This Christmas break, our Soft Winter Festival features a heartwarming programme at the Plein Theatre for all ages! The festival includes puppet theatre performances for the whole family, delicious and affordable food from Aunt Peggy, a comedy night, the Amsterdam Winterstal at OBA Oosterdok and a connecting end-of-year drink for the whole neighbourhood. We would like to end 2024 ultra-soft with local residents,...
Eye Filmmuseum turns the spotlight on the American avant-garde film of the 1960s this autumn. An explosion of form experiments in a turbulent era. A movement that still inspires.
Nieuwe Noten Amsterdam celebrates its fifth anniversary this season! To celebrate, we have a special offer: students and professional musicians and composers can go to any Nieuwe Noten concert for only €10. Every month in Plein Theater, you get the unique chance to experience new music in an intimate setting. Nieuwe Noten Amsterdam offers a stage for contemporary chamber music....
The associate artist for the 78th edition of the Holland Festival in June 2025 is American choreographer Trajal Harrell (Douglas, Georgia, USA, 1973). Harrell is one of the most important international contemporary choreographers. His unique style incorporates elements from various dance traditions, fashion, music and visual art. With universal human emotions and themes of connection, tragedy, tenderness and vulnerability, Harrell's...
Staff of city museums around the world come to Amsterdam This year, the Amsterdam Museum, together with Imagine IC, is organising the International Conference of City Museums and Contemporary Heritage Practice. This event is initiated from ICOM, the International Council of Museums. Each year, a different museum gets the honour of hosting the event. After Moscow (2015), Mexico City (2017),...
At 1 hour and 50 minutes, it happens. That's when Nicolien van Vroonhoven, culture spokesperson for the ruling NSC party, makes it clear how things stand. "The cultural sector should also take a look at itself, because there are whole groups in society that have nothing to do with culture." Venue: pop temple Paradiso in Amsterdam; the occasion: a church early...
ZID Theatre enthusiastically launches the fourth edition of FATE, the talent development programme for young, creative newcomers and creators with a refugee or migration background! Ambitious performing artists up to 30 years old are given the chance to develop their talents and realise their artistic dreams through flexible training, coaching and unique presentation opportunities. FATE opens doors to the Dutch arts and cultural landscape and offers a springboard to professional careers. Do you know any talents? Share this initiative and make sure they sign up for this special programme soon!
Plein Theater provides a stage for contemporary music. Adventurous and small-scale performances, new compositions and leading musicians; in the Nieuwe Noten Amsterdam series, audiences are given monthly opportunities to experience this unique concept in an intimate setting. In the summer of 2024, Plein Theater will open its doors wide. In the Summer of Music in and around...
Coming soon to ZID Theatre HISTORIA: A Journey through Cultures and Time HISTORIA is choreographer and dancer Issam Zemmouri's first dance solo. With a background in dance from Morocco and France, Zemmouri has been a regular at ZID Theatre in the Netherlands for over five years now. He was also an active participant in the FATE training programme (Future Academy...
The 77th edition of the Holland Festival closed on 29 June with a minute-long standing ovation for Georgina Verbaan who showed a phenomenal acting performance in the The Second Woman, a performance by Anna Breckon and Nat Randall, in which she played the same break-up scene for a full 24 hours with a hundred most non-professional counterparts. The day before, Victor Pilon closed...
This is what charisma looks like. Arthur Verocai, now 79, tall and lean, stylish jacket around bony shoulders, only has to look into the hall once to overwhelm the audience. In the Concertgebouw's main hall on Tuesday night, the Brazilian legend stood in front of the Metropole Orchestra to belt out work from his scarce albums. He hardly needed to...
One of the lesser-known and therefore hidden gems of this Holland Festival can be found in the Transformatorhuis of Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek. In that space, a single artist spends six hours every day shovelling 40 tonnes of sand from one pile to another. It sounds strange, but those who are there make something very special
Probably the most famous murder of a woman for what she is is that of the fictional Carmen, a free-spirited young Spanish woman with a fear of commitment. Opera composer Georges Bizet immortalised this character from a French story by Prosper de Merimée, making the crime of passionel a common term for what is none other than femicide. That habit of men killing women...
Jet fighters, drones, thunderstorms with accompanying flooding and lovely babbling brooks with the occasional bird in a pine tree. All of Austria descended on the Gashouder at Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek grounds this weekend and it is what it promised: spectacle as only Austrian music spectacle can be. Georg Friedrich Haas's work 11000 Saiten is a great superlative: surround with emdr and...
Future health minister and deputy prime minister Fleur Agema graduated as an architect early this century with a study on the ideal prison. Artist Jonas Staal re-examined her graduation design a few years ago. Agema appears to have an extremely dystopian vision of the world in which prisoners and guards must pass through a disorienting, inky-black, concrete hell to...
Live music in the theatre, I long for it more and more. Performances in which actors are accompanied by a soundtrack, amplified with or without transmitter microphones, always only half captivate. You soon find yourself watching a kind of live performed film. But without the comfort of a cinema and the technical capabilities of the camera.... Sunday 9 June sat in...
That's where Christiane Jatahy had me for a moment. When during her directed and devised story 'Despois do Silencio', one of the actresses falls into a Winti-like delirium, and her colleagues try to keep her from colliding unceremoniously with spectators in the front row, I briefly think it is real. That's how used to reality we are by now...
It was busy at Amsterdam's Westergas area, this Thursday, 6 June. Fantastic, of course, that not only do you have a couple of excellent running restaurants and clubs there, and the evening four-day march passes by while there is a big salsa party at the club near the world-famous Gashouder, but then it still feels a bit weird that the royal opening of the...
Tonight, the 77th edition of the Holland Festival opened in the presence of Her Royal Highness Princess Beatrix. In the opening speech, festival director Emily Ansenk said that "the world's most urgent groundbreaking performing arts come together in June in Amsterdam.It may be here in all its multiformity. If you are 77 years old, and have lived through all sorts of eras, developments and governments, then...
There was a time, not so long ago, when the Holland Festival had a reputation for being elitist. The festival, which was founded in 1947 to get the culturally starved Netherlands back on track after World War II, had a bit of that about it because, for a long time, "being elitist" was also completely...
After a successful first edition of Eye meets Marmoucha, Marmoucha Orchestra is back at Eye for a special event: the live accompaniment of the silent film Kif Tebbi on 8 June. Kif Tebbi When the Turks loot the countryside in Libya for supplies for their troops, Mné, an Arab girl from a nomad tribe with whom Ismaïl is in love, flees through...
Keti Koti month takes place annually in the month of June in the run-up to Keti Koti on 1 July. This month is dedicated to remembrance and reflection around the Netherlands' slavery past and its repercussions today. Plein Theater in Amsterdam East, located next to the Oosterpark and the National Monument on Slavery History, is particularly dedicated to...
Three more weeks and the Holland Festival is about to start again! The 77th edition of the Holland Festival opens at the Amsterdam Gashouder on 6 June with Rite of Spring, a double programme in which Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps is the inspiration for a film by Greek filmmaker and visual artist Evangelia Kranioti. This edition's associate artist, the...
Kinan Abuakel took his Syrian classical music with him when he fled the country. With his Saz, a Syrian stringed instrument similar to the Greek bouzouki, which in turn is derived from the Turkish Buzuk, he plays a mixture of new and classical Syrian music. I heard it by surprise at Amsterdam's Podium Mozaïek. That's how I discovered live what I...
KesselsKramer is the Holland Festival's new communications agency. After an extensive selection process, they decided on this collaboration that does justice to the design history of the Holland Festival. KesselsKramer is developing a new campaign for the Holland Festival 2024, in which they will focus on the artists who make the Holland Festival groundbreaking. Photography for the campaign will be provided by the...
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