The Holland Festival is the Netherlands' leading festival, showcasing the best of what is being made internationally and nationally on the bigger stages.
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,...
'For the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to play all the notes written by Chekhov. It was an intellectual and artistic challenge to really work with Chekhov. I could really let Chekhov be one of the authors of the play, which is very unusual for me. After all, I'm used to writing plays to...
Euphoria cancelled due to situation in Ukraine - Intention to shift to Holland Festival 2023 With pain in its heart, the Holland Festival is forced to announce that Julian Rosefeldt's spectacular film installation Euphoria will not be coming to Amsterdam in June 2022. For the 75th edition of the Holland Festival, the world premiere of the new...
We can already chalk up Angélique Kidjo as one of the most disarming appearances at the 2022 Holland Festival. The Benin-born singer is this year's associate artist, together with German director Nicolas Stemann. On Wednesday 9 March, she performed as a commanding speaker at the press conference with which the Holland Festival opens its public relations offensive each year. It was a...
Admittedly, I was never a fan, but how I hated those planes last night. I was walking through a dark, nocturnal forest between Lage Vuursche and Hilversum. Where, in the silence, I could have listened extra carefully to creaking twigs, shuffling insects, whispering trees and the occasional owl, I mostly heard how happy we all are that after corona we have another...
In Electra, one of the finest tragedies handed down to us by the ancient Greeks, there is at least one piece of text that made history. It is the account of a horse race. You see nothing, but the language puts your imagination to work. 25 centuries later, they tried to turn the images described into real images for the...
There is a direct, inverse, link between musical talent and acting ability. The techniques needed to play a musical instrument are completely different from the registers you need - physically and mentally - for acting. So the better you master your instrument, the worse the acting. The musicians of Klangforum Wien master their instrument at the very, very...
'...this (final) image, in which really I saw what I never saw before. That was so insane where I started to doubt my own perception. Interesting sensation that for me is separate from interpretation.' I quote here a visitor I know from the performance Transverse Orientation, one of the toppers of this year's Holland Festival. She was sitting three metres...
Some art you don't quite understand, but touches you deeply. Paradjanov's films, for instance, or The Planet, a Lament by Garin Nugroho. Nugroho has chosen not to provide his performance with surtitles, so your rational brain has to be sidetracked for a while. What are they singing, what exactly is happening, what is it about? After a few minutes of this same...
Saturday 26 June at the Holland Festival, a special evening around two music films by Frank Scheffer: the documentary Inner Landscape and the opera film Si Fan. Supplemented by a short live performance by Chinese musician Wu Wei. This will present a musical journey from the seventh-century Tang Dynasty to contemporary electronic music. An evening with unexpected perspectives.
In a legendary episode of the SF series Star Trek, The Next Generation, for fans like me, Captain Picard is hit by a strange light signal from an empty probe. We then switch to a village to which the captain seems to have been teleported and see how he leads quite a life as a village wise and gifted flute player. At the end, he dies...
Someone cried the other day that bands were dead. That in a world of digital convenience, loop apps and samples, there was no place left for boys and girls with a guitar, a rickety drum kit and possibly a piano. Last night, while real men were watching football, I sat in Amsterdam's BIM house watching a band. It made me overjoyed. Kukangendai, on...
A boy is a guest at his own funeral where a black metal band is playing a funeral concert. The killer, his best friend, is also there, along with anonymous black metal fans. The light is harsh, there is snow on the ground. To the right at the side of the stage, a wall has been built with crates of beer, to the left is what I am in...
Those blessed with the surname 'sheep' not only know that they come from a rich and honourable lineage, but also know by heart all the proverbs, sayings and name jokes, offensive or otherwise. Up to and including comradely blathering chiefs of art. Then the fact that Flemish theatre company FC Bergman is producing a show titled 'The Sheep...
It is always nice to know that someone is waiting for you. Companies offering rare things, officials who have highly sought-after stamps to put up, all owe their happiness and income to people willing to wait for them. Waiting itself, of course, is also something you can build a life around. There are people...
After three centuries of colonial oppression and exploitation, it is now pay-back time. However, we, the progeny of the navy that came to get nutmeg there, are not so good at it. Because we come back to Indonesia with mass tourism, cheap clothing dyers and multinationals like Unilever. We do little else but drain the place further. Economically, but also culturally. This can be subject...
Something about roots, and that they are cut off and that this is inconvenient. Or not, because it gives freedom. Something about men and women, but what exactly didn't quite become clear in Mailles, which I got to experience at the Holland Festival on Thursday 10 June, after another curious test-for-access episode. The great hall of the building that I just don't...
England is closed. The culture minister happily reports that artists can tour Europe again, as long as they do not go outside Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. We've always taken an ambitious approach in negotiations on touring artists, including in my meeting with @AbidRaja last month. Delighted that our new trade deal with Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein will allow musicians, performers...
There are reasons not to live in Belgium, but yesterday I was intensely longing for an evening with my southern neighbours. After all, they have 'testing for admission' in the cultural sector just a little better regulated than here. When I attended a 'testing for access' performance in Antwerp, there was a tent in front of the theatre entrance where I walked in, with a time appointment, a...
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