In the past two decades, acquiescence and agreement were viewed as the proper way of behaving. “Please confirm” is a digital request made to us several times a day, no matter whether purchasing a public transport ticket or looking for the first edition of a text. It is the most frequent request we encounter, and it would seem bizarre and nonsensical not to confirm. No interface has a “don’t confirm” symbol. Refusing to click on the “confirm” button takes you back to square one or forces you to exit. For about one year now, it seems, however, that not to confirm has again become a viable option. No matter whether the so-called financial crisis was a true crisis or merely an intrigue that was hatched to manipulate and streamline the market and will be followed by others – it has certainly created stimuli for new visions. Suddenly, there is room for not-confirming, for calling the seemingly factual into question, for considering the possibility of changing conditions all around, for a practice of acting or thinking differently. Put plainly, political thinking once more stands a fighting chance against market fundamentalism.

The question “Everything’s different?” may refer to lots of things: to politics, society, art, one’s own life, artistic work. Conceivably, one might also prove that space for activity does not exist anymore at all except as a rehash of former attempts to think or act differently. This striving for the different is a form of energy, a potential of curiosity; it is more creative than acquiescence. Obviously, art is always “energy of difference”. The performing arts, too, embody energy of difference although they are still sometimes subject to representative constraints; if they limit themselves to mere representation, they stop being art.

The performing arts programme, whose aesthetic structure by necessity imposes heterogeneousness, focuses its “everything’s different?” question at society, biography and art. Some works attempt to reflect an energy of the different from the past, like Krystian Lupa’s large-scale Factory 2 or the production by the young Estonian group NO99, who with Joseph Beuys as their travelling companion skip through all sorts of contemporary stage avant-gardes to convince a folklore-loving Minister of Cultural Affairs why they search for the “different” in art. In a series of Festwochen-commissioned lecture performances, visual and performing artists will address this question explicitly with a view to the present and future. Moreover, the Vienna-based performance group God’s Entertainment will recycle individuals regarded as “superfluous” by society at large into respected Austrian professionals, while the concept group geheimagentur from Hamburg will copy artworks and events on request together with six artists and Chinese specialists from Dafen. The series at project space Karlsplatz – a co-operation with Kunsthalle Wien - is an original production: all lectures as well as the works created by the two groups are specifically commissioned by Wiener Festwochen. In all, there will be five productions specially developed and created for and in Vienna, beginning with the lecture performances and installations at project space. In addition, Luc Bondy will direct a nearly unknown play by Euripides - Helen, in a new translation created by Peter Handke for this occasion - at the Burgtheater. Alvis Hermanis and his Latvian ensemble of Jaunais Rīgas Theater will explore the idiosyncratic funeral rites of their country and the stories of some of its dead in a new work, whose prologue is set at Vienna’s Central Cemetery. In 100 Percent Vienna, Rimini Protokoll will interview 100 inhabitants of the city to compile a representative portrait of the Austrian capital. At the Vienna Museum of Ethnology, South-African artist Brett Bailey will develop a new installation concerned with colonial and postcolonial crimes of Europeans and, more specifically, with the genocide committed by German troops against the original population of Namibia. Among international guest performances at Wiener Festwochen, we find a staged concert from Kinshasa by choreographer and theatre artist Faustin Linyekula, who demands more, more, more... future for his country. In Korean-American artist Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment, we risk tripping over our own suppressed racism when confronted with the stereotypes White America still reserves for Black American biographies. A small-scale production from Iran casts the yearning for a free life within a die of fear. With his amazing, excellent actors, Daniel Veronese transposes Ibsen’s Nora to present-day Argentine and a somewhat impoverished middle-class setting, whose denizens still pretend that they aspire to prosperity – including “enlightened” gender roles - while actually struggling for survival. Together with a collective of visual artists and groups of artists from Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian director Enrique Diaz will scour the present of that city both for signs of the “other” and for manifest fears of this otherness. The project involves a “collective” of distinct artworks and approaches combined by Enrique Diaz under one joint creative motto. Titled “the other” (“otro”), the production will be premiered in early summer 2010 in Brussels, Dresden and Vienna. Meg Stuart’s new choreography Do Animals Cry uses six dancers impersonating the members of a crazy family and furious lone fighters to suggest emotional transformations that change humans into another species; Alain Platel’s new work Out of Context shows us another, socially unacceptable and often feared state of the human soul and body. In his dramatisation of Vladimir Sorokin’s futuristic novel Ice, Kornél Mundruczó from Budapest narrates how a sect planning to establish the reign of an elite - chosen partly for racial, partly for esoteric motives – in the midst of everyday life in a Russian metropolis, which is viewed as a catch-as-catch-can social battlefield, recruits its members and sets up a totalitarian regime. With their new work Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech, which chooses an unusual formal structure oscillating between choreography and spoken text, Japanese artist Toshiki Okada and his group chelfitsch convincingly wring alarming, condensed scenes from modern-day office life, stuck between absolute discipline and absolute panic under conditions of precarious employment contracts.

Forum Festwochen will showcase novel works by the post-Yugoslavia generation of artists who spent their childhood in a Socialist state and now must come to terms with their new identities as Serbians, Bosnians, Croatians. This year’s Forum Festwochen will offer two plays from Croatia and Serbia, two performances by Serbian and Bosnian artists and two interactive works by artists of Serbian descent living in Vienna – one of these is Bed and Breakfast, curated by Wiener Festwochen, by Alexander Nikolic. Alongside these “different” dramatic forms, there will also be stage productions by big theatres, some of these unusually long, thus enabling spectators to spend an entire day or the whole night in a different world. Robert Lepage’s modern epic Lipsynch is ultimately a family history, or rather the mosaic of a family history unfolding in fragments and very different places around the world. The story is presented in Lepage’s unique way of perceiving our time and weaving a bigger, special tale from small, scattered events or, perhaps more accurately, of recounting our time as a bigger tale precisely through marginal events. Peter Stein’s version and production of Dostoyevsky’s Demons was created last spring in the barn of the director’s Italian country-house. It was Stein’s intention to re-narrate, not to interpret, this novel. Frank Castorf’s Nach Moskau based on Chekhov’s play Three Sisters and his story Peasants, will intersect varying perspectives of pre-revolutionary life. This German-language production will be premiered in Moscow before being shown at Wiener Festwochen. While the two productions directed by Luc Bondy are based on classic texts, they are still world premieres: David Harrower transforms Arthur Schnitzler’s Liebelei into the English-language play Sweet Nothings, and Luc Bondy will shift the setting of this small private tragedy from the late 19^th century to the 1920s. Euripides’ Helen is a largely neglected but extremely original find that was newly translated into German by Peter Handke. The abovementioned productions Factory 2 by Krystian Lupa and Ice by Kornél Mundruczó must be classified as large-scale dramatic productions as well.

The beginning and end of the performing arts programme will be dedicated to two plays by Elfriede Jelinek, the creator par excellence of a language of otherness in words and deeds. The plays will address a piece of Austrian and German history, a long hushed-up mass murder and current events, with Rechnitz taking the part of the tragedy and the business comedy Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns standing for the farcical element. We are delighted that Elfriede Jelinek will be represented with these two excellently staged plays at Wiener Festwochen 2010.

Stefanie Carp
10 December 2009