The Holland Festival is the Netherlands' leading festival, showcasing the best of what is being made internationally and nationally on the bigger stages.
Antony Hegarty gives away the layered and emotionally charged show Cut the World with his pianist and the Metropole Orchestra. He shows that it need not be an issue to present more of the same. Meanwhile, the audience imagines themselves in the fairytale forest, eating out of his hand. Photo: Clive Osborne It is not the first time the...
Vincent Macaigne strikes me as a director you shouldn't fight with. Right from the first seconds of Requiem 3, he rams full steam ahead with the most hysterical opening scene I have seen in ages, and keeps on hacking relentlessly for 80 minutes. It takes a while to get through. But suddenly, in this tsunami of...
Claron Macfadden did it on her own, Alain Platel with 150 people and Andrea Breth in 54 scenes: touching. And convey a message. Dodo-reporters Mariska van der Meij, Daniël Bertina and Wijbrand Schaap look back at the first weekend of the Holland Festival 2012, and reviewer Maarten Baanders looks ahead to Emio Greco/PC's special performance. Kind of...
Two men are sitting together at a table eating spaghetti. One is wolfing down the plate of pasta in no time, while at the same time telling an amusing anecdote - just barely intelligible - with fierce gestures and self-righteous grunts. The other, an elderly guy, is totally ignored. Despite frantic attempts, the poor man just cannot manage to...
At two-thirds, the lump shoots in to not go out until the end. It happens at every Alain Platèl performance. Heartfelt sobs from the audience, lots of swallowing around you and the inevitable tears welling up like a natural disaster. To call the Flemish choreographer's work predictable because of this is going too far. What he and his company Les...
[View the story "Opening Holland Festival 2012" on Storify]Opening Holland Festival 2012On 1 June, the Holland Festival opened at Theater Carré. We were there, saw Platel's C(h)oeurs and tasted the atmosphere. Although it almost went wrong. Here's what to make of it on social mediaStorified by Cultureel Persbureau - Sat, Jun 02 2012 08:37:18The Dodo goes...
Top theatre from all corners of the world, big names we had never dared hope for, and a newsreel that we will broadcast at unexpected times. Festival day newspaper The Dodo, now a household name in festival land, is going all out at this year's Holland Festival. Of course. It is the dream of every blogger, professional or amateur, to be at the performances of the...
Maybe it is also just the wrong choice to see part three immediately after the first two parts. Maybe after a day of you or some settling down you will be able to appreciate Petry's text, on its own merits. Imagine a three-star dinner. A sensuous succession of small and medium-sized dishes, prepared with the...
On 28 February, Pierre Audi will present the programme of the 2012 Holland Festival at the City Theatre. As in 2010 and 2011, we will follow that festival closely with our online festival daily newspaper at www.dedodo.nl. That daily newspaper has now proven its right to exist, as more and more festivals want to collaborate with the Cultural Press Agency on this unique initiative. To the 'product-range'...
That frightens us quite a bit ourselves. We knew that the Cultural Press Agency was doing pretty well, but we didn't really think a reach of more than 100,000 people was possible. After all, we had done nothing in the way of marketing. Just posting content and not giving away free tickets. And only once something with a bare female breast in it. Enfin....
In conclusion. The 2011 Holland Festival could well be historic. Not only was it the festival that attracted the most audiences for years, it was also the festival that took place while a minority government of populists, nationalists and materialists proclaimed the end of art subsidies. We therefore look back on a festival in which we had a great time with our new...
The Dodo was busy, this third week of the Holland Festival. Thankfully, again with an exciting mix of beautiful, weird and extraordinary. As it should be, really. What makes the Holland Festival all the more exciting is that such extremes can sometimes take place within one programme, as with the National Ballet, or even within one performance, as with The Russians...
Composer Richard Ayres signs off on the animal opera ''The cricket recovers''. Photo Hanya Chlala At last: the opera The Cricket Recovers based on the animal story The cure of the cricket by Toon Tellegen is in the Netherlands! Over six years after its world premiere in Aldeburgh, the Holland Festival presents Richard Ayres' work, performed by Asko|Schönberg and VocaalLAB conducted by Etienne Sie......
Photo Mark Barton Could Prime Minister Rutte cum suis' anti-advertising by dismissing art as destined for leftist types and other idiots already be having an effect? You would almost think so when you see the rather poorly filled halls during the performances at the Holland Festival. There are more than ten people sitting in the front row, but still the...
The ark as the earth, as a spaceship carrying us through the chaos of the universe to a safe haven. The pole star as the apparent magnetic centre of the universe around which all the stars revolve. No, this is not woolly new age chatter, these are the starting points for Tevot and Polaris, two major orchestral works by Thomas Adès, which had their Dutch premiere under the composer's own direction.
The Irrepressibles with their Human Music Box. Photo Patricia Niven At the request of the Holland Festival, Jamie McDermott of The Irrepressibles created a new programme: Human Music Box. The ten-piece British band will start its world tour in Amsterdam. The premiere on Friday 17 June at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ became an understated, musical evening that was especially visually appealing. In...
Photo Joris Jan Bos 'Labyrinth' is the name of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's choreography. Mazes intrigue because you can get lost in them and then insist on finding the exit. Along the way, a person then has all kinds of revealing experiences about himself. But Cherkaoui does not get to this passage. He immediately starts with symbolism. A dancer holds a wide band that...
Cologne and Paris may not have been built in a day, but it took less than three days to fly to the moon. A warped comparison to say that a show that rattles three days before its premiere can turn out to be an unimaginable hit on the premiere itself. So something like that could happen with The Russians, the latest show
Dancers of Sasha Waltz & Guests in ''Jagden und Formen''. Photo Dominik Mentzos. Composer Wolfgang Rihm and choreographer Sasha Waltz, two familiar faces at the Holland Festival and big names in European performing arts, released a performance together in 2008 that could not be missing from a Holland festival programme this year. The festival not only focuses on a number of......
Scene from ''Around Robert Wyatt''. Photo Annabelle Tiaffay. "Alifib" by British progrocker Robert Wyatt (b. 1945) is a song that gets under the skin. Wyatt's near-breaking voice sounds so genuinely sad that it takes your breath away. It seems an impossible task to perform "Alifib" convincingly without the master himself. Yet the French Orchestre National de Jazz gets...
Photo: Ruth Walz That the Off Broadway musical Fela! was a success, we could actually expect. For The Dodo, we therefore did not send anyone there either: there are already enough newspapers and other bloggers eager to have a front-row seat to the New York audience favourite. That they had a good time, you can read elsewhere on this site,...
In very different places, people can sometimes have the same idea. And even more sometimes, those similar ideas both lead to something wonderful. A couple of years ago, thanks to Brabant theatre Bis, mime company Kassys performed the beautifully sad tragedy 'Kommer', in which colleagues spent pointless time in a mourning room full of lease plants. Every gratuitous phrase was magnified by powerfully helpless gestures to the...
Firs is his name. And he always arrives late. Because of the gout. Poor houseboy. Firs was created by Anton Chekhov. His masterpiece The Cherry Garden is about the boredom and lameness of the old rich, and Firs is the house servant who sees it all happening. Chekhov lets him die, at the end, when the departing house owners totally forget about him...
Papageno showed off without his feathers last night. Indeed, the entire direction of Une flûte enchantée was an unadorned pleasure. Sober. Integral. You can't get a Dutch audience wilder than with such an approach. Compliments, then, to Peter Brook. At the Muziekgebouw aan het IJ was the Dutch premiere of Brook's adaptation of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte. The production turned...
An opera based on texts by Nietzsche, and then start with loud laughter and main character N trying to catch two water nymphs. Wait a minute, that's Wagner! Well, at Wagner's Rheingold involves three Rhine daughters, but the similarity is too great to be coincidental. And neither is this one, but in the first minutes of Wolfgang Rihm's Dionysos is much more going on. Here is a composer at work who not only plays with text and music, but also with centuries of cultural history and knows how to add jokes to it. It is to get intoxicated.
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