The Holland Festival is the Netherlands' leading festival, showcasing the best of what is being made internationally and nationally on the bigger stages.
'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...
From 1 June to 1 July 2023, the 76th edition of the Holland Festival will take place with over 200 performances. Leading performances by artists from all over the world can be seen at 20 different venues in Amsterdam. Besides regular festival locations such as the Gashouder, Muziekgebouw, Carré and Het Concertgebouw, these include new venues such as the Planetarium, Donau...
On 11 June 2023, the Holland Festival will host the Dutch premiere of the British 5-star musical theatre production Wuthering Heights at DeLaMar in Amsterdam. One of London's most influential directors, Emma Rice, adapted Emily Brontë's literary masterpiece into a fiery theatrical experience, with live music, humour, puppetry and dance. Wuthering Heights received rave reviews in London and is touring on this...
American singer, composer and choreographer Meredith Monk presents the world premiere of her new work Indras Net in the 76th edition of the Holland Festival. Belgian director Lisaboa Houbrechts stages a family epic that spans three generations: Vake Poes; or how God disappeared. With performance EXÓTICA, Mexican-Chilean choreographer Amanda Piña breathes new life into works by the forgotten...
The associate artist for the 2023 Holland Festival is singer, composer and visual artist ANOHNI. The festival will feature new and existing work by her. Among other things, ANOHNI and the festival are working on a new, large-scale project involving multimedia and movement in the Gashouder in Amsterdam. About her role as associate artist herself taking the stage
Kasia Tórz joins the Holland Festival from 1 September as programme manager Theatre and Dance. Together with director Emily Ansenk and programme manager Music and Music Theatre Jochem Valkenburg and programmer Katinka Enkhuizen, who joins on 1 October, she will form the new artistic team of the Holland Festival. Emily Ansenk on Kasia's appointment: "Her broad experience with...
Actually, it was too bad to persevere. Perhaps I should indeed have followed my impulse to walk away hard, but I stayed with Kein Licht. Indeed, this play, written by Elfriede Jelinek, composed by Philippe Manoury and directed by Nicolas Stemann, was technically quite good. Only that little dog, I so did not like that. Animals and...
There is at least one reason to go see Porca Miseria, Trajal Harrell's latest work. The Holland Festival hosts the American choreographer best known for his Vogueing work this weekend, and the soundtrack to his trilogy is nothing short of stunning. Starting with Willie Nelson and ending with the Lamento della Nimfa with which Claudio Monteverdi...
Moby Dick; or, The Whale is the latest gesammtkunstwerk by artist collective Moved By The Motion, Schauspielhaus Zürig and Wu Tsang. Her adaptation of the great American classic as layered as the book. Where Herman Melville uses accounts, scholarly sources and monologues, Tsang deploys film and music. In a collage of theatrical performance, dance, found footage, animation and documentation nature footage,...
On the day a group of Dutch climate scientists announce that we are not going to make 'Paris', A Play for the living in a time of extinction premieres. How do you make a play about the biggest crisis threatening us? How do you make sure you keep making theatre and not agitprop? Or maybe it's not so bad at all....
If humanity goes extinct, there has been a woman somewhere who was the last not to have a child. To whom does that honour belong? At the Holland Festival, an ensemble of 12 performers now perform a requiem for that last non-mother. Actress and singer Joy Wielkens is the extraordinarily disarming high priestess in this at times quite heavy evening, in which the end of...
It shows either enormous guts, or boundless naivety, to make a musical in which a slave trader in Africa is converted by a song to a life of love and respect for fellow human beings. Yet Yemandja, the play that was performed in a setless performance at the Holland Festival, is actually just that. I could also explain...
"You know, I am just a little man, I want to introduce you my wife," France's Abd al Malik told the Holland Festival audience. Right he was, as his Moroccan wife Wallen was undoubtedly one of the queens of the French R&B world from 2001 to 2008. This set the tone, as the acclaimed singer shone 18...
What does trauma do to people? A lot, I can say now, after hearing and especially seeing Le Moindre Geste at the Holland Festival. The performance is very special in its conception, and for that reason alone beautiful to experience, and confronting, for both the amateurs who performed it, and the fans who watched it. Le Moindre Geste can be...
'Where is that sound coming from anyway?' I heard someone whisper behind me. Right above the audience, I saw a man playing tubular bells, idiophones and other percussion. Behind the stand of 1,000 people, a piano resonated. A celesta sounded in the corner of the Gashouder. Different sounds travelled around the venue like the earth makes its round in by starry sky....
Upon entering the Transformatorhuis on Amsterdam's Westergasterrein, we are blinded by a row of bright lights on the floor. A low tone produces a kind of pleasant unease, a sound of possibility. Then the light goes out and we are in pitch darkness, red half-moons from staring into the lamps still burnt on our retinas. The tone persists...
Benin singer Zeynab Abib had some making up to do. And she did. As a guest artist in the opening performance of the Holland Festival last week, she performed in the limelight with Holland Festival associate artist Angélique Kidjo, but didn't quite pan out. This time, not in the big Carré but in the more intimate Great Hall
How do you play a rainforest? I was once told that the rainforest makes deafening noise especially at night. On 7 June, I got to hear the same thing in the installation Altamira 2042, thanks to the Holland Festival. In that performance, Brazilian artist cum documentary filmmaker Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha managed to make the sound of the tropics tangible. In a...
It's quite something, what Sami Yusuf brings to the stage: his own accompanying group of seasoned pros, the heavenly voices of Cappella Amsterdam and the traditionally Mediterranean sounds of the Amsterdam Andalusian Orchestra. Together, this results in a sound experience that moves from calm ponds with a gurgling fountain, to dry steppes winds, raging seas and overwhelming mountains. There could effortlessly be a...
Yemi Alade. What a woman. Never heard of her until 3 June, the opening of the Holland Festival's anniversary edition. She was one of the guests of Angelique Kidjo, the Benin-born African singer who is one of the two associate artists of the country's most prestigious festival this year. And Yemi Alade, star from Nigeria, threw her full...
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