The Holland Festival is the Netherlands' leading festival, showcasing the best of what is being made internationally and nationally on the bigger stages.
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...
Amy Winehouse is alive. Though perhaps we shouldn't call it life, as she stands in all her corpse-blue glory, looking bewildered at the audience in the Muziekgebouw for an hour. A bit like we know her from those tragic last concert recordings, where she was stiff with all the chemicals and liquid aids to perform a few last notes. She is now...
At the walk-in, several actors dribble across the bare stage. No set pieces, few lights, a little smoke from the machine. Slowly, the stage fills, and the actors line up at the front of the stage. The first scene is sung, a surprising choice. Then Diana, the high priestess of the Amazons, a brilliant role by Marieke Heebink, holds a...
Whereas in the West dragons are mythical creatures to be defeated, in the East they are the embodiment of joy, unlimited possibilities and destiny. People born in the year of the dragon (every 12 years with 2000 being the most recent adult generation) are proud, irresistible, vibrant and extroverted, according to Chinese astrology. Put seven on and...
The dome of Artis Planetarium is made for stars; it is not a shiny Imax canvas. That the images in Coral: Rekindling Venus by Lynette Wallworth therefore do not splash off the screen is to be expected. Wallworth, a close friend and colleague of ANOHNI, is prominent at this year's Holland Festival and made Coral, Rekindling Venus exclusively...
That he prefers not to hear news about the weather, but that there were once people alive who he knew, and what the weather was like then, Ed Atkins cannot talk about that often enough. So he repeats that phrase endlessly. A 'loop', then, as we know it from music and video art. But performed live. Is...
ANOHNI lived in Amsterdam for a year as a young child, in Gerrit van der Veenstraat, formerly Euterpestraat. The street where the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) had its headquarters during the war in what is now a nice school with a focus on art. Opposite was the building from which Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung organised the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews. The...
The picture is immediate. Vast glaciated vistas, patches of fog and the twilight of a land where the sun rises only once a year. Something like that. And then that soaring music that in one long tone makes all air traffic redundant for at least a month. Beneath it the rumble of shifting earth plates. For the first time in 10 years, Sigur Rós made another...
Input from members: that's what drives this club. Just watch. Yesterday I wrote this piece: Jerome Bel is quite something. The man who identifies himself as a choreographer has banned himself from flying for sustainability reasons, which is why he could not come to Amsterdam from Paris to read his own autobiography. However noble the non-flying...
A TED Talk, but not 15 minutes as prescribed by that scattershot ideas organisation, but an hour and a half. In How To Live (After You Die), the monumental artist Lynette Walworth takes you through a story-with-light images about the temptations of sectarian faith, which, via the Amazon and the Outback, over Donald Trump and along the steppes of Mongolia, ends in the caves...
The first half of the Holland Festival is pretty much over, so time for Team Culture Press to take a look at what that first half has brought us. A lot, according to Helen Westerik and Wijbrand Schaap, and also many real highlights. 'Perhaps the best edition in years.' Among other things, we discuss the intimate installation 'Evolution of Fearlessness', look back...
I can't resist mentioning it, because I think they were doing it for a reason, the dancers in the musical Wuthering Heights making really visible big rounds with their arms one time: this was a half-second reference to Kate Bush's world-changing 'windmill swings' in the music video to her legendary 1978 pop song. A subtle nod as in my...
What if 200 of the greatest thinkers and poets this planet has known in recent centuries were just one of us? An ordinary stranger on a bus, or your taxi driver, or a skater? Or a singing tiger in a supermarket? Julian Rosefeldt makes that thought audible, tactile and almost tangible in the mega-installation 'Euphoria' at the...
Laurie Anderson visited the Holland Festival for a third time and played to a sold-out Carré. With a five-piece Sexmob, a jazz combo from New York for the occasion, she performed well-known and lesser-known songs from her oeuvre spanning more than four decades. And every song felt like it was dear to her, with fresh, new arrangements of double bass and baritone ...
Well, Angela... this 'posthuman' play by German-British director Susanne Kennedy, now at the Holland Festival, aims to touch on many things: life & death, time & space, truth & fake. The play begins with a text running across the walls announcing that everything in this story is real, based on diaries and facts. Soon after, this statement becomes...
A word says more than a thousand images. This may seem strange in a world that thrives on visual culture, but it is a truism. If you have yet to see cows of all shapes and sizes, let the Holland Festival convince you. Yesterday, I saw the opening performance 'Drive Your Plough Over The Bones Of The Dead' and...
Not much happens in Angela (A Strange Loop) by Susanne Kennedy. That is not a bad thing; there is more art in which little happens. Beckett, for instance, was a master of it. Just as he caused confusion in the 1950s with pieces like Waiting for Godot, viewers and critics alike get a bit thrown off by Susanne...
'Sometimes people come to me crying to tell their stories, things they have experienced.' Theatre-maker, author, director Lisaboa Houbrechts has stirred things up with Vake Poes, the theatrical family epic she created with the Flemish company La Geste. The intense performance, in its lyricism fitting into the oeuvre of Alain Platel's Les Ballets C de la B...
Sometimes the run-in to a performance is so pleasant that you hope everyone will continue to drone on for a bit. Make it last longer! It feels like you're at a rehearsal, or a private party, at a private event, where you can peek in. That is certainly the case with Prophétique (on est déjà né-es) by Nadia Beugré, which...
From 4 June to 29 October 2023, ANOHNI, the Holland Festival's associate artist, presents a multimedia exhibition at Huis Willet-Holthuysen: She Who Saw Beautiful Things. With this art display, ANOHNI honours its former collaborative partner Dr Julia Yasuda. Also on display are photographs taken by her now-deceased wife Erika Yasuda. These are now on display for the first time. Back to...
'Simplicity is the problem of our time. Simplicity is labelling. It should be about fluidity and confusion.' Greek opera-maker Elli Papakonstantinou, whose star has risen rapidly in recent years, is performing a contemporary version of Euripides' classic tragedy 'Bacchantes' at this year's Holland Festival. In that 405 BC play, wine god Dionysus (also known...
The Holland Festival is looking for 23 male actors for the production Bros. An excellent opportunity for those who want to work with renowned director Romeo Castellucci and experience a performance behind and on the stage of the Rabozaal in ITA. Bros is a large-scale production that leaves a big impression. Who are we looking for? We are looking for a diverse group of men aged 18 to 65, with a height between...
About 30 men in American police uniforms on stage, the kind we know from TV. But in Romeo Castellucci's show Bros, to be seen at the Holland Festival in June, you don't get to see chases and interrogations, but brutal violence. The show is about the anonymity offered by a uniform, in this case especially...
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