The Holland Festival is the Netherlands' leading festival, showcasing the best of what is being made internationally and nationally on the bigger stages.
On 11 June 2023, the Holland Festival will host the Dutch premiere of the British 5-star musical theatre production Wuthering Heights at DeLaMar in Amsterdam. One of London's most influential directors, Emma Rice, adapted Emily Brontë's literary masterpiece into a fiery theatrical experience, with live music, humour, puppetry and dance. Wuthering Heights received rave reviews in London and is touring on this...
American singer, composer and choreographer Meredith Monk presents the world premiere of her new work Indras Net in the 76th edition of the Holland Festival. Belgian director Lisaboa Houbrechts stages a family epic that spans three generations: Vake Poes; or how God disappeared. With performance EXÓTICA, Mexican-Chilean choreographer Amanda Piña breathes new life into works by the forgotten...
The associate artist for the 2023 Holland Festival is singer, composer and visual artist ANOHNI. The festival will feature new and existing work by her. Among other things, ANOHNI and the festival are working on a new, large-scale project involving multimedia and movement in the Gashouder in Amsterdam. About her role as associate artist herself taking the stage
Kasia Tórz joins the Holland Festival from 1 September as programme manager Theatre and Dance. Together with director Emily Ansenk and programme manager Music and Music Theatre Jochem Valkenburg and programmer Katinka Enkhuizen, who joins on 1 October, she will form the new artistic team of the Holland Festival. Emily Ansenk on Kasia's appointment: "Her broad experience with...
Actually, it was too bad to persevere. Perhaps I should indeed have followed my impulse to walk away hard, but I stayed with Kein Licht. Indeed, this play, written by Elfriede Jelinek, composed by Philippe Manoury and directed by Nicolas Stemann, was technically quite good. Only that little dog, I so did not like that. Animals and...
There is at least one reason to go see Porca Miseria, Trajal Harrell's latest work. The Holland Festival hosts the American choreographer best known for his Vogueing work this weekend, and the soundtrack to his trilogy is nothing short of stunning. Starting with Willie Nelson and ending with the Lamento della Nimfa with which Claudio Monteverdi...
Moby Dick; or, The Whale is the latest gesammtkunstwerk by artist collective Moved By The Motion, Schauspielhaus Zürig and Wu Tsang. Her adaptation of the great American classic as layered as the book. Where Herman Melville uses accounts, scholarly sources and monologues, Tsang deploys film and music. In a collage of theatrical performance, dance, found footage, animation and documentation nature footage,...
On the day a group of Dutch climate scientists announce that we are not going to make 'Paris', A Play for the living in a time of extinction premieres. How do you make a play about the biggest crisis threatening us? How do you make sure you keep making theatre and not agitprop? Or maybe it's not so bad at all....
If humanity goes extinct, there has been a woman somewhere who was the last not to have a child. To whom does that honour belong? At the Holland Festival, an ensemble of 12 performers now perform a requiem for that last non-mother. Actress and singer Joy Wielkens is the extraordinarily disarming high priestess in this at times quite heavy evening, in which the end of...
It shows either enormous guts, or boundless naivety, to make a musical in which a slave trader in Africa is converted by a song to a life of love and respect for fellow human beings. Yet Yemandja, the play that was performed in a setless performance at the Holland Festival, is actually just that. I could also explain...
"You know, I am just a little man, I want to introduce you my wife," France's Abd al Malik told the Holland Festival audience. Right he was, as his Moroccan wife Wallen was undoubtedly one of the queens of the French R&B world from 2001 to 2008. This set the tone, as the acclaimed singer shone 18...
What does trauma do to people? A lot, I can say now, after hearing and especially seeing Le Moindre Geste at the Holland Festival. The performance is very special in its conception, and for that reason alone beautiful to experience, and confronting, for both the amateurs who performed it, and the fans who watched it. Le Moindre Geste can be...
'Where is that sound coming from anyway?' I heard someone whisper behind me. Right above the audience, I saw a man playing tubular bells, idiophones and other percussion. Behind the stand of 1,000 people, a piano resonated. A celesta sounded in the corner of the Gashouder. Different sounds travelled around the venue like the earth makes its round in by starry sky....
Upon entering the Transformatorhuis on Amsterdam's Westergasterrein, we are blinded by a row of bright lights on the floor. A low tone produces a kind of pleasant unease, a sound of possibility. Then the light goes out and we are in pitch darkness, red half-moons from staring into the lamps still burnt on our retinas. The tone persists...
Benin singer Zeynab Abib had some making up to do. And she did. As a guest artist in the opening performance of the Holland Festival last week, she performed in the limelight with Holland Festival associate artist Angélique Kidjo, but didn't quite pan out. This time, not in the big Carré but in the more intimate Great Hall
How do you play a rainforest? I was once told that the rainforest makes deafening noise especially at night. On 7 June, I got to hear the same thing in the installation Altamira 2042, thanks to the Holland Festival. In that performance, Brazilian artist cum documentary filmmaker Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha managed to make the sound of the tropics tangible. In a...
It's quite something, what Sami Yusuf brings to the stage: his own accompanying group of seasoned pros, the heavenly voices of Cappella Amsterdam and the traditionally Mediterranean sounds of the Amsterdam Andalusian Orchestra. Together, this results in a sound experience that moves from calm ponds with a gurgling fountain, to dry steppes winds, raging seas and overwhelming mountains. There could effortlessly be a...
Yemi Alade. What a woman. Never heard of her until 3 June, the opening of the Holland Festival's anniversary edition. She was one of the guests of Angelique Kidjo, the Benin-born African singer who is one of the two associate artists of the country's most prestigious festival this year. And Yemi Alade, star from Nigeria, threw her full...
In the French-speaking world, everyone has read l'Étranger (The Foreigner) by Albert Camus. The 1942 book, which many Dutch people have also read, if only because it is nice and thin for the French reading list, tells the story of a white French resident of Algeria, a so-called pied-noir, who is so convinced of the absurdity of life that he becomes a...
Just for fun, name one literary or cultural classic Dutch work that you are sure people around you know about. And I mean a work, like a book or a play, that pops up every few years in the lists, on our stages, in our cinemas. Something that everyone, even now, is on...
For its 75th edition, the Holland Festival is teaming up with the Melkweg and club Lofi for some exciting evening and night programmes. On 3 and 24 June, the unpolished atmosphere of Lofi in the Westelijk Havengebied will allow for late-night partying, while on 20 June the Melkweg will be the place to be. During these three nights, co...
Asko|Schönberg premieres Mary Finsterer's new opera at the Holland Festival. Antarctica takes us into the mysterious world of the southern continent. A multidisciplinary performance in which the Australian composer links historical, mythical and scientific images and stories about Antarctica. In doing so, she uses an enchanting combination of musical elements from old and new styles....
'For me, the world of Wotan equals the world of Putin.' Christopher Ruping, director of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen to be shown in Amsterdam in June, makes no bones about it: 'Siegfried [central character of Wagner's monster production, ws] is a very problematic character. He kills the dragon without asking questions. We give the dragon...
The comparison with the Derksen affair cited in this article no longer holds true as of this date, as the TV personality has been restored to full glory by the television station that previously 'cancelled' him. From Monday 16 May, he will return to his old role as a 'grumpy old man' in Today Inside. See the link here.
Once upon a time, Ben Frost started out as a composer of laden ambient music. Not necessarily upbeat, more contemplative and just a little depressing of the kind that can be used to add some colour to a dip. Take the piece "You, Me and the End of Everything," which can be found on YouTube. Compared to the score of The Murder of Halit Yozgat,...
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