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HISTORIA Revisited & HISTORIA Collection - Exhibition

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... 

Holland Festival 2024 concluded with successful 24-hour The Second Woman 

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... 

Once maligned Brazilian hero Verocai conquers the Holland Festival.

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... 

Image from Sisyphe. © Louis-Daniel Vallée

Hear what Maaike Muis experienced from a man moving sand at the Holland Festival

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 

Katia Ledoux in Carmen. © Inés Manai

Carmen adaptation by Wu Tsang shows how to combine respect and topicality

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... 

Eleven thousand strings in a round temple: Holland Festival highlight, but also missed opportunity?

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... 

Melencolia by Ensemble Modern at Holland Festival: Unreal music theatre about the end of everything

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... 

Dying drummer says it all in Tiago Rodrigues' Dans la Mesure de l'Impossible at the Holland Festival

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... 

With Despois do Silencio, Christiane Jatahy commands deep respect at the Holland Festival

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... 

Opening party Holland Festival drowns in Westergasfabriek

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... 

Holland Festival opened in the presence of Princess Beatrix. 

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... 

Georgina Verbaan is let down hundreds of times by a different man each time during the final weekend of this Holland Festival. Photo Janiek Dam

The best chance of total bewilderment. Why you want to experience completely unknown performances at the Holland Festival.

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, Marmoucha is back at Eye

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... 

campaign image: PaulinaMatusiak&EddyWenting | Square Theatre

Plein Theater presents Month for Keti Koti from 31 May to 27 June with various activities around the slavery past and Surinamese cuisine.

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... 

PR image Holland Festival

Brazilian vibes and groundbreaking performances at Holland Festival 

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 at Podium Mozaïek photo by author

Boundless Roma pride makes opening Explorez Festival something not soon to be forgotten. 

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... 

Holland Festival chooses KesselsKramer: Pioneering performing arts festival and communications agency work on first campaign

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... 

ZID Theatre presents programme for ExploreZ Festival 2024

A varied programme that takes visitors through groundbreaking performances and different perspectives Amsterdam, 4 April 2024 - Today, ZID Theatre is proud to present the programme for the ninth edition of the ExploreZ Festival. The multidisciplinary and international festival will take place from 7 to 18 May at various locations in Amsterdam. It promises an inspiring mix of local and international talents... 

Timeline of the Dutch period in New York

Exhibition on New Amsterdam from an Indigenous perspective 

Amsterdam Museum collaborates with the Museum of the City of New York and original inhabitants of New York Four hundred years ago, the first Dutch settlers arrived in the area that is now New York. Their mission from the Dutch West India Company (WIC) was to establish the colony of New Netherland, with its capital New Amsterdam, at the southern tip of... 

2 x Steve Reich and world premiere Tansy Davies: 18 April - Muziekgebouw

The pulse of Steve Reich's work lends itself ideally to transforming the atmosphere of a metropolis into music. Street sounds For City Life, Steve Reich took to the streets to record the sounds of New York. Conversations, car horns and alarms, a pile driver, slamming doors, as well as the beating of a heart. Played on samplers... 

WINNERS CINEDANS FEST '24

At a festive ceremony on the closing night of Cinedans FEST '24 (Sunday evening 24 March) at Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam, the following international prizes were awarded for best dance film 2024: Cinedans JURY AWARDS Best Short Dance Film up to 25' €5,000 Until Director & Choreographer |Tanin Torabi |Iran| 2023|13′ From the jury report: Until portrays dance as a form of resistance and shifts the... 

New editing & theatre studio in Amsterdam

Top of the Bill for new generation of makers: 'Theatre Studio Artist Space' On 21 March, ICK Dans Amsterdam opened the doors of its new, state-of-the-art editing studio on the WG grounds in the heart of Amsterdam. Thanks to new sponsor ETC (Electronic Theatre Controls), the studio is now equipped with high-quality, sustainable LED lighting, making it an ideal editing studio for new (dance) makers. With... 

Appointment of two new supervisory board members Amsterdam Museum

Robbert Maruanaija and Patricia de Weichs de Wenne have joined the supervisory board of the Amsterdam Museum. Amsterdam City Council's Alderman for Art and Culture Touria Meliani appointed the new members. Robbert Maruanaija (1986, born and living in Amsterdam) started his working life as a professional footballer and then switched to the creative sector. He explains that... 

Georgina Verbaan plays lead role in 24-hour theatrical marathon The Second Woman. One woman, one role, one hundred men.   

From 28 to 29 June, Georgina Verbaan will play the lead role for twenty-four hours at the Holland Festival in Nat Randall and Anna Breckon's play The Second Woman, a unique hallucinatory cinematic theatre experience. During this theatre marathon, live at ITA and simultaneously on screen at Koninklijk Theater Tuschinski, she plays with a hundred different, to her unknown, antagonists every... 

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