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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.

#HF11 Special performance Jagden und Formen by Waltz and Rihm does not produce an ideal exchange, but it does raise interesting questions about the fusion of dance and music

Componist Wolfgang Rihm en choreograaf Sasha Waltz, twee bekende gezichten op het Holland Festival en grote namen in de Europese podiumkunsten, brachten in 2008 samen een voorstelling uit die dit jaar niet mocht ontbreken in een Holland festival-programma. Het festival heeft niet alleen aandacht heeft voor een aantal grote, hedendaagse componisten (Xenakis, Rihm), maar timmert ook behoorlijk aan de weg op het… 

Read More "#HF11 Special performance Jagden und Formen by Waltz and Rihm does not produce an ideal exchange, but it does raise interesting questions about the fusion of dance and music

#HF11 Messy set-up of Around Robert Wyatt gets in the way of magical moments

”Alifib” van de Britseprogrocker Robert Wyatt (1945) is een liedje dat onder de huid kruipt. De bijnabrekende stem van Wyatt klinkt zo oprecht triest dat het je de adem beneemt. Het lijkt een onmogelijke opgave om ”Alifib” overtuigend te brengen zonder de meester zelf. Toch krijgt het Franse Orchestre National de Jazz het voor elkaar. Waar Wyatt in het origineel… 

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Week two of the Holland Festival (#HF11) brings a nice mix of highlights and questionable choices.

Dat de Off Broadway-musical Fela! Een succes was, konden we eigenlijk wel verwachten. Voor De Dodo hebben we er daarom ook niemand heen gestuurd: er zijn al genoeg kranten en andere bloggers die graag bij de New Yorkse publiekslievelingen op de eerste rang willen zitten. Dat ze een goede tijd hadden, leest u elders op deze site, via de blogstream… 

Read More "Week two of the Holland Festival (#HF11) brings a nice mix of highlights and questionable choices.

#HF11: Japanese company canteen leads to hallucinatory tragedy of incapacity

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... 

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#HF11: There is an old crippled servant haunting the Zuidas

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... 

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#HF11 Unadorned, austere and powerful "Flûte Enchantée" by Peter Brook

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... 

Read More "#HF11 Unadorned, austere and powerful "Flûte Enchantée" by Peter Brook

#HF11 Playing with Nietzsche's moustache in opera fantasy by Wolfgang Rihm

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.

Read More "#HF11 Playing with Nietzsche's moustache in opera fantasy by Wolfgang Rihm

#HF11 Young Hungarians in Leonce and Lena deserve our sympathy

Actors wearing sort of harem trousers and bamboo sticks on a nondescript playing surface. Some of you may think back nostalgically or with trepidation to the days when there were 'Akademies voor Ekspressie' in the Netherlands. Summits of socio-art. Sometime deep in the 1970s, that is. Maladype Theatre, from Hungary, fits seamlessly into that picture, which... 

Read More "#HF11 Young Hungarians in Leonce and Lena deserve our sympathy

#HF11 Weather barbed, lovely and humorous notes at mini-festival Xenakis 1234

With the battle between Titans and gods on Mount Olympus, Xenakis opens 1234, a mini-festival in the great Holland Festival. In four concerts, spread over two days, it features Iannis Xenakis central. There is also an extensive exhibition dedicated to the Greek composer, who was a mathematician and architect by birth.

Read More "#HF11 Weather barbed, lovely and humorous notes at mini-festival Xenakis 1234

#HF11 Environmental message in 'Birds with Skymirrors' does not give imagination wings, but literally gets in the way

You can hardly take your eyes off the feet. The dancers make busy, fast steps and yet their bodies seem to glide across the stage. It exudes something of perfection. In 'Birds with Skymirrors', you constantly get the feeling that the bird world has been the model for the movements. Trembling hands are reminiscent of wingtips, vulnerably scanning the skies.... 

Read More "#HF11 Environmental message in 'Birds with Skymirrors' does not give imagination wings, but literally gets in the way

#HF11: Isabelle Huppert alone on camera enchanting in shaky adaptation of Tramline Desire

They say of Isabelle Huppert, for years the most beautiful and mysterious appearance on the cinema screen, that she has the look of a dead zebra finch live. I had at least heard about that, but had never experienced it in real life. Until Friday night 3 June at Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg at Un Tramway in the Holland Festival. And it's true... 

Read More "#HF11: Isabelle Huppert alone on camera enchanting in shaky adaptation of Tramline Desire

#HF11: As grand, as extreme and as haunting as Schlingensief's 'Mea Culpa' you rarely see theatre

Dying young turns out to be advantageous not only for skywalkers like Buddy Holly, Sam Cooke or Jesus. Even in a rather elitist world like that of German theatre, you can achieve star status through an early death. At least that happened to Christoph Schlingensief, the man who died of lung cancer in 2010. The man had already achieved stardom throughout the German-speaking world,... 

Read More "#HF11: As grand, as extreme and as haunting as Schlingensief's 'Mea Culpa' you rarely see theatre

#HF11: With The School for Scandal, Deborah Warner gives a gleeful kick to an arch-conservative theatre tradition. The British are not amused.

Photo: Neil Libbert

That was a bit of a grind for British theatre critics. The celebrated director Deborah Warner (1959) recently pulled Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal out of the closet. A play from 1777, and an untouchable part of the British theatre canon. Building on the style of her earlier production Mother Courage (2009) Warner also indicated The School for Scandal - goddamn - a quirky, contemporary twist.

 

"With many video, light, music and noise - like a rock concert, " grins Warner in the office of the Barbican Theatre In London. "Mother Courage had an incredibly populist, exciting atmosphere. I love that arrogant theatricality immensely, and I wanted to continue that style in The School for Scandal. For me, the big challenge was to explore the Brechtian theatre style of Weimar - which I got through Mother Courage had discovered again - to collide with an eighteenth-century theatre text."

Read More "#HF11: With The School for Scandal, Deborah Warner gives a gleeful kick to an arch-conservative theatre tradition. The British are not amused.

The Dodo revives for Holland Festival edition 2011 #HF11

This week the Holland Festival erupts and we are there. We are producing a Dodo Festival Day newspaper with a sizeable team of professional journalists, as we did before for Springdance and The International Choice of the Rotterdam Schouwburg, for example. We follow the festival closely to bring news as it happens. We go to see performances where others... 

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A Don Giovanni without Don before it, without scruples and without illusions, but with a few naked women. #hf10

 By Wijbrand Schaap Once in a while, a theatre director stands up who wants to expose the emptiness around him or her. That it is about the emptiness within him (or her) himself, this young director usually finds out some 20 years later, once it has become a little less empty. That's how these things go. We... 

Read More "A Don Giovanni without Don before it, without scruples and without illusions, but with a few naked women. #hf10

Shukshin's Stories: a 'gypsy boy-with-trane' painting by a grand master. #hf10

The Russian soul. So there is something about that. And you get something from that when you see a Chekhov play (if done well), or read one of his short stories. Or when you read the works of Tolstoi, Dostoevsky or any other inhabitant of that vast nothingness east of Poland. Or seeing the paintings, which a few... 

Read More "Shukshin's Stories: a 'gypsy boy-with-trane' painting by a grand master. #hf10

Teleac course on muezzin singing delivers little deeper insight #hf10

 Above, fun audio from the Holland Festival. We went to watch and listen at this performance. Afterwards, we talked to actor Sabri Saad el Hamus and reviewer Martin Schouten. They had their own views on this play, which was announced as follows: Cairo is the city with thirty thousand minarets. Here you can hear five times a day above the... 

Read More "Teleac course on muezzin singing delivers little deeper insight #hf10

Oerol arrives. Competition for Holland Festival on scarce arts pages in Festivalland #hf10

 The Marathon Effect is well known: put spectators together in a theatre for half a day or more, preferably on uncomfortable seats, and hand them over to a couple of actors with a play. Success seems assured, and the ancient Greeks already knew that. So that there would be no discord surrounding the monster project I Demoni, the Dostoevsky adaptation of Peter... 

Read More "Oerol arrives. Competition for Holland Festival on scarce arts pages in Festivalland #hf10

Demoni by Peter Stein: Masterpiece leads to masterpiece #hf10

 After a 12-hour theatre marathon, what can be said? That it was good? Good. It can. That it was rare? Also true. That it takes a director in his 70s to stage a Russian novel with such calmness, and that it takes such phenomenal actors to keep the audience hooked for 11 hours to the not-very... 

Read More "Demoni by Peter Stein: Masterpiece leads to masterpiece #hf10

'Calliope writes very essential notes'. Premiere Greek Love Songs by Calliope Tsoupaki #hf10

 Image report: Ellen Segeren A few years ago, Greek-Dutch composer Calliope Tsoupaki wrote songs with piano accompaniment for Greek singer Nena Venetsanou. Some of these Tsoupaki arranged for the four brass players of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Brass Soloists and the four singers of the Egidius Quartet, whose tenor part is filled in for this occasion by Marcel Beekman. For him, Tsoupaki also wrote... 

Read More "'Calliope writes very essential notes'. Premiere Greek Love Songs by Calliope Tsoupaki #hf10

Battle of the hashtags: Harmony Festival, Ca vs Holland Festival, Nl #hf10

 Fortunately, there is a considerable time difference between Santa Monica and Amsterdam, but for a while there was a threat of considerable confusion when the organisers of the three-day Harmony Festival thought they could reserve the hashtag #hf10 for themselves. However, since the first twitters, yesterday, things have been quiet in California, as they have discovered that Holland Rulez where trending topics are concerned.... 

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Jelineks Rechnitz impresses Holland Festival visitors #hf10

Image by Andrew B47 via Flickr Photo: Chris Vanderburght It was time for a real theatrical hit at the Holland festival, after the rather lukewarmly received British-American Shakespeares of Sam Mendes' Bridge Project. And clap it did with Rechnitz by Elfriede Jelinek dooor the best actors of the Münchener Kammerspiele. Karin Veraart of De Volkskrant was deeply impressed: ...Not... 

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Meanwhile at the Holland Festival: Press cheers over Dog's Heart and doubts Anne Therese de Keersemaeker #hf10

 Not all was negative around Sam Mendes' Bridge Project, which was received rather sparingly by us at The Dodo, and a few other media outlets. Apart from a few positive Twitter reactions, the performance of The Tempest also garnered a pretty nice review from Volkskrant reviewer Karin Veraart, who admired music, directorial discoveries and acting performances by Stephen Dillane in particular and the fresh couple... 

Read More "Meanwhile at the Holland Festival: Press cheers over Dog's Heart and doubts Anne Therese de Keersemaeker #hf10

Thanks to Elfriede Jelinek, since 9 June we know a little better what it is like to be Austrian. #hf10

 By Wijbrand Schaap (photo Arno Declair) Since Wednesday 9 June 2010, the Netherlands has been looking a bit more like Austria again, although with us the mountains are in the southeast, instead of the west. And there's another difference: we are still allowed to see the stage work of Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, while the stern writer's work in her... 

Read More "Thanks to Elfriede Jelinek, since 9 June we know a little better what it is like to be Austrian. #hf10

Amsterdam FM Clash of Reviewers on Holland Festival #hf10

 Loek Zonneveld is furious about The Bridge Project, but overjoyed with De Keersemaeker's The Song and Wijbrand Schaap still enjoys Amal Maher in the broadcast of Clash der Recensenten on Amsterdam FM, Tuesday 8 June, between 15:00 and 16:00. Also featuring a clear explanation of what The Dodo is, and what it is for... 

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