Paul Verhoeven, Dick Maas, Katja Schuurman, Monique van de Ven and Kim van Kooten are all special guests at the upcoming edition of the Dutch Film Festival. Nothing special, you might think, but if you see them on the festival posters you probably won't recognise them. After all, they are namesakes of well-known film personalities who this year
Festival Boulevard in Den Bosch sold 55,000 tickets this year, 5,000 less than in 2012. The festival, which this year was held from 1 to 11 August, did attract more crowds for the free offerings on the festival square. This brought the total number of visitors to the festival this year to 145,000, 5,000 more than in 2012. As the venue occupancy is still nice at 85%, the drop in ticket sales will mainly be due to a smaller offer of performances.
Still competing at the top and successfully entering Europe with 60 per cent less budget. Impossible, cries many. Only with a new stadium, argues another. And with extra investments in the winter break. But it can be done, according to a few.
A man and a woman dance passionately in the hall of Paradiso. Such an experimental dance performance is unusual for the Amsterdam pop palace. Yet the festival I Like To Watch Too right here. Many people feel a barrier towards this kind of performance, but here there is just the right 'in and out' atmosphere to make avant-garde art something you can just look at and that always triggers something in you.
"I am very curious about the audience's reactions. People always have an image at a festival. They come, expecting to experience all sorts of things. What you get here is the terrain, an exploration and a story that emerges as a result. The main energy that exists on and around this terrain is, "I get to go on it, and what's there? On that energy, I want to build on."
Isn't avant garde dance too lofty? Is it still viable in these harsh cultural times? I Like To Watch Too aims to clear up this misunderstanding. The festival brings experimental dance closer to the public than ever.
The collaboration between pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama and choreographer Nicole Beutler in the performance 'Shirokuro', seen last week at the Holland Festival, provides a beautiful perspective on two piano sonatas by Galina Ustvolskaya. 'Shirokuro' means black and white in Japanese. Despite strong visuals and impressive co-protagonists on stage, the Russian composer's absolute music is never explained and therefore retains its sheer power.
Holland Festival
Gorgeous dresses, big sunglasses and high heels. It is clear that the performance by the famous Moscow theatre company Theatre of Nations also attracted a large Russian audience. Men in suits occasionally talking to their sleeves seem to testify to Russian billionaires present. But nothing could be further from the truth when suddenly Princess Beatrix steps into the auditorium with her entourage.
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.
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.
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
Holland Festival
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 difficult 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.
Holland Festival
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.
Anyone suffering from the misconception that dance is about beauty is mercilessly disabused of the dream by Gisele Vienne. Her pieces are about pain. Sometimes gory and explicit, sometimes sublimated but no less powerful. The Pyre is an overwhelming piece that leaves the audience dizzy.
Holland Festival
Holland Festival
Seagull, an early play by Anton Chekhov, is about drama in the same way that his equally famous play Cherry Garden is about cherry growing or real estate fraud. Not so. It seems to be a mistake that stage artists often make and that Chekhov cites in his 115-year-old play: thinking that everything is always about you. Which is why Thomas Ostermeier, lauded German director, cannot be blamed for the fact that his direction of The Seagull at Toneelgroep Amsterdam is about theatre.
So there is figurative music. Music that, like a figurative painting, offers a fairly accurate depiction of reality. Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo's composition 'Hurricane Transcriptions' is just such a picture:
Holland Festival
'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.
Holland Festival
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.
Holland Festival
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.
Holland Festival
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.
Is it because of the ice age? Is it a question of money or guts? Last night, the Amsterdam cinema Het Ketelhuis hosted the so-called Spring Consultation for the tenth time.
Holland Festival
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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