The 77th edition of the Holland Festival concluded on 29 June with a minute-long standing ovation for Georgina Verbaan, who gave 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 his 12-day performance Sisyphe to loud and long applause. For 12 days, Canadian Pilon performed Sisyphe for 6 hours a day, reflecting on the absurdity of life inspired by Albert Camus' essay The Myth of Sisyphus.
The festival opened on 6 June with Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, Caroline Shaw, Evangelia Kranioti, Christiane Jatahy, Karina Canellakis, Frank Ticheli and the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, and Cappella Amsterdam.
Many of the festival’s themes touched on the burning issues of today’s world: migration, identity, inequality. What is my home? Where do I feel home? And how does the past continue to influence the present?
Holland Festival director Emily Ansenk: ‘We wanted to build a home where everyone felt welcome for the festival’s 24-day duration. We felt the connection between audience and artists onstage in many different ways. Many artists addressed the audience directly, often breaking the fourth wall.’
The Gashouder hosted 11.000 Saiten, a grand concert for 50 pianos and the 25 musicians of Klangforum Wien. Hartwig Art Foundation and Holland festival presented Carmen to a sold-out Carré, in which director and artist Wu Tsang had three Carmens perform her radical adaptation. The Holland Festival also provided a stage for young makers like Flavia Pinheiro, with her solo The Unborn, and Joshua Serafin with their production PEARLS, both hosted in Frascati.
Associate artist Christiane Jatahy
Theatre and film maker Christiane Jatahy was the associate artist for this year’s festival. Jatahy regularly casts a critical gaze on social relationships, gender relations and the consequences of slavery. In Hamlet - In the Folds of Time, her Hamlet is an adult woman who wants to rectify her past, while her Ophelia refuses to die, having been a victim for four centuries. In Depois do silêncio she used various sources to vividly portray the effects of the colonial system in Brazil. On commission for het Holland Festival she made Crossings, two works for public spaces. In Nelson Mandelapark and Noorderpark, Jatahy spoke about home with people from Amsterdam who were either born or had relocated there: what is ‘home’, how and where do you feel at home? What does it mean to you if you can’t find a home? Where do you belong? Crossings was made with locals, who shared their at times moving stories.
The festival hosted many different Brazilian artists in Christiane Jatahy’s wake, from small and intimate performances like Clayton Nascimento’s Macacos addressing police violence. The 16 productions by Brazilian makers went into both the cultural wealth of Brazil and its problematic realities of structural racism. The wealth of rhythms from Candomblé and Umbanda with Vitor Araújo, the legendary Arthur Verocai with the Metropole Orchestra and guests on the Concertgebouw stage and the trio Metá Metá, featuring two members of The Ex who provided the live score to the film Limite, a focus on Brazil without music cannot be done, Jatahy said.
Audience expansion
With performances throughout the city, from Amsterdam North to South East and East to New West, the festival drew a highly diverse audience. It managed to reach a younger target group with educational programmes for young people, a club night with DJs from Brazil and night programmes in Frascati and the Muziekgebouw. This edition of the Holland Festival was also well-attended by the city’s Brazilian community.
Many of the other programmes similarly drew a multilingual and diverse audience. And because we presented a large Brazilian programme, this year the venue welcomes were not only in Dutch and English but also in Portuguese.
Professionals
The festival not only aims to showcase makers and their work to a general audience, but also puts a lot of effort into meet-ups between makers and other professionals from the field behind the scenes. Many of the artists attending the festival also visited performances and/or rehearsals by their colleagues, which led to many extraordinary encounters. As part of the annual project Immerse programme, an international group of seven makers at the start of an international career visited performances, had meet-ups with other makers and got to know the festival and organisation better. As part of the also annual ‘Festival Exchange’, two young festival makers from Egypt and South Korea came to the festival in order to see what things are like at the organisation’s different departments. New this year was a fully-fledged ‘Professionals Weekend’, which saw a group of around 45 directors and programmers visiting performances, meeting makers and discussing burning issues in the field.
(Digital) Accessibility
The programme was deepened in various ways, with a wide range of introductions, post-event receptions and meetings between artists and audience members, as well as discussions and a book club. Various parts of the programme could be attended for free: the traditional Opera in the Park, visual arts in Frascati and several parties with performances that went on deep into the night, as well as Crossings.
HF Digital is the Holland Festival’s online channel with in-depth information in the form of podcasts, mini lectures and a playlist with music from the festival. It’s also the channel for a number of works by the artists themselves. A stream of The Bird with a thousand voices was available worldwide during the festival, and you can listen to a recording of Vitor Araújo’s sold-out concert here after the festival. You can also watch the Ammodo Docs-produced Northern Winds, about artist Jonathas de Andrade, on HF Digital after the festival.
Not online, but streamed live in Tuschinski was The Second Woman, where audiences could watch a unique live made and edited film for the full 24 hours in Tuschinski 1.
Facts and figures
From 6 through 29 June, Holland Festival presented a total of 40 productions with 110 performances, which included 8 world premieres and 23 Dutch premieres. The festival was well-attended, with venues filled to over 80% capacity on average and many sold-out performances.
photo: final applause The Second Woman, Anna Breckon, Nat Randall, Georgina Verbaan. Holland Festival 2024 ITA
credit: Janiek Dam