Vienna Festival opening: Revolutionary exercise in front of City Hall
Published: Saturday, May 18th 2024, 02:20
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Swiss artistic director Milo Rau wanted to break with tradition at the opening of his first edition of the festival on Vienna's Rathausplatz. With the proclamation of the "Free Republic of Vienna", the start of the festival on Friday evening was indeed unusually political and activist.
Pop acts from Pussy Riot to Bipolar Feminin and statements from Elfriede Jelinek to Carola Rackete evoked a spirit of resistance that had to walk a fine line between party, pathos and slogans.
It was already clear in the run-up to the official launch that Rau would not only not shy away from controversy, but would make it part of the program, so to speak. With the lively discussion surrounding philosopher Omri Boehm's "Speech to Europe", the "Council of the Republic", which also featured controversial proponents, and the ultimately withdrawn invitation from Teodor Currentzis, who was accused of lacking distance from the Kremlin, the festival has been the talk of the town for weeks.
The idea of reflecting on the current world situation with the means of art and countering it with rebellion and a spirit of optimism was something like the almost logical guiding principle of the opening evening, which lasted more than an hour and a half. And until the end, it was not entirely clear how serious the Swiss artistic director and his team really were about the utopia of a civil society revolution.
Storming the town hall
Right at the start of the show, the takeover of the "Free Republic of Vienna" was staged as an assault on the town hall. A video was shown on the screens in which Festival Director Rau, Burg actress Bibiana Beglau - the two then acted as a kind of moderator duo throughout the evening - and Herwig Zamernik alias Fuzzman, musical director of the opening program, had taken their seats at the mayor's desk and then, followed by the camera, hurried through the corridors of City Hall towards the stage, not without snatching the folders from the hands of supposed bureaucrats. Irony or platitude? We don't really know.
At the same time, a kind of armada of insurgents, which later functioned as a choir, had already taken up position on stage to sing the first of the two republic anthems "All colors are happiness" with Fuzzman. "Go home, capitalists! You've achieved nothing!" was the catchy phrase, "We've made ourselves beautiful for you fucking racists!"
When selecting the musical acts, which made up around half of the program, Zamernik opted for politically underpinned pop of various kinds. The Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot, for example, performed their protest song "Putin has pissed himself" to great acclaim from the 36,000 or so visitors on site.
Greetings also from Switzerland
The musical performances were interspersed with recorded greetings and live statements from international activists and artists such as the nature conservation ecologist Carola Rackete, Pussy Riot member Diana Burkot, the Ukrainian director Stas Zhyrkov, the Swiss non-binary person Kim de l'Horizon, who won the German Book Prize two years ago, and the author Sybille Berg, also from Switzerland.
Here, the pressing issues of the present, from climate change to racism and war to gender identity, were taken up and the "Free Republic of Vienna" was propagated as a possible place of solidarity, equality and self-empowerment, sometimes rather whimsically, sometimes combatively, sometimes with a tendency towards pathos. However, the seriousness of rightly important concerns threatened to be thwarted by sometimes strange (visual) language, for example when the screens suddenly staged the throwing of a Molotov cocktail or rapper Kid Pex invoked a "Guantanamo of Austria".
Unplanned, the Middle East conflict also crept into the evening: in the meantime, a banner, which later disappeared again, appeared on stage with the demand for peace and freedom for Palestine. You can of course express your opinion in the "Free Republic", but it must also be clear "that you are waving the flag for a terrorist regime here", responded Fuzzman, while Rau more or less ignored the matter.
Spark does not ignite
The Festwochen director scored a small coup with the video message from the publicity-shy Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, from whose multi-layered contribution one could also read something like a vague reservation about the absolute commonality of a cause, no matter how worthy of support: "We take over the kitchen. I can't cook, but I like to see what comes out, and then I want to be a part of it without being consumed by the fire that I carefully circle."
At the end, Fuzzman and his Singing Rebels performed the "Anthem of the Republic". The spark of revolution did not seem to have fully ignited in the audience, who responded to the previous call to sing along.
143 performances at 34 venues
However, there is still time for this, as the "Free Republic of Vienna" with its 100-strong "Council of the Republic" made up of experts, intellectuals and citizens - Jelinek, Berg and Zhyrkov are also members - will remain in place until the end of the festival weeks on June 23. This year's festival features a total of 47 productions and artistic projects, with a focus on participatory formats and projects with free admission. Some of the best-known names include Kornél Mundruczó, Florentina Holzinger, Kirill Serebrennikov and Tim Etchells. A total of 45,000 tickets will be issued for the 143 performances planned at 34 venues.
The decidedly political program is likely to continue to occupy not only the festival community. The Vienna ÖVP announced on Friday that it would be submitting an urgent question to Mayor Michael Ludwig (SPÖ) at the municipal council meeting next Wednesday, as the festival - "sponsored by the City of Vienna - provides a stage for extremist views". So there is plenty more to talk about.
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