The Holland Festival is the Netherlands' leading festival, showcasing the best of what is being made internationally and nationally on the bigger stages.
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...
'Are we ready? Yes. Is everything ready? No, far from it, because it is all very complex. But in the end the jubilation now prevails, because until a week and a half ago we didn't even know if we were allowed.' In this Nerd podcast, Emily Ansenk, director of the Holland Festival for the second year, tells Marijn Lems and Wijbrand
A night walk where, for once, it is not about talking to each other, or exercising the muscles, but about being very aware of where you are. Mindfulness as a theatre experience, then, and if all the coronagraph remains against us, the only part of the Holland Festival that can go on live because of sufficient distance and outside. It needs to be that bad...
From 3 to 27 June 2021, the 74th edition of the Holland Festival will take place in and around Amsterdam. This year's associate artists are American-Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and French-Austrian theatre maker Gisèle Vienne - notable artists with wide-ranging interests, as evidenced by their collaborations with Hollywood directors, techno artists, visual artists and rock bands. During the...
Holland Festival's Supervisory Board appoints Carolien Gehrels as its new chair from 1 March 2021. Carolien Gehrels (1967) is well known to the Holland Festival as a regular visitor of performances and concerts and through her role as Amsterdam alderman responsible for art and culture from 2006 to 2014.
French-Austrian theatre maker Gisèle Vienne (1976) and Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952) have been appointed associate artists for the 2021 Holland Festival.
The three of them are back together in the office for the first time since the lockdown on 13 March. The interview, in which director Emily Ansenk, music programmer Jochem Valkenburg and theatre programmer Annemieke Keurentjes take stock of the first - and hopefully only - online edition of the country's most prestigious performing arts festival, takes place a day after the lockdown. There was no...
The Holland Festival 2020 had an exceptional year; due to the corona pandemic, it did not physically go ahead for the first time in its history. Instead, it was given an online programme as its fulfilment. Holland Festival online programme 2.0-2.0 was the 73rd edition of the festival and the second to work with an associate artist. This year, that was choreographer, director,...
'We did get quite a kick out of spectators at the beginning: "How dare you treat the actors like that? First you put a mask on them, then you steal their voices and make them playback!'' Richard Jansen couldn't care less. He is part of the creative team as sound designer
You take film classics like Dracula and Star Wars, track down their Arabic remakes, and edit these fragments on a live soundtrack that fuses Arabic pop history with electronic music of today. This, in short, is the recipe of the dynamic collaboration between musician Rayes Bek and video artist Randa Mirza, better known as Love & Revenge. With their compelling show,...
In the pre-corona world, Garin Nugroho would open the Holland Festival with his performance The Planet - A Lament. It would no doubt have been as impressive an experience as his Setan Jawa staged in 2017. We would be enchanted by his dancers and purified by the story. In the stripped-down online version of the Holland...
What an incredible bucket of guts Lucie Horsch has. Twenty years old. Quite world-famous by now, admittedly. But you just have to dare, in your acceptance speech for the prestigious Dutch Music Prize, to throw the minister's just-expressed words back in her face. Because that is what Lucie Horsch did, with a controlled fury that made a deep impression even from 25 metres away. The...
First of all, I would like to thank everyone who made it possible for me to receive the Dutch Music Prize here today. Not only all the people who have helped me during the years of my trajectory and given me so much inspiration and motivation, but also everyone who has supported me from an early age in my...
From 11 to 21 June, the Holland Festival will present an online programme as close as possible to the core and essence of the original programme, which was cancelled due to the corona crisis. Together with artists from around the world who were due to perform in the 2020 festival, an alternative online programme has been put together. The festival theme, suggested by...
We are fairly bombarded to death with online theatre experiences. Frankly, I avoid them. I always thought theatre was something to be experienced live. Bobbing shoes are terrible, visible consumption when speaking is something I can't stand at the moment and the sound is always mediocre. I want live theatre, and nothing else. Leave TV to the TV makers, they have studied for that. Still...
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