Holland Festival: 4 ways to look to the future
Metropolis at Holland Festival: 4 ways to look at the future.
Holland Festival
The Holland Festival is the Netherlands' leading festival, showcasing the best of what is being made internationally and nationally on the bigger stages.
Turkish toppers play the roof off Carré: fresh wind through Holland Festival #hf2015
Stars, we don't really do that in the Netherlands. Our ground level does not allow diva behaviour. In our lowlands, you get a plus if you have stayed so nicely ordinary despite your success. Even if you stand in the Arena with your songs, like the Toppers, this weekend. How different it is in Istanbul. There, you are allowed to be shamelessly famous. Like.
The seven performances you must see this Holland Festival
As Big as the Sky I am looking forward to Arnoud Noordegraaf's new multimedia project, As Big as the Sky, with sets by Ai Wei Wei. Noordegraaf is a master at blurring the boundaries between film and reality. His music is elegant and appealing and serves the story. As Big as the Sky, op...
Holland Festival - Back to the future with Metropolis
During the Holland Festival, theatre company La Fura dels Baus lets us experience the city of the future with the interactive performance M.U.R.S. As an overture, HF has programmed the film Metropolis, Fritz Lang's magisterial 1927 dystopian vision, which rightly became known as the mother of all future films. Iconic imagery, biblical influences, Marxist dialectics and actually still surprisingly modern. New York,...
Ritual dance around digital Calf: M.U.R.S. by Fura dels Baus at Holland Festival
Zonder de app op je smartphone M.U.R.S. bezoeken is een uitdaging. De voorstelling van het beruchte theatercollectief uit Barcelona is een commentaar op de manier waarop mensen via allerlei gadgets ongemerkt onderdeel worden van een door internationale bedrijven gerunde SMART-society. Doe je mee of niet? Valt er eigenlijk wel wat te kiezen? Volgens Jürgen Müller, een van de oprichters van…
'A drunken panda who wants to have a tussle' - The Loom of Mind on HF15
In The Loom of Mind, Icelandic folk singer Mugison, his bosom friend Pétur Ben, and Flemish baroque ensemble B.O.X. join forces. What does that sound like: melancholic Icelandic blues with 17th-century instruments? Like a stand-up storytelling concert performance? Or like a drunken panda who wants to have a game? How did you find each other? Pieter Theuns, lutenist and founder of B.O.X.: "I found Mugison...
Play 'Nibelungen' debunks modern Europe at Holland Festival
Berlin's Gorki Theatre won a prize this year: it was named the best theatre in the German language area by the German-language press. The company won the award partly because it employs many actors of immigrant origin. With its performance Der Untergang der Nibelungen, which can be seen in this year's Holland Festival, the group also thematises the...
La Re-sentida (Chile) reckons with leftist church in Holland Festival 2015
The 1970s have for some time been the target of what we shall conveniently call the up-and-coming generation. And so we are talking about the 1970s as the glory years of hippyism, the jubilant times of the left-wing church and everything else that, with the knowledge of today, is dirty and dirty. They were the years when...
A vital and pitiful procession: William Kentridge at EYE
With its latest retrospective If We Ever Get To Heaven, EYE again convincingly and confidently presents itself as a museum that looks beyond film history. This was already evident in previous exhibitions such as Expanded Cinema, which showcased visual artists working at the intersection of film and art. Now William Kentridge has been given the honour of...
Ruth Mackenzie takes on the future. The Holland Festival gets a more exciting boss than you thought.
The Holland Festival got a completely unknown new director in the person of Britain's Ruth Mackenzie. At least, to us. The flamboyant, artistically exceptional opera director Pierre Audi makes way for a woman who has presented herself mainly as a manager of festivals and cultural institutions, but whose ideas are anyone's guess. When she was presented, none of the...
Seeing music (and not hearing it?)
Vanwege mijn fascinatie voor de complexe relatie tussen luisteren en kijken, besloot ik drie voorstellingen tijdens het recente Holland Festival te bezoeken en te ervaren wat er gebeurde als ik probeerde oren en ogen in gelijke mate de kost te geven. De eerste was “Delusion of the Fury” (1966) van de Amerikaanse componist Harry Partch, de tweede een concertante uitvoering van Philip Glass’ opera “The CIVIL warS” (1983), de derde een uitvoering van Franz Schuberts “Die Winterreise” (1827) waarbij vierentwintig korte films van de Zuid-Afrikaanse kunstenaar William Kentridge werden vertoond.
Silent hakas, blood and grim nudity at The Crimson House
Princess Beatrix can take a punch in contemporary theatre. Just two years ago, she was in the audience (as queen) at The Life & Death of Marina Abramovic, and this year at The Crimson House by Lemi Ponifasio / MAU. Just about one of the most radical - because loud, raw and rather unfathomable - performances of this edition of the Holland Festival. We didn't quite get there, by the way, but
Ayn Rand was haunting Dutch theatre as early as 2006.
Ivo van Hove has not only a play made based on Ayn Roland's novel of ideas The Fountainhead. In 2006, the artistic director of Toneelgroep Amsterdam even wanted to base a whole new design of the theatre system on it. Eight years later, we can see that only the negative aspects of Van Hove's vision have been realised.
Doesn't 'The Returns' exclude you as much as the art snobs parodied by Forsythe?
Als iemand spreekt in zinnen met telkens woorden die rijmen op ‘art’ of waarin de lettergreep ‘art’ telkens opduikt, moet je je instellen op een andere logica dan die van de dagelijkse communicatie. Als het ook nog een vrouw in fel rood gekleed is die die woorden geëxalteerd en met veel maniertjes uitspreekt en daarbij suggereert dat ze hypergevoelig is voor alles wat met kunst te maken heeft, dan balanceren je gedachten tussen:
Spaghetti 'Thyestes': classic roots work fiercely in a new preparation
In Rome, they have known what good food is for 20 centuries or so. Bloodletting is everything. Seneca, a Roman of the better sort, wrote plays in which bloodshed was elevated to an art. Audiences feasted on them, just as they feasted on Seneca's recipes in Shakespeare's time, 1,500 years later, and as we feast on Game of Thrones on TV now. It can't be gory, can't be cruel enough. We like that.
Struggling River of Fundament - grandiose recycling opera that doesn't know when to stop
From 2007, video artist Matthew Barney (The Cremaster Cycle) and composer Jonathan Bepler on a free adaptation of Norman Mailer's most maligned book Ancient Evenings. To Mailer's mythology of ancient Egypt, they added the equally mythical American automobile industry in an ambitious and operatesque film project with a demanding length of 5 hours 11 minutes.
From February River of Fundament on world tour and the Holland Festival
Isabella Rosselini is endearing with her animal stuff. 4 missed opportunities in Bestiaire d'amour at @hollandfestival
Every Holland Festival there is at least 1 performance which a lot of people wonder why it is programmed. This year, that honour falls to 'Bestiaire d'Amour' by and starring Isabella Rosselini. We take a moment to look for answers.
7 confusing reasons why the stage version of The Fountainhead rattles, but you should still go.
Topical again, now that Toneelgroep Amsterdam is reviving the play, my review from 2014. This week, the stage adaptation of The Fountainhead premiered. The book is terrible, the performance rattles, the actors win only narrowly. The content, however, creates even more confusion, which is why I won't stop you from going to see it. And Hans Kesting, of course. I put it this way.
Disappointed dinner guests get money back. Yummy gesture from the Holland Festival
Visitors to the film Napoleon, last Sunday at Ziggo Dome, who had thought of booking dinner at one of the intervals, will get their money back. This was decided by the Holland Festival after a commotion arose on the internet, and beyond, about the caterer's lousy service, and the rather poor quality of what was on offer. Visitor Marc Veerkamp said the following on facebook:
Alain Platel deals firm death blow to traditionalists in #hollandfestival
Met talent alleen kom je er niet. Je moet ook een beetje geluk hebben. Dat geluk overkwam Alain Platel inmiddels zo vaak dat je bijna gaat twijfelen aan je eigen goddeloosheid. Maar toch. Wie niet alleen een componist als Fabrizio Cassol tot zijn vrienden mag rekenen, maar ook het zangwonder Serge Kakudji een kans heeft gegeven, verdient wel een beetje geluk. Wat het drietal nu met 13 muzikanten uit Kinshasa voor elkaar heeft gekregen is ronduit revolutionair. En een doodsklap voor wie gelooft dat noord en zuid elkaar nooit echt kunnen ontmoeten. Ik maakte hem maandag 16 juni mee. En hij dreunt nog na.
Bitter tears, screaming loneliness. Kušej does Fassbinder @HollandFestival 2014
Nice 'old-fashioned' Holland Festival: a special set-up that confronts the audience with the implications of their own position and viewing behaviour. And that's just as well with Fassbinder's 'Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant'. Melodrama was no stranger to the German theatre and film wizard. The bitter tears are of a fashion queen and her entourage, clinical is the setting, wafer-thin the story, and yet unusually exciting how this lady drama develops.
Tis Pity! Holland Festival brings the best show to the smallest audience.
Language is music. Sometimes we forget that. Then we think language is a way of conveying objective meanings. Kind of silly. Language is food for all the senses. No strumming is needed under that. That's pure opera without embellishments. The English-language performance 'tis Pity she's a whore' I saw at the Holland Festival yesterday proves that. Even if you don't understand the seventeenth-century phrases, it is a joy to listen to.
Warhorse is almost perfect: 6 reasons to go. Or stay away.
Saturday, June 14, went off in a flood of evening gowns, dinner jackets, Dutch celebrities and Gooische Tanks War Horse premiered. A play about a war in which the Netherlands was neutral, and of which there are memorial stones in every village in the rest of the world. You can go and see it. Or not. We have listed six arguments.
On M2M and genius theatre makers who completely miss the mark
One of the rules of thumb of contemporary theatre art reads as follows: There is no middle ground in a production with an insanely long title. Such a production is either fantastic or dies of its own pretensions. At Judson church is ringing in Harlem (made to measure) / twenty looks of paris is burning at the judson church (m2m) is the latter.
Ragged ritual defies permanent display: Germaine Kruip at the Stedelijk @HollandFestival 2014
"You know ma'am, that big red painting? Turn right before that". A young attendant shows us the way. At first glance, it's nothing. A man in semi-uniform, black trousers, white shirt, slowly turns on his axis. Sol Lewitt's mural, number 1084 from 2003, lends him the necessary decorum. Around the corner hang Barnett Newman and Andy Warhol. Would the man care? In this 'hall of fame' of conceptual art, the man's spinning stands out a little timidly. Some visitors remain standing, leaning against white walls or sinking down on the polished wooden floor. Those who take their time watch the spinning of the man and his fellow dervishes slowly take possession of the Stedelijk.
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