From experimental gamelan to Inuit sensory explorations, these are the must-sees we will be attending
Image by Archie Finch
It’s that time of year again — the sun is getting a bit more generous, the city feels more open, and we become just a bit more receptive to spontaneity, a stranger’s smile, and, of course, art that can now fit into our elongated days. The perfect moment, really, to let your mind wander while everything around you is in bloom. Luckily, the Holland Festival returns to Amsterdam with its annual surge of artistic energy: a generous, sometimes overwhelming mix of international artists, performances, and ideas spanning theatre, music, opera, dance, and experimental forms that blur into one another in the best way.
Within this overly saturated (although we’re not complaining) agenda, we’ve gathered a series of must-sees that caught our attention — and we’re sure will catch yours.
Image by Jan Gates
Tanya Tagaq – Split Tooth: Saputjiji
Inuit landscape translated sonically and sensorially
Split Tooth: Saputjiji entails a transformative marriage of two works: Tanya Tagaq’s book Split Tooth and album Saputjiji, now become a performance that feels deliberately unbounded. Rooted in Inuit life in the Arctic regions of Canada, it traces a coming-of-age shaped by both the vastness of ice and light and the lasting weight of colonial history. Taking a hybrid form, the work moves between memoir and mythology, where the personal slips into the collective. Tagaq’s voice echoes the blinding vastness of northern landscapes, transmuting their scale and intensity. Drawing on Inuit throat singing, Tagaq outgrows the physical limitations of vocal possibilities, further venturing into whispering, growling, and harmonious singing. The result is an immersive, sensory performance where the memory of a distant land, carried in one body, is transferred to many.
Image by Archie Finch
Blackhaine — And Now I Know What Love Is
Intense emotions choreographed in a former prison,
We’ve been following Blackhaine for a while, drawn to the sharp, unsettling physicality of his work — music and performance that heavily presses on your chest. While his collaborations with Space Afrika, Playboi Carti, and Kanye West might have been the passages through which his work first reached our ears, witnessing the magnetism of his solo career and vision has been even more exciting. At its core, Blackhaine’s practice sits between choreography, architecture, and sound, driven by belief, restraint, and existential agony. His sonic palette of drill, post-punk, ambient, and experimental hip-hop invades your body, and his voice tears you apart. Now, And Now I Know What Love Is brings his world into live form, in its full brutality and tenderness. While he won’t be physically present (which gives it even a darker edge, as if he gives parts of himself to other bodies to temporarily hold), a cast of performers carries the piece inside the former Bijlmerbajes — a setting that amplifies its intensity and confinement.
Jameszoo — Salukat
Gamelan meets experimental electronics, all DIY and feeling like home
A gamelan ensemble and a jazz-leaning electronic producer walk into the same sonic space to conjure House — and we can’t wait to experience what that crossover will be like. Led by Jameszoo (aka Mitchel van Dinther), the performance brings together Het Muziek and Gamelan Salukat in a playful, shape-shifting search for what “home” might sound like. Working with a custom-designed set of instruments tuned in a ten-tone scale (reconstructed from a box of musical Lego, btw), tradition is pushed outward into something restless and vibrant. Winds, strings, and gamelan textures collide, scatter, and regroup, creating moments that feel chaotic but reveal an underlying precision. There’s a sense of shared attention running through it, where seemingly disparate elements find their intimacy and breathe into this experiment of togetherness.
Image by Bowie Verschuuren
Naaz and Huba de Graaff— Qaqnas
Freedom sung into resistance
Naaz’s voice is always a safe, familiar, and empowering world to turn to. Having recently dropped an album, Naaz now takes herself into a new territory — for Qaqnas, she steps into something even more charged: an opera that turns voice, electronics, and resistance into its own kind of stage language. What does freedom mean for women today? The work circles that question without settling it. Inspired by “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” (“woman, life, freedom”), a slogan rooted in the Kurdish women’s movement, the piece holds both its force and its fragility — freedom as something continuously fought for, and never fully secured. Sung in Sorani Kurdish, a language once forbidden and now reclaimed, the sound itself becomes an act of visibility. Composed by Huba de Graaff and based on a poem by Kurdish poet Tarza Jaff, the opera unfolds in a studio-like space where an all-female cast operates everything themselves (plus: expect costumes to blow your mind).
Image by Casper Koster
Boogaerdt/VanderSchoot & Jef Van Gestel — HOLOBIONT
A five-hour live world of bodies, drag, and transformation
Five hours, no fixed seats, and no clear line between watching and joining in — step into HOLOBIONT like your new, slightly bizarre living room. Premiering at the Holland Festival and created by Boogaerdt/VanderSchoot with Jef Van Gestel, it unfolds as a fluid, shape-shifting gathering that raises questions of resistance and body autonomy, in a time when queer bodies are subjected to global scrutiny and violence. A holobiont is a cluster of life forms coexisting as one organism — and here, that idea becomes spatial. Performers and visitors drift through a shared environment of drag, dance, text, and sound, where nothing stays fixed for long. You are a free wanderer. But this openness is pointed: in a moment where trans and gender-diverse bodies are increasingly politicised and policed, simply occupying space becomes an act of resistance. HOLOBIONT occupies that safe space, while also questioning how free our bodies are.
Image by Casper Koster
We know, it’s too much to choose from. But if you want to experience these works not just alone, but as part of a wider festival community, HF Young offers a way in. HF Young is the Holland Festival community for younger audiences between 18 and 40. Membership is free and gives you 25% discount on almost all performances. Alongside access, it also creates shared festival moments — drinks, parties, and post-show talks.
Words by Evita Shrestha
Images courtesy of the artists / Holland Festival
