The Holland Festival, 1– 26 June 2011
Launched in 1947, the Holland Festival is among the oldest European performing arts forums. The self-definition it provides is simple and terse: the Holland Festival is the best operas, dance and musical productions featuring the world's best performers. The festival programme comprises both world premieres of works created specially for the Holland Festival and powerful performing arts events "road-tested" elsewhere.
This year is no exception with the Holland Festival doing exactly what it says on the tin - gathering the best artists from worldwide: from the unique Laurie Anderson from New York, bringing to Amsterdam the mystical universe that is Delusion, her latest piece, to the metaphysical master of Italian visual theatre Romeo Castellucci whose On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God is centred on the figure of Jesus Christ.
The festival will see the premiere of a new reading of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin by the great conductor Mariss Jansons and Stefan Herheim, a director known for his wonderful theatrical imagination.
A never-before seen view of the world is revealed by the poetic stage universe created by the choreographer Lemi Ponifasio from New Zealand, transcending the borders of dance, theatre or any other specific genre of art; the festival programme features Ponfasio's Birds with Skymirrors.
Two other pieces worth catching in Amsterdam are Un Tramway, the Paris Odéon-Théâtre's version of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire starring the unique French actress Isabelle Huppert and Une Flûte Enchantée, Peter Brook's latest work, his take on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Die Zauberflöte. In his 21st-century projects, Peter Brook, one of the seminal 20th-century directors, sometimes dubbed 'the theatre Socrates', approaches the material with the most radical simplicity, polarising his spectators.
One of the most intriguing ensembles appearing at the Holland Festival is New York's legendary avant-garde Wooster Group company; they have staged Tennessee Williams' autobiographical Vieux Carré, using a variety of stage technologies to transmit the playwright's 'lyrical voice'.
Alongside appearances by established masters, the Holland Festival introduces quite a few completely fresh names worth memorising - and the physical theatre of the Hungarian independent Maladype Theatre group and its director Zoltán Balázs, presenting a remarkably original reading of Georg Büchner's Leonce & Lena comedy, a masterpiece of 19th-century German playwriting.
Another event worthy of some special attention is the Lithuanian composer Justė Janulytė's Sandglasses, a musical installation based on the interplay between a cello, electronic instruments and video. Janulytė is known for her attempts to create acoustic metaphors for optic ideas.
With an extensive programme of his works, the Holland Festival remembers the late German theatre, film and opera director Christoph Schlingensief, one of the most influential artists in the contemporary world, who passed away last year. The programme includes several of his films, the Vienna Burgtheater production of Mea Culpa and Via Intolleranza, a production staged at Schlingensief's pet project, his savannah opera house in Burkina Faso - part one of Schlingensief's utopia which now, after the artist's death, is steadily inching closer to becoming a reality.
Programme : www.hollandfestival.nl
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