The Holland Festival is the Netherlands' leading festival, showcasing the best of what is being made internationally and nationally on the bigger stages.
On 28 February, Pierre Audi will present the programme of the 2012 Holland Festival at the City Theatre. As in 2010 and 2011, we will follow that festival closely with our online festival daily newspaper at www.dedodo.nl. That daily newspaper has now proven its right to exist, as more and more festivals want to collaborate with the Cultural Press Agency on this unique initiative. To the 'product-range'...
That frightens us quite a bit ourselves. We knew that the Cultural Press Agency was doing pretty well, but we didn't really think a reach of more than 100,000 people was possible. After all, we had done nothing in the way of marketing. Just posting content and not giving away free tickets. And only once something with a bare female breast in it. Enfin....
In conclusion. The 2011 Holland Festival could well be historic. Not only was it the festival that attracted the most audiences for years, it was also the festival that took place while a minority government of populists, nationalists and materialists proclaimed the end of art subsidies. We therefore look back on a festival in which we had a great time with our new...
The Dodo was busy, this third week of the Holland Festival. Thankfully, again with an exciting mix of beautiful, weird and extraordinary. As it should be, really. What makes the Holland Festival all the more exciting is that such extremes can sometimes take place within one programme, as with the National Ballet, or even within one performance, as with The Russians...
At last: the opera The Cricket Recovers after the animal story The cure of the cricket by Toon Tellegen is in the Netherlands! More than six years after its world premiere in Aldeburgh, the Holland Festival presents Richard Ayres' work, performed by Asko|Schönberg and VocaalLAB conducted by Etienne Siebens. Pierre Audi signed on to direct: he made the performance layered and daring....
Could Prime Minister Rutte cum suis's anti-advertising by dismissing art as destined for leftist types and other idiots already be having an effect? You would almost think so when you see the rather poorly filled halls during the performances at the Holland Festival. There are more than ten people in the front row, yet it all doesn't hold...
The ark as the earth, as a spaceship carrying us through the chaos of the universe to a safe haven. The pole star as the apparent magnetic centre of the universe around which all the stars revolve. No, this is not woolly new age chatter, these are the starting points for Tevot and Polaris, two major orchestral works by Thomas Adès, which had their Dutch premiere under the composer's own direction.
At the request of the Holland Festival, Jamie McDermott of The Irrepressibles created a new programme: Human Music Box. The ten-member British band will start its world tour in Amsterdam. The premiere on Friday 17 June at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ became a subdued, musical evening that was especially visually appealing. In the middle of the Grote Zaal was a large, rotating...
'Labyrinth' is the name of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's choreography. Mazes intrigue because you can get lost in them and then insist on finding the exit. Along the way, a person then has all kinds of revealing experiences about himself. But Cherkaoui does not get to this passage. He immediately starts with symbolism. A dancer holds a wide band that goes from the stage house to...
Cologne and Paris may not have been built in a day, but it took less than three days to fly to the moon. A warped comparison to say that a show that rattles three days before its premiere can turn out to be an unimaginable hit on the premiere itself. So something like that could happen with The Russians, the latest show
Composer Wolfgang Rihm and choreographer Sasha Waltz, two familiar faces at the Holland Festival and big names in European performing arts, released a performance together in 2008 that could not be missing from a Holland festival programme this year. Not only does the festival have a focus on some great contemporary composers (Xenakis, Rihm), but it is also quite pushing the envelope on the...
"Alifib" by British progrocker Robert Wyatt (b. 1945) is a song that gets under the skin. Wyatt's near-breaking voice sounds so genuinely sad that it takes your breath away. It seems an impossible task to perform "Alifib" convincingly without the master himself. Yet the French Orchestre National de Jazz gets it right. Where Wyatt in the original...
That the Off Broadway musical Fela! was a success, we could actually expect. For The Dodo, we therefore did not send anyone there either: there are already enough newspapers and other bloggers eager to have a front-row seat to the New York audience favourite. You can read that they had a good time elsewhere on this site, via the blogstream
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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.
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....
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...
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,...
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."
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...
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...
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