Archive 2007 

2007 marked the Holland Festival’s 60-year anniversary, a good reason to look back at 1947, when one of the festival’s missions was to promote international exchange by inviting both artists and visitors from abroad and introducing these to a Dutch audience. 

Under the banner of Oppression and Compassion, the festival offered performances which took the worst of humankind as its themes: Elfriede Jelinek’s Babel by the Wiener Burgtheater about the events in the Abu Ghraib prison; John Adams’ Doctor Atomic with a libretto by Peter Sellars based on Robert Oppenheimer’s development of the first atomic bomb. Compassion and reconciliation were also found in the danced East-West dialogues by Sylvie Guillem and Akram Kahn, and Jerome Bell and Pichet Klunchun, respectively.