Program

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Festival August is a new festival set on a beautiful estate. It features performances, film, music, art, meaningful conversations, and, of course, delicious and healthy food that goes straight from the land to your plate. It’s a place where you can celebrate and slow down. The ideal setting to explore our relationship with nature, our surroundings, and one another. These aren’t topics specific to either the city or the countryside—they concern us all.

The festival’s program is designed to engage with the location and its surroundings. The orchard, the forest, the barn, and the beautiful greenhouse—all places where you can expect to find program events. Featuring work by Nineties Productions, Bureau Vergezicht, Tina Farifteh, Siba Sahabi, Sister Sylvester, Deniz Tortum, Mirte van Laarhoven, Goda Žukauskaitė, TIDE (Julian Tjon Sack Kie & Laurence Gaudreau) and more. Below is a sneak peek at the program.

During the day, there’s plenty of fun for kids, too. Give nature a helping hand and design your own plant. Or take a stroll around the grounds—you might even discover an undiscovered species.

Nineties Productions - Wat als het ons vertraagt
© Julian Maiwald

Nineties productions - Wat als het ons vertaagt
Wat als het ons vertraagt (‘What If It Slows Us Down’) is a theatrical audio walk about a future civilization. Director Anne Maike Mertens and writer Han van Wieringen explore the “what if” question from speculative fiction: what if we imagine a future in which earth’s inhabitants relate to one another and to the earth in a different way? The performance premiered in ’23 at Oerol, and especially for Festival August, Nineties has created an adapted version that will let you experience the Rorik Estate with a whole new perspective.

Meet a “spirit guide,” a scientist specializing in future history. This guide sketches the world of the Kelips people in the year 2031, after the Great Shift. We get to know the Kelips amid political unrest caused by the arrival of a rust fungus. Should they give in to their fear of this looming threat, or should they instead give the unknown a chance? How do they determine their stance toward the new reality that is emerging?

Composer Annelinde Bruijs and actress Meral Polat join this journey through time, lending their voices to both the guide and the Kelip.

Bureau Vergezicht - Excerpts from Beste mensen + Panel Discussion
They come in all shapes and sizes. Some seek to unite, others to disrupt, and still others to sow doubt: climate speeches. For nearly half a century, they have been delivered on all kinds of stages by world leaders, scientists, and activists. Each has a different tone, but what unites them is a sense of urgency and a call for change.

For Beste Mensen, (’Dear People’) theater maker and writer Anoek Nuyens -known for De zaak Shell (’The Shell case’), among other works- examined climate speeches from the past fifty years. Once characterized by optimism, when both left-wing and right-wing politicians—including Margaret Thatcher and Richard Nixon—called for action to tackle this “new major problem.” Now, fifty years later, optimism has given way to despair, and climate activists are taking to the streets all over the world. The question now on the table is: what comes after that despair? Could the turning point lie in the sum of these speeches?

Beste Mensen is a monologue inspired by 50 years of climate speeches. A timely performance about passionate climate rhetoric, rich imagination, and lackluster politics, performed by Hannah Hoekstra.

For Festival August, Hannah will perform several excerpts from the show, and we’ll sit down with Lene Grooten (Business Manager of Bureau Vergezicht), a representative from Landgoed Rorik, and Festival August founder Daniël Kieft to discuss the green in art and art in green spaces.

Bureau Vergezicht - Beste mensen
© Sanne Peper

TIDE (Julian Tjon Sack Kie & Laurence Gaudreau)
TIDE is a collaboration between composer and music producer Julian Tjon Sack Kie (NL) and cellist Laurence Gaudreau (CA), born out of their shared fascination with the symbiosis between synthetic and organic sounds. Their music draws on influences from contemporary classical music, African music, and the electronic underground scene. Using instruments such as the kora, the cello, and the modular synthesizer, they delve into sonic explorations through a blend of structured improvisation and composition. Following their performance at Gaudeamus in 2023, they were artists-in-residence at Uncloud in December 2024 and were featured in the Echoes of Nothing concert series at the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ in Amsterdam.

Set amidst nature yet within easy reach of Tata and the big city, Festival August offers the ideal setting for the synthetic and the organic to blend or clash.

TIDE (Julian Tjon Sack Kie & Laurence Gaudreau)
© Sam Zwart

Tina Farifteh - Toen ik de zon en maan tegelijk zag
In Toen ik de zon en maan tegelijk zag (’When I Saw the Sun and the Moon at the Same Time’), Iranian-Dutch artist Tina Farifteh poses the following question to herself and the visitor: “If society offers no home, is there perhaps a place for the displaced in the landscape?”
A 24-hour journey condensed into 24 minutes along the Frisian Seedyk, near the village of Sexbierum, where Farifteh currently lives. This installation is part of Tina in Sexbierum—a transmedia project about displacement, detachment, the longing for a home, and, at the same time, the inability to feel at home in a society that constantly rejects you on an existential level.

Toen ik de zon en maan tegelijk zag was originally created in collaboration with Boris Acket for BredaPhoto and produced in partnership with Prospektor. This work is part of the permanent collection of the Fries Museum, where the large-scale version is also on view through March 21, 2027. During Festival August, the compact version will be on view; it was previously presented at MONOPOLE, the branch of the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, where the work was part of the exhibition Silence & The Presence of Everything, curated by Boris Acket and Sanneke Huisman.

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Tina Farifteh - Toen ik de zon en de maan tegelijk zag
© Tina Fariteh

© 2026 Festival August