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.
It was a touching moment when director Cherry Duyns drove a frail Misha Mengelberg onto the stage on Tuesday 9 June, after the premiere of his opera Koeien (Cows). Dressed in a bright orange windbreaker and wearing a cap with an oversized visor, the recently turned eighty improviser and rudderless disruptor looked around uncomfortably: is this applause for me? Yet he visibly enjoyed himself and...
For the first time in years, Robert Wilson is back on stage by himself and he proves what a sublime performer he is. In Samuel Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape, he plays an old man looking back at his younger self. His older self is almost without language, but with cries, grimaces and gestures. Wilson manages to take the play to its bitter...
'Urbo Kune' is esperanto for 'common city'. Klangforum Wien presents 24 hours of contemporary music and ideas today at the Muziekgebouw, focusing on the future of Europe and ideas about the ideal capital of the United States of Europe. https://vimeo.com/129976101 At 12:12 today afternoon, the event started with an incomprehensible statement from the roof. Mayor Van der Laan, Arnon Grunberg, Francine Houben exchange...
The new format of the Holland festival puts the spectator first. Plenty of visible events, free performances and being in the middle of the city. It's director Ruth McKenzie's trademark. It is therefore not surprising that she does not shy away from the digital universe. After all, what better way to share than digital art? But what then is digital art...
Manger, de nieuwe voorstelling van Boris Charmatz en Musée de la Danse, geeft toeschouwers alle ruimte. Waar je je opstelt om te kijken of juist om te luisteren, naar wie of wat je kijkt en voor hoe lang, maak je zelf uit. De Zuiveringshal op het Westergasfabriekterrein, majesteitelijk leeg en galmend, zorgt voor een wonderlijke sfeer in deze voor Charmatz’…
It is one of the most pre-discussed performances of this Holland Festival. Newspapers, magazines and webmagazines dived en masse on The End featuring Japanese superstar Hatsune Miku. That she is not real. About all of us being fascinated by the virtual and technology. About her two and a half million Facebook friends. About the fans who have written more than 100,000 songs for her. About the costume designs...
Geïnspireerd door verhalen van Borges, wiens weduwe bij de lancering van het online interactieve muziekstuk tijdens het Holland Festival aanwezig was, heeft The Book of Sand toch nog het meeste weg van een uitgebreide, hele chique videoclip. Is dat erg? “Neither the book nor sand possess a beginning or an end.” Het verhaal van Borges, waarnaar de titel verwijst, gaat…
A confession. There is no other way. So: yes. I was lying between immaculate white sheets in a comfortable bed with actress Lina Issa and it was beautiful. She whispered soft words in my ear, put a hand on my hand and it was very quiet around us. Thanks to that whispering, the noise of the big city fell away. Trams...
Emio Greco and Pieter Scholten rehearse their new performance Extremalism in Marseille. The two dance companies under their direction, ICKamsterdam and Ballet National de Marseille, have merged for this occasion: 30 dancers on stage, six authors and designers in the auditorium, and the crew of technicians is also made up of Amsterdamers and Marseillais. They are working together on the biggest production that Greco and...
Lulu, the opera that Alban Berg left unfinished on his death in 1935, is considered an undisputed masterpiece, which is frequently performed. The opera is at the Muziektheater for the third time this millennium, but for the first time with the third act completed by Friedrich Cerha. South African artist William Kentridge will direct. He and the performers were honoured after the...
A young blonde woman climbs a staircase in a round, windowless room and emerges into a desert. She runs laps around a red cloth, singing "everything's repeated many times". Or: the same young woman lies in the same windowless round room, but now in a different dress and with a curious machine. "everything's repeated many times". Or: the same...
Stepping into M.U.R.S. is a treat. This is the smart city, the city of our near future. Communication electronics and fun rule. It resembles a fairground or a huge disco. Exciting voices welcome you. You whirl in with the crowd. Everyone joins in. Your phone is in touch. Cheerleaders stand on a stage,...
Metropolis at Holland Festival: 4 ways to look at the future.
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.
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...
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,...
Visiting M.U.R.S. without the app on your smartphone is a challenge. The performance by the infamous Barcelona-based theatre collective is a commentary on how people are unwittingly becoming part of a SMART society run by international corporations via all sorts of gadgets. Are you in or out? Is there actually anything to choose? According to Jürgen Müller, one of the founders of...
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...
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...
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 hippy-dom, the jubilant times of the left-wing church and everything else that, with today's knowledge, is dirty and dirty. They were the years when...
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. Previous exhibitions such as Expanded Cinema, which showcased visual artists working at the intersection of film and art, already demonstrated this. Now William Kentridge has been given the honour of...
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...
Because of my fascination with the complex relationship between listening and watching, I decided to visit three performances at the recent Holland Festival and experience what happened when I tried to pay equal attention to ears and eyes. The first was "Delusion of the Fury" (1966) by American composer Harry Partch, the second a concert performance of Philip Glass's opera "The CIVIL warS" (1983), the third a performance of Franz Schubert's "Die Winterreise" (1827) in which twenty-four short films by South African artist William Kentridge were shown.
Prinses Beatrix kan wel tegen een stootje hedendaags theater. Twee jaar geleden zat ze nog (als koningin) in de zaal bij The Life & Death of Marina Abramovic, en dit jaar bij The Crimson House van Lemi Ponifasio / MAU. Zo ongeveer één van de meest radicale – want luid, rauw en tamelijk ondoorgrondelijke – voorstellingen van deze editie van het Holland Festival. We kwamen er overigens niet helemaal uit, maar
Ivo van Hove heeft niet alleen een toneelstuk gemaakt op basis van Ayn Rands ideeënroman The Fountainhead. In 2006 wilde de artistiek leider van Toneelgroep Amsterdam er zelfs een heel nieuwe inrichting van het toneelbestel op baseren. 8 jaar later kunnen we constateren dat alleen de negatieve kanten van Van Hove’s visioen zijn gerealiseerd.
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