Up to Nature

On the occasion of the Up to Nature Unplugged Festival, the Vogeltennwiese in the Vienna Woods will be used as a brut venue for performances, installations, and concerts, including the open air Bar brut deluxe. Across three days, artists from Vienna and Europe present productions that examine the forest’s living environment and the recreational area at the city’s outskirts as a border area between urban culture and cultivated nature. Up to Nature is a festival for all those who find the areas outside of pubs too crowded, the theatre too dark, and the mountain hut too desolate in the summer.

Sustenance is also being provided. Please bring along blankets and camping mats and be sure to wear appropriate clothing.

The Vogeltennwiese can be reached from Hütteldorf Station (U4) by taking Bus 52b to station Siedlung Krodon and from Ottakring Station (U3) by Bus 46b or 146b to station Feuerwache am Steinhof. brut will be providing an additional shuttle bus to Ottakring Station (U3) from 0:30 to 2 in the morning.
Directions from Hütteldorf Station (52b) can be downloaded here and from Ottakring Station here (46b) or here (146b).

Up to Nature will be touring in summer and autumn to Bristol (29 June to 1 July), Oslo (24 to 26 August), and Kuopio (28 to 30 September).

Up to Nature is a co-production of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival Kuopio, Black Box Teater Oslo, brut Wien, Inbetween Time Bristol, and Maska Ljubljana. In co-operation with the Wiener Festwochen. With the kind support of the European Commission.

6pm to midnight
Antti Laitinen (somero)
Tree (performance)

Over the past three years, Finnish artist Antti Laitinen has devised performances with subtle humour that are deliberately doomed to fail. A trained photographer, he fastidiously documents this failure of his projects. One of his recurring themes is the relationship between humans and nature. For example, in Bare Necessities (2002) he went out into the Finnish nature and attempted to survive for four days without the assistance of any cultural artefact. In this project’s documentation he can be seen trying in vain to make a blanket from moss, or how he keeps rubbing two sticks together without even the slightest hint that they might soon catch fire. For the festival Up to Nature, Laitinen embarks on another similarly hopeless mission into nature. For Tree he will be felling a deciduous tree in the Vienna Woods and cutting it up into logs in order to ultimately reassemble it as true to the original as possible. As a copy of the original, Tree becomes a sculpture in public space. www.anttilaitinen.com

By and with Antti Laitinen

7pm
Martin Nachbar (Berlin)
Animal Dances (dance)

“Martin Nachbar has been proving for years now that ‘Konzepttanz’ is not only intelligent, but can also be extremely humorous.” Franz Weigand

Animal Dances presents configurations, effects, and forces that arise when humans and animals come into contact. Martin Nachbar is known for borrowing movement and language material from a wide variety of contexts in order to try them out on his own body. This time he will be working directly from the animal kingdom. He doesn’t avoid simply imitating animals at all. While the one or other animal sound makes the atmosphere on stage very concrete and close to nature, he doesn’t deny himself the possibilities of playing with the abstract idea of “becoming an animal”.
Animal Dances examines the relationships that twenty-first century city-dwellers have with animals: anthropomorphised pet, unknown working animal, invisible vermin, and beasts of prey photographed on a safari.
This is another artistic experiment by Nachbar on himself during the course of which the exploration and the respective dance-reflective means are as important as the actual result. www.martinnachbar.de

9pm
Fiksdal/Langgård/Becker (Oslo)
Night Tripper (performance)

In Night Tripper, choreographer Ingri Midgard Fiksdal, composer Ingvild Langgård and scenographer Signe Becker are exploring the idea of nature as animistic, as a place of both healing and destructive powers, of immanence and transcendence. Ancient mythology meets contemporary everyday life, and dream and reality merge into an otherworldly, yet tangible tale. Night Tripper draws from ideas of voodoo culture, where lingering too long at the crossroads can make true believers into divine horsemen.  
Night Tripper takes shape as a trail in the woods, concert performance, ritual and social event. It begins in the twilight hour and takes the audience into the night. The piece features seven performers, curious instruments, numerous installation artworks, a local choir from Federal Grammar School 18, and a lot of potent spirits.
Fiksdal, Langgård and Becker all trained at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and have collaborated on several projects ranging from visual art, to concerts and performances. Their previous piece The Orchard Ballads, has been performed in various versions in Norway, Sweden and New York, and was acclaimed as “a surprising and all-consuming experience. The performance rocks the premises for what dance and theatre can be.” (Aftenposten, NO).

Concept, choreography and performance Ingri Midgard Fiksdal Concept, composition and performance Ingvild Langgård Concept, scenography and performance Signe Becker Music and performance Jørn Tore Egseth, Pernille Holden, Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen and Gunhild Mathea Olaussen

Night Tripper is supported by The Norwegian Arts Council, by the Foundation for lyd og bilde and the Foundation for utovende kunstnere.

10pm
Owl & Mack: Boris Hauf and Martin Siewert (Vienna)
Concert

Owl & Mack is a project by Boris Hauf that really works as a solo act but can also be extended with guest musicians to make a larger band. On the occasion of the Up to Nature festival, Hauf meets the guitar player Martin Siewert, who have been fellow musician travellers for more than twenty years. Together they will bring the typical Owl & Mack sound to the meadow, a sound that comes into being when the nocturnal predator Owl, with its marked depth perception for night time hunting, and the Mack brand – known particularly for robust lorries used for long hauls and in the construction industry – collide: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins meets Nick Cave meets Cowboy Junkies. http://hauf.klingt.org

Ukulele and vocals Boris Hauf Folk guitar and vocals Martin Siewert Lyrics Litó Walkey (Goatisland)

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Admission free