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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.

Fewer audiences, but fuller halls for @hollandfestival 2013

69,500 visitors, at least 5,000 fewer than previous editions, but the halls were fuller. With 82% audience occupancy, the Holland Festival organisers are satisfied with the 2013 festival. Whether that higher occupancy rate, apart from the smaller number of performances (14 fewer than last year) is also due to smaller halls, is impossible to find out from here, but the fact that the large Theater Carré, with its many unsellable low-visibility seats, was also hardly used this year will certainly have helped.

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Franui provides the most fun Mahler evening in years at @HollandFestival

Holland Festival

What to expect from a 'musicabanda' from East Tyrol? Gemütliche folk music? Yodelling? Dance music for weddings and parties? An evening in a beer pub? Either way: definitely not Mahler. But why not, thought the Franui from the village of Innervillgraten. Result: an enervating performance around orchestral songs. We have never heard Mahler like this before.

Read More "Franui provides the most fun Mahler evening in years at @HollandFestival

Martin Wuttke makes Berlin museum night worthwhile at @hollandfestival

Holland Festival

There are those who spend nights queuing for a ticket. After all, the Berliner Ensemble is mythologically big. As big as the Royal Shakespeare Company in England, or La Comédie Française in France. Monuments to cultural history, dedicated to one writer, like Brecht or Shakespeare, or to an entire history, as the French are used to. We Dutch have

Read More "Martin Wuttke makes Berlin museum night worthwhile at @hollandfestival
Photo: Anne Bonthuis

Exhibit B confronts with probing looks @hollandfestival

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A sociable group of ladies who came in laughing and chatting, leave the room bewildered and tearful. Upset, embarrassed, this is how I see all visitors coming out. What is hard to describe in words is written on their faces. Exhibit B by Brett Bailey is more than impressive. It is an exhibition that confronts and touches.

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Chris Marclay enchants @hollandfestival with his found footage collages

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Multidisciplinary jack-of-all-trades Chris Marclay has broken through with his film project The Clock: every second of the day represented with found footage. It took him five years to make the 24-hour work. That says something about the way he makes his art. The incredible precision with which he edits makes his work so convincing that the viewer almost falls into a trance.

The Holland Festival presented three of his works at EYE, the new film museum, in which he collaborated with MAZE, a descendant of the Maarten Altena Ensemble.

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The Pyre: strakke, ontregelende voorstelling van Gisele Vienne @HollandFestival

Holland Festival

Wie aan de misvatting lijdt dat dans gaat over schoonheid wordt door Gisele Vienne genadeloos uit de droom geholpen. Haar stukken gaan over pijn. Soms bloederig en expliciet, soms gesublimeerd maar niet minder krachtig. The Pyre is een overweldigend stuk dat de toeschouwer duizelig achterlaat.

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Twee geconcentreerde kippen en iets met Tsjechov op @hollandfestival

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Meeuw, een vroeg toneelstuk van Anton Tsjechov, gaat over toneel zoals zijn al even beroemde toneelstuk Kersentuin over kersenteelt of vastgoedfraude gaat. Niet dus. Het lijkt een fout die toneelkunstenaars wel vaker maken en die Tsjechov in zijn 115 jaar oude stuk aanhaalt: denken dat alles altijd over jou gaat. Daarom is het Thomas Ostermeier, gelauwerd Duitsch regisseur, niet zo kwalijk te nemen dat zijn regie van De Meeuw bij Toneelgroep Amsterdam over theater gaat.

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Sonic Youth-gitarist Lee Ranaldo stelt teleur met stormschilderij op @hollandfestival

Er bestaat dus figuratieve muziek. Muziek die, net als een figuratief schilderij, een tamelijk accurate afbeelding van de werkelijkheid biedt. De compositie ‘Hurricane Transcriptions’ van Sonic Youth-gitarist Lee Ranaldo is zo’n plaatje:

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Marie on a string: Anja Röttgerkamp stars as an unknown soldier in Gisèle Vienne's The Pyre @HollandFestival

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'The Pyre', the latest show from internationally rising star Gisèle Vienne, initially seems less disturbing than her previous work. Pieces like 'Jerk' (2008), based on the true story of a young serial killer, and 'This is how you will disappear' (2010), starring a dark forest, were only seen in a few places in the Netherlands. Hopefully, this performance at the Holland Festival will change that. Gisèle Vienne once studied harp, then philosophy and eventually trained as a puppeteer. But Vienne sees herself primarily as a visual artist working with time, on a stage, where different rhythms, motifs and figures come together.

Read More "Marie on a string: Anja Röttgerkamp stars as an unknown soldier in Gisèle Vienne's The Pyre @HollandFestival

Zimmermann & De Perrot give circus genre creative tap at @hollandfestival

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Circus, tricks, clownery, spectacle: it has been a party for centuries. But roughly the same party every time.

Zimmermann & De Perrot, originally clown and DJ respectively, found each other in the brilliant insight that circus could be turned into beautifully absurd modern theatre.

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'El Djoudour' is interesting as a cultural-political project, but does not convince artistically @Holland Festival

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Men and women together on the dance floor, it is still forbidden in large parts of the Muslim world. Two years ago, the dance performance 'Nya' was at the Holland Festival, a piece written on the skin of nine Algerian dancers, mostly B-Boyz from the streets, but also the son of a ballet teacher from Algiers participated. This year, French choreographer Abou Lagraa, his wife Nawal Ait Benalla and much of the Algerian cast returned to the Holland Festival with a piece in which women also dance.

Read More "'El Djoudour' is interesting as a cultural-political project, but does not convince artistically @Holland Festival

Desdemona in black and white

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Is the kingdom of the dead in the opera Sunken Garden by Michel van der Aa a 3D garden full of brilliant colour, director Peter Sellars chooses in Desdemona by Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré for sober black and white. On the stage of a sold-out Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ are glass bottles and jars, sometimes lit from below, sometimes from above, with hanging light bulbs like flickering candles. On the left are a number of ngonis (Malian lute) and two koras (Malian harp lute), played by black musicians.

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Chilean IK generation seeks revolutionary art at @hollandfestival

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Six actors, four years in a bunker. One is dead. Those are the details we have to make do with in Tratando de hacer una obra que cambie el mundo. According to this title, the actors are trying to create a play that will change the world. The characters have locked themselves away in an underground bunker and receive occasional provisions via a packet.

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John Adams' other Gospel of Mary @HollandFestival: masterpiece just too long

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Mary is arrested at a demonstration and thrown into a cell next to a heroin addict, while her sister Martha has just started a shelter for the homeless. And Lazarus, yes, Jesus brings him back to life here too, with downright breathtaking sounds. And we are not even halfway through.

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Crushingly good: Nine Rivers by composer James Dillon, with conductor and percussionist Steven Schick @HollandFestival

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From the mild, everyday cacophony around the Muziekgebouw in the afternoon, on the terrace by the IJ, you'll get into the silence of the concert hall in a few steps. For three and a half hours (with over two hours of breaks in between), Asko|Schönberg, Slagwerk Den Haag and Capella Amsterdam will play and sing your ears off. Steven Schick (a.o. once Bang on a Can), not only conducts, but also takes charge of the middle part of the concert, at the Bimhuis, as a percussionist. Under his inspired direction, 'Nine Rivers' navigates between spectacle and purism: a battle between complex form and the simplicity of raw sound matter.

Read More "Crushingly good: Nine Rivers by composer James Dillon, with conductor and percussionist Steven Schick @HollandFestival

'Shéda', insane chaos with a glimpse of genius @hollandfestival

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If after only the first 15 minutes, half of the middle row flees the auditorium, and you look at your watch, thinking, my god we still have over five hours to go, there is something thoroughly wrong with the performance. 'Shéda', by Congolese playwright Dieudonné Niangouna, is an insane tub of chaos of incoherent tirades. Declaimed screaming at a stretch by 12 hyperactive African and European actors, each with a fixed character, who return as gods to apocalyptic worlds, à la Mad Max, beating each other up with bizarre lyrics. Goodness, it is impossible to make sense of it all. Yet it continues to fascinate. Why?

Read More "'Shéda', insane chaos with a glimpse of genius @hollandfestival

Meistersinger @HollandFestival convinces musically only

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Cowardly knight defeats untalented rule fetishist with help from wise cobbler and wins singing contest and the hand of coquettish goldsmith's daughter. Or: boy meets girl on the streets of Nuremberg and decides to enter the local version of Nuremberg's got talent. The judges send him away, but he gets the audience vote. Wagner wouldn't be Wagner, however, if he didn't take about five hours for this story.

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Deep in the belly of the Icelandic cello @hollandfestival

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It's a tricky genre, which drone, or ambient. Or, what do you call the avant-garde cello experiments of the Icelandic Hildur Guðnadóttir (1982). Very slow, very repetitive, very minimalist. Abstract sound art that leans heavily on loops, resonations and buzzing, über syrupy tones that swell into a large, layered sound collage.

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Two voices on Sunken Garden @HollandFestival part 2. Thea Derks: 'Guilt & penance before, after, with and in death'

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Amsterdam, 5-6-2013 - It is difficult to go uninhibited to a production that has already caused so much controversy as Sunken Garden by Michel van der Aa. This "first 3D opera" was slammed as "soporific" after its premiere at London's Barbican Theatre last April, but also hailed as "the future of opera".

Read More "Two voices on Sunken Garden @HollandFestival part 2. Thea Derks: 'Guilt & penance before, after, with and in death'

Two voices on Sunken Garden @HollandFestival, part 1. Henri Drost: "much more than 3D film opera"

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Forget all the fuss about the first-ever 3D film opera, forget all the fuss in British newspapers. Michel van der Aa himself sighed in interview that, on reflection, he would have loved to have made the second 3D film opera. And perhaps he had

Read More "Two voices on Sunken Garden @HollandFestival, part 1. Henri Drost: "much more than 3D film opera"

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