Every summer, the Holland Festival welcomes the world to Amsterdam with a month-long performing arts lineup that is a highlight of the Dutch capital’s cultural calendar. After two years of reduced offerings due to the coronavirus pandemic, the festival this year, which runs through June 26, returns to full steam with a robust program to mark the event’s 75th anniversary.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Holland Festival was founded in 1947 as a project for peace and understanding between nations. A similar belief in the power of art to bridge cultures also led to the creation of the Edinburgh International Festival and the Festival d’Avignon that year.
After three quarters of a century, the Holland Festival is perhaps more global than ever. Focusing on climate and issues of representation, this year’s program features new and recent work from a diverse range of established artists from the United States, Europe, Africa and South America.
“I don’t think we’ve ever been mainstream,” says Holland Festival director Emily Ansenk. In a recent telephone interview, she explained that the event is aimed at introducing the Dutch public to vital artistic voices rather than lining up superstars guaranteed to generate hefty box office receipts.
“We’re not looking for the big names because they’re big names,” says Ms Ansenk, 52. “The festival starts every year with a clean slate and you have to fill it in with the perfect mix,” she added.
In the second half, the festival will combine theatre, dance, opera and music, including works by the French-Beninese singer Angélique Kidjo and the German theater director Nicolas Stemann, both this year’s artists-in-residence.
Mrs. Kidjo performs in ‘Yemandja’, her new music theater piece about slavery and betrayal. The work, which had its world premiere at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in March, is a magical-realistic panorama set in a 19th-century African village where the local ruler teams up with a Brazilian slave trader.
“‘Jemandja’ is about how we can come together to heal the wounds caused by colonialism and slavery,” Ms Kidjo said in an interview available on the festival’s website. “Music plays an important role in this.”
On June 24, Ms. Kidjo is also scheduled to perform in concert with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta and solo musicians in a program featuring her own songs and several others written for her by the American minimalist composer Philip Glass, as well as chansons by Edith Piaf and George Brassens.
Ms Ansenk cited the concert as an example of the kind of cross-pollination that her festival encourages. “We put together local ensembles or stars with international ones and then something magical happens,” she said.
While putting together the program, Ms. Ansenk explained that she and her programmers are waiting to see what kind of themes and connections emerge from the lineup.
“It’s really what the artist wants to bring to the table and then we weave a kind of common thread through the festival program with it,” she said. “It’s also nice for the audience to kind of bundle it up and say, this is what artists are working on these days.”
The issue of proper rendering, a subject of much of Ms Kidjo’s work, has been at the center of ‘Contre Surveys’, which played at the festival earlier this week. The show is the theatrical exploration of Mr. Stemann of ‘The Meursault Investigation’, Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s postcolonial take on Albert Camus’ ‘The Stranger’.
“While I was working on this project, the question arose: who are we to tell this story?” That is what Mr. Stemann says in an interview published on the festival’s website. “Who can play these characters? This is part of an important and highly topical debate on identity politics. I didn’t want to see these questions as problems, but as productive topics for theater.”
The ethic of storytelling is also at the heart of “Der Ring des Nibelungen”, an irreverent adaptation of Wagner’s epic cycle, written by Necati Oziri and directed by Christopher Rüping, an in-house director of the Schauspielhaus Zurich, in Switzerland.
Mr. Oziri, a young German playwright, depicts the inner lives of Wagner’s mythological figures, with an emphasis on the exploited and marginalized among them, while Mr. Rüping wildly performs the monologues during an energetic and music-filled evening with an almost four-person audience. hour runtime.
Mr. Stemann, the co-artistic director of the Schauspielhaus Zurich, has introduced Mr. Rüping for this summer’s line-up. As artist-in-residence, mr. Stemann three productions at the Holland Festival, in addition to a sneak preview of “Sonne”, a new play about climate change (told from the point of view of the sun) by the Austrian Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek. Mr Stemann, who will carry out the work in Zurich next season, regularly works with Ms Jelinek.
The environmental theme continues in ‘Kein Licht’, an opera by composer Philippe Manoury based on a text by Mrs. Jelinek, which will be performed by Mr. Stemann during the closing days of the festival.
The music theater piece, cheekily dubbed a “Thinkspiel” by the composer, evokes a desolate world after a Fukushima-style nuclear power plant disaster through instrumental, vocal and live electronic music – as well as a real howling dog.
“It starts with Fukushima, but then expands to the theme of exploitation and the destruction of nature and the planet in general,” explained Mr Stemann in the website interview. In Amsterdam, the director will present a revised version of the work, which premiered in 2017 at the Opéra Comique in Paris.
“Kein Licht” treats its bleak subjects – stupidity and blindness leading to man-made apocalypse – with neurotic humor and a taste for the absurd. In doing so, the feeling of indignation is offset by vice. For Mr. Stemann, it is important to find a way to confront current issues without being propagandistic or preachy.
“Currently, art is at great risk of being hijacked by political agendas,” said Mr Stemann. And while he has a prominent presence at a festival that has chosen to address burning issues, the director finds it necessary to ‘defend the autonomy of art’.
“I feel like art loses its power when it gets too political,” he said.