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Holland Festival

Het Holland Festival is het meest toonaangevende festival van Nederland, en toont het beste wat er internationaal en nationaal op de grotere podia wordt gemaakt.

Holland Festival lanceert digitaal archief

Het Holland Festival heeft sinds zijn oprichting in 1947 een schat aan informatie bewaard.Dit archief is een feest van herkenning voor liefhebbers van podiumkunsten. Het biedt een unieke kans om iconische voorstellingen te herontdekken, kunstenaars en hun werk beter te leren kennen en in de rijke geschiedenis van het festival te duiken. De videofragmenten, voorstellingsinformatie, kunstenaarsbiografieën en beroemde festivalposters vormen… 

STREAM: ARTHUR VEROCAI & METROPOLE ORKEST, ft. Paula Santoro, Rogê and Ricardo Verocai 

5-8 December, Digital Theatre During the past Holland Festival, 79-year-old Brazilian music legend Arthur Verocai presented a memorable concert in a packed Concertgebouw. Together with the Metropole Orchestra and guest artists, he performed the music from his iconic 1972 debut album: a mix of bossa nova, samba, jazz, psychedelia and funk. Early this century, major hip-hop artists such as Snoop Dogg,... 

First performances Holland Festival 2025 on sale

Sales of the first four performances of the 78th Holland Festival will start on 26 November via www.hollandfestival.nl: two performances inspired by paintings and two matinees in The Concertgebouw. On 18 March 2025, the full programme will be announced, including the projectWelcome to Asbestos Hall that associate artist and choreographer Trajal Harrell will develop especially for the festival. Director... 

Holland Festival celebrates Amsterdam 750 with performance Otemba - Daring Women 

Music theatre brings 17th-century painting from the Rijksmuseum to life in a conversation about female indomitability On the occasion of the kick-off of the anniversary year Amsterdam 750, we are pleased to announce in advance a festival performance focusing on the complex history of the city and the country. With this performance, the Holland Festival aims to explore from the arts - painting, music, theatre and design -... 

Trajal Harrell associate artist Holland Festival 2025

The associate artist for the 78th edition of the Holland Festival in June 2025 is American choreographer Trajal Harrell (Douglas, Georgia, USA, 1973). Harrell is one of the most important international contemporary choreographers. His unique style incorporates elements from various dance traditions, fashion, music and visual art. With universal human emotions and themes of connection, tragedy, tenderness and vulnerability, Harrell's... 

Holland Festival 2024 concluded with successful 24-hour The Second Woman 

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... 

Stage photo Second Woman by Heidrun Lohr

Rineke Dijkstra captures 24-hour theatre marathon with Georgina Verbaan  

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... 

The Romeo. © Orpheas Emirzas

Trajal Harrell's The Romeo is the laid-back performance you need right now @Holland Festival. 

"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... 

Once maligned Brazilian hero Verocai conquers the Holland Festival.

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... 

Image from Sisyphe. © Louis-Daniel Vallée

Hear what Maaike Muis experienced from a man moving sand at the Holland Festival

One of the lesser-known and thus 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 

Katia Ledoux in Carmen. © Inés Manai

Carmen adaptation by Wu Tsang shows how to combine respect and topicality

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... 

Eleven thousand strings in a round temple: Holland Festival highlight, but also missed opportunity?

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' work 11000 Saiten is a great superlative: surround with emdr and... 

Melencolia by Ensemble Modern at Holland Festival: Unreal music theatre about the end of everything

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... 

Dying drummer says it all in Tiago Rodrigues' Dans la Mesure de l'Impossible at the Holland Festival

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... 

Music with balls for Beatrix at Holland Festival

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... 

With Despois do Silencio, Christiane Jatahy commands deep respect at the Holland Festival

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... 

Opening party Holland Festival drowns in Westergasfabriek

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... 

Holland Festival opened in the presence of Princess Beatrix. 

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... 

Georgina Verbaan is let down hundreds of times by a different man each time during the final weekend of this Holland Festival. Photo Janiek Dam

The best chance of total bewilderment. Why you want to experience completely unknown performances at the Holland Festival.

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... 

PR image Holland Festival

Brazilian vibes and groundbreaking performances at Holland Festival 

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... 

scene image Hamlet by © Simon Gosselin

Timeless doubt in French Hamlet: 7 dilemmas for Christiane Jatahy.

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... 

Holland Festival chooses KesselsKramer: Pioneering performing arts festival and communications agency work on first campaign

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... 

Georgina Verbaan plays lead role in 24-hour theatrical marathon The Second Woman. One woman, one role, one hundred men.   

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... 

image from macacos by Julieta Bacchin

Intersections, encounters and coming home in Holland Festival 2024

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... 

PR image ITA/NDT/HF

Festivals full of theatre, dance and music from the comfort of your own living room

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... 

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