With its latest retrospective If We Ever Get To Heaven, EYE again convincingly and confidently presents itself as a museum that looks beyond film history. This was already evident in previous exhibitions such as Expanded Cinema, which showcased visual artists working at the intersection of film and art. Now William Kentridge has been given the honour of...
He is the last surviving avant-gardist, and it will not have escaped new-music lovers that he turned 90 on Thursday, 26 March. I mean, of course, Pierre Boulez, the composer and conductor who once declared Schoenberg dead and suggested that perhaps opera houses should be blown up because of their moldy programming. The same man then tirelessly broke a lance for the music of Arnold Schoenberg ...
In June, Boris Charmatz comes to the Holland Festival with manger. He introduced the theme of adults touching children at the former papal palace in 2011. A statement on a tricky current issue. Why don't choreographers speak out more often on poignant topical issues? Pass by new works from recent months and it strikes you that there are hardly any choreographers among them who...
The Netherlands is one of the few countries where Science Fiction plays no role in mainstream media, let alone in the arts. If we look upwards at all, it is through Govert Schilling's disarming Duplo bricks, or Vincent Icke's mildly ironic commentary in DWDD. Or turning 'Mission Earth', a failing soap opera with bickering comedians, into...
Just over a month earlier than usual, the Holland Festival is presenting its new programme this season. There is every reason for this. With the arrival of Ruth Mackenzie as artistic director, a fresh wind is blowing through the festival. Annet Lekkerkerker talks about the changes in the video below. The presentation of the brochure - finally readable thanks to a new design - shows...
The Holland Festival got a completely unknown new director in the person of Britain's Ruth Mackenzie. At least, to us. The flamboyant, artistically exceptional opera director Pierre Audi makes way for a woman who has presented herself mainly as a manager of festivals and cultural institutions, but whose ideas are anyone's guess. When she was presented, none of the...
23,000 signatures and a host of public meetings have caused Brett Bailey's impressive Exhibit B in London to be cancelled. The show, or rather, the event, has previously been seen with great success in the Netherlands, and garnered nothing but praise in Edinburgh too. We too went to see it, and we were impressed. In...
Declining visitor numbers, shrinking subsidies, impoverished programming: most Dutch theatres are struggling, research by NRC Handelsblad recently showed. Theatres welcomed 12 million visitors in 2012, according to NRC figures, a quarter less than in 2008. Festivals, on the other hand, are on the rise. More and more are being organised, and they are attracting more and more people - in total...
There is a world outside Amsterdam. There is culture there too. High-quality even. And of course, Amsterdammers know that too. After all, that whole world comes to Amsterdam every year for the Holland Festival, and if it were up to the director of the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg Melle Daamen, a lot more would come from abroad. Ballet, for example. Our national...
Because of my fascination with the complex relationship between listening and watching, I decided to visit three performances at the recent Holland Festival and experience what happened when I tried to pay equal attention to ears and eyes. The first was "Delusion of the Fury" (1966) by American composer Harry Partch, the second a concert performance of Philip Glass's opera "The CIVIL warS" (1983), the third a performance of Franz Schubert's "Die Winterreise" (1827) in which twenty-four short films by South African artist William Kentridge were shown.
Princess Beatrix can take a punch in contemporary theatre. Just two years ago, she was in the audience (as queen) at The Life & Death of Marina Abramovic, and this year at The Crimson House by Lemi Ponifasio / MAU. Just about one of the most radical - because loud, raw and rather unfathomable - performances of this edition of the Holland Festival. We didn't quite get there, by the way, but
Ivo van Hove has not only a play made based on Ayn Roland's novel of ideas The Fountainhead. In 2006, the artistic director of Toneelgroep Amsterdam even wanted to base a whole new design of the theatre system on it. Eight years later, we can see that only the negative aspects of Van Hove's vision have been realised.
When someone speaks in sentences with words that repeatedly rhyme with 'art' or in which the syllable 'art' keeps popping up, you have to adjust to a different logic than that of everyday communication. If it is also a woman dressed in bright red who pronounces those words eloquently and with many mannerisms, suggesting that she is hyper-sensitive to anything to do with art, your thoughts balance between:
In Rome, they have known what good food is for 20 centuries or so. Bloodletting is everything. Seneca, a Roman of the better sort, wrote plays in which bloodshed was elevated to an art. Audiences feasted on them, just as they feasted on Seneca's recipes in Shakespeare's time, 1,500 years later, and as we feast on Game of Thrones on TV now. It can't be gory, can't be cruel enough. We like that.
From 2007, video artist Matthew Barney (The Cremaster Cycle) and composer Jonathan Bepler on a free adaptation of Norman Mailer's most maligned book Ancient Evenings. To Mailer's mythology of ancient Egypt, they added the equally mythical American automobile industry in an ambitious and operatesque film project with a demanding length of 5 hours 11 minutes.
From February River of Fundament on world tour and the Holland Festival
After impressive retrospectives dedicated to John Cage (2012) and Edgard Varèse (2009), the Holland Festival this year put Venetian composer Luigi Nono in the spotlight. Under the title 'Trilogy of the sublime', the imposing Gashouder was the epicentre of three full-length concerts, short 'Nono interventions' sounded in the Rijksmuseum's subway, a two-day symposium was organised around Nono, and his widow Nuria set up an exhibition entitled 'Maestro di suoni i silenzi'.
Every Holland Festival there is at least 1 performance which a lot of people wonder why it is programmed. This year, that honour falls to 'Bestiaire d'Amour' by and starring Isabella Rosselini. We take a moment to look for answers.
Topical again, now that Toneelgroep Amsterdam is reviving the play, my review from 2014. This week, the stage adaptation of The Fountainhead premiered. The book is terrible, the performance rattles, the actors win only narrowly. The content, however, creates even more confusion, which is why I won't stop you from going to see it. And Hans Kesting, of course. I put it this way.
Visitors to the film Napoleon, last Sunday at Ziggo Dome, who had thought of booking dinner at one of the intervals, will get their money back. This was decided by the Holland Festival after a commotion arose on the internet, and beyond, about the caterer's lousy service, and the rather poor quality of what was on offer. Visitor Marc Veerkamp said the following on facebook:
To make it 450e birth anniversary of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Krzysztof Pastor created a full-length choreography for the National Ballet, loosely based on The Tempest (1611). The performance is part of the Holland Festival. Dramaturge Willem Bruls adapted Shakespeare's last play about the island exiled prince Prospero and his daughter Miranda into a script in which the story is told four times, from as many perspectives. The result is enchanting.
Nice 'old-fashioned' Holland Festival: a special set-up that confronts the audience with the implications of their own position and viewing behaviour. And that's just as well with Fassbinder's 'Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant'. Melodrama was no stranger to the German theatre and film wizard. The bitter tears are of a fashion queen and her entourage, clinical is the setting, wafer-thin the story, and yet unusually exciting how this lady drama develops.
Language is music. Sometimes we forget that. Then we think language is a way of conveying objective meanings. Kind of silly. Language is food for all the senses. No strumming is needed under that. That's pure opera without embellishments. The English-language performance 'tis Pity she's a whore' I saw at the Holland Festival yesterday proves that. Even if you don't understand the seventeenth-century phrases, it is a joy to listen to.
Saturday, June 14, went off in a flood of evening gowns, dinner jackets, Dutch celebrities and Gooische Tanks War Horse premiered. A play about a war in which the Netherlands was neutral, and of which there are memorial stones in every village in the rest of the world. You can go and see it. Or not. We have listed six arguments.
"You know ma'am, that big red painting? Turn right before that". A young attendant shows us the way. At first glance, it's nothing. A man in semi-uniform, black trousers, white shirt, slowly turns on his axis. Sol Lewitt's mural, number 1084 from 2003, lends him the necessary decorum. Around the corner hang Barnett Newman and Andy Warhol. Would the man care? In this 'hall of fame' of conceptual art, the man's spinning stands out a little timidly. Some visitors remain standing, leaning against white walls or sinking down on the polished wooden floor. Those who take their time watch the spinning of the man and his fellow dervishes slowly take possession of the Stedelijk.
Jubilation and cheers echoed last night in the sold-out Great Hall of the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ after the Dutch premiere of Delusion of the Fury of Harry Partch at the Holland Festival. No wonder, as the performance directed by Heiner Goebbels was titillating and the performance by the - conductorless - MusikFabrik perfect.
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