tree. All of Austria descended on the Gashouder at Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek grounds this weekend and it is what it promised: spectacle as only Austrian music spectacle can be. Georg Friedrich Haas's work 11000 Saiten is a great superlative: surround with emdr and...
Future health minister and deputy prime minister Fleur Agema graduated as an architect early this century with a study on the ideal prison. Artist Jonas Staal re-examined her graduation design a few years ago. Agema appears to have an extremely dystopian vision of the world in which prisoners and guards must pass through a disorienting, inky-black, concrete hell to...
Live music in the theatre, I long for it more and more. Performances in which actors are accompanied by a soundtrack, amplified with or without transmitter microphones, always only half captivate. You soon find yourself watching a kind of live performed film. But without the comfort of a cinema and the technical capabilities of the camera.... Sunday 9 June sat in...
Jazz-Rock, it still exists. In all those years of sitting in the theatre, reading books or listening to David Bowie or Rufus Wainwright, I had kind of forgotten about it. Music by real men, Heavy Metal for people who have studied for it, Gothic but with several conservatory degrees under their belt. Subtle chopping where the drummer's left hand is a 17/23rd...
That's where Christiane Jatahy had me for a moment. When during her directed and devised story 'Despois do Silencio', one of the actresses falls into a Winti-like delirium, and her colleagues try to keep her from colliding unceremoniously with spectators in the front row, I briefly think it is real. That's how used to reality we are by now...
It was busy at Amsterdam's Westergas area, this Thursday, 6 June. Fantastic, of course, that not only do you have a couple of excellent running restaurants and clubs there, and the evening four-day march passes by while there is a big salsa party at the club near the world-famous Gashouder, but then it still feels a bit weird that the royal opening of the...
Tonight, the 77th edition of the Holland Festival opened in the presence of Her Royal Highness Princess Beatrix. In the opening speech, festival director Emily Ansenk said that "the world's most urgent groundbreaking performing arts come together in June in Amsterdam.It may be here in all its multiformity. If you are 77 years old, and have lived through all sorts of eras, developments and governments, then...
There was a time, not so long ago, when the Holland Festival had a reputation for being elitist. The festival, which was founded in 1947 to get the culturally starved Netherlands back on track after World War II, had a bit of that about it because, for a long time, "being elitist" was also completely...
Three more weeks and the Holland Festival is about to start again! The 77th edition of the Holland Festival opens at the Amsterdam Gashouder on 6 June with Rite of Spring, a double programme in which Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps is the inspiration for a film by Greek filmmaker and visual artist Evangelia Kranioti. This edition's associate artist, the...
To exist or not to exist, to be there or not to be there: the Hamlet adaptation to be seen during this Holland Festival puts the necessary spin on William Shakespeare's over-familiar 1602 play. Director Christiane Jatahy takes a female approach. Her Hamlet is not the young Danish prince who must avenge his father and has doubts. Shakespeare's Hamlet pretends to be...
KesselsKramer is the Holland Festival's new communications agency. After an extensive selection process, they decided on this collaboration that does justice to the design history of the Holland Festival. KesselsKramer is developing a new campaign for the Holland Festival 2024, in which they will focus on the artists who make the Holland Festival groundbreaking. Photography for the campaign will be provided by the...
From 28 to 29 June, Georgina Verbaan will play the lead role for twenty-four hours at the Holland Festival in Nat Randall and Anna Breckon's play The Second Woman, a unique hallucinatory cinematic theatre experience. During this theatre marathon, live at ITA and simultaneously on screen at Koninklijk Theater Tuschinski, she plays with a hundred different, to her unknown, antagonists every...
The 77th edition of the Holland Festival presents innovative international performing arts with more than 40 productions and over 380 artists at 21 different venues in Amsterdam. The opening takes place on Thursday 6 June with a special programme in the Gashouder, where Stravinsky's iconic Sacre du printemps will be accompanied by a film by Evangelia Kranioti, and Caroline Shaw's Music in...
ITA, HOLLAND FESTIVAL AND NDT PRESENT BIBERATING PROGRAMS ONLINE, IN DIGITAL THEATER International Theatre Amsterdam, Holland Festival and Nederlands Dans Theater will present groundbreaking programmes online, in the Digital Theatre, during the Christmas holidays. In order to connect makers, companies and (inter)national visitors, the initiators choose a programme during the Christmas holidays. The ideal period to be together, to feel...
Ticket sales start on 28 November for the first four performances for the 77th edition of the Holland Festival. 11,000 Saiten ('11,000 strings') by composer Georg Friedrich Haas is a spectacular sound experience in Amsterdam's Gashouder, by fifty pianists and the ensemble Klangforum Wien. Choreographer Trajal Harrell returns with The Romeo, his new large-scale dance performance. The Bird of...
The associate artist for the 77th Holland Festival in 2024 is Brazilian theatre director, filmmaker and writer Christiane Jatahy (Rio de Janeiro, 1968). Among other things, Christiane Jatahy will present Hamlet, a co-production with Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe from Paris. Shakespeare's play will have a female title role and is the starting point to reflect on the world we live in, and how...
The 76th edition of the Holland Festival opened on 1 June with Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Simon McBurney and closed on 1 July with Requiem for Nature by Tan Dun, Pierre Audi and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. With over 80,000 visitors, an average audience attendance of over 80% and many sold-out venues, the festival was...
The Casady sisters, since they went through life together as CocoRosie in 2003, have developed a totally unique sound. Yesterday, they were guests at the Holland Festival, at the invitation of their friend ANOHNI. The latter, as associate artist, introduced this year's festival audience to the female and queer side of the New York art scene. CocoRosie are with...
The dome of the imposing former Gashouder on the Westergasfabriek grounds turns out to offer excellent acoustics for music. There, last night, the premiere of Indra's Net, the latest composition by singer, director and filmmaker Meredith Monk, took place. Famous mainly in the United States, where she has been composing and performing minimal music for more than 50 years. Since 1978, together with her...
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