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Holland Festival

Laurie anderson by Ebru Yildiz

Deep poignancy and plenty of humour with Laurie Anderson at Holland Festival

Laurie Anderson visited the Holland Festival for a third time and played to a sold-out Carré. With a five-piece Sexmob, a jazz combo from New York for the occasion, she performed well-known and lesser-known songs from her oeuvre spanning more than four decades. And every song felt like it was dear to her, with fresh, new arrangements of double bass and baritone ... 

scene photo by Camilla Adams

'Drive Your Plough...' - Masterful narrative theatre by Simon McBurney is a lesson for every viewer #HF23

A word says more than a thousand images. This may seem strange in a world that thrives on visual culture, but it is a truism. If you have yet to see cows of all shapes and sizes, let the Holland Festival convince you. Yesterday, I saw the opening performance 'Drive Your Plough Over The Bones Of The Dead' and... 

ANOHNI associate artist Holland Festival 2023

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 new theatre and dance programme manager Holland Festival 

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... 

Three hours of vogue in Harrell's Porca Miseria might be a little too much of a good thing. #HF22

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

Moby Dick for the twenty-first century, genderqueer and layered #HF22

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,... 

Persuasive theatre on theatre about climate crisis - A play for the living in a time of extinction

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.... 

Wallen, the grande dame of French R&B world, returns for exclusive performance in Amsterdam

"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... 

Hearing and seeing pulled apart in fascinating project by C de la B at Holland Festival #HF22

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... 

Spatial overall experience in the Gashouder

'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.... 

30 appearances out of darkness by Arno Schuitemaker excites the senses

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... 

Moving during Bolojo star Zeynab Abib's performance at Holland Festival

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 

Sami Yusuf overwhelms packed Concertgebouw with cinematic music spectacle

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... 

Holland Festival opens with Queen Angelique Kidjo's African dance party #HF22

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... 

SPECIAL! Holland Festival 2022 shows us how indifferent we are about the past #hf22

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... 

ANTARCTICA - at the Holland Festival : World premiere of an opera about the mysterious continent on 5 and 6 June

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.... 

(Update) Nicolas Stemann on his version of 'der Besuch' at the Holland Festival: 'We do take such women very seriously these days.' #HF22

Update 11 May 2022

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.

Ben Frost shoots at elusive state violence with 130-decibel musical bullets #HF22

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,... 

Tiago Rodrigues directs Isabelle Huppert in The Cherry Garden at the Holland Festival: 'From Chekhov, the best friend of all actors in the world, we play every note.'

'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... 

'We need art to talk to lunatics' - Holland Festival presents anniversary programme

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... 

Supervisors come to ministry with cry for help: 'What is gone once is hard to rebuild.'

'We are coming up with this heartfelt cry because we are genuinely concerned that the cultural sector is not overcoming the lockdowns of the past two years.'This is what the chairmen of the Supervisory Boards of a large number of cultural institutions are writing today in a letter to Ernst Kuipers, Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport, and Robbert Dijkgraaf and Gunay Uslu, Minister and State Secretary of... 

Nerd podcast 14: These two reviewers remarkably agree on Catholic theatre, the Holland Festival, ITA and the upcoming summer

We once started this series because we disagree horribly about some things, but in practice things turn out differently. In episode 14 of this fascinating series of insider conversations about theatre and whatnot, we talk about a few Holland Festival performances and look ahead to the festival summer. As it turns out, the... 

Holland Festival celebrated the live arts in corona time

The 74th edition of the Holland Festival closed last weekend with the performances Transverse Orientation by Dimitris Papaioannou, Age of Rage by ITA-Ensemble and Pierrot Lunaire by Marlene Monteiro Freitas. The festival collaborated with two associate artists, Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and French-Austrian theatre maker Gisèle Vienne. Twenty-three companies played one hundred and eleven performances in twenty-five days. The festival presented seven world premieres and co-produced 11 international... 

Arnold Schoenberg sounds out of an endearing piece of kindergarten drama. #HF21

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... 

The myth of Europe, you need a Greek for that anyway (and a better theatre) #hf21

'...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... 

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