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.

12 to 8pm
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

From 12pm
FrenchMottershead (London)
Understory, 1–3 (workshop)

Understory, 1-3 offers three interactive events made in collaboration with local experts, each with a connection to the forest. You have a choice of 'workshops' led by the experts, which will experiment with your 'human' and nature relationship, take you on a sensory botany trail, or introduce you to physical games based on the lives of the wild boar and deer. Each experience offers you an opportunity to play with the order of things under the canopy of the Wienerwald.

Understory 1, 12 to 3pm (in english) and 4.30 to 7.30pm
Human-Nature-Relationships Each of us has our own understanding of the relationship between humans and nature; from man dominating nature, to fearing its bad spirits. Andreas Muhar will lead you on a playful exploration of the concepts behind your behaviour towards nature, testing the stability of those views and the impact they may have on the future of the landscape.

Understory 2,  12.30 to 3.30pm and 5 to 8pm
If you join a session with botanists Margarita Lachmayer and David Prehsler they will invite you to touch, smell, taste and scrutinize your way through the question 'what is a forest?'. Alongside introducing you to the field research techniques they use to identify plants, they'll offer an overview of the plant communities and reveal the narrative of man's influence on the Wienerwald.

Understory 3, 1 to 4pm and 5.30 to 8.30pm
You will play a real life simulation game, led by research scientist Andreas Duscher, which will develop your awareness of what it's like to be a Wild Boar or Red Deer, and to eat, sleep and be hunted like them. This workshop is inspired by Andreas’' work at the nearby Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology, looking at seasonal spatial and habitat use of Wild Ungulates (hoofed mammals).

The workshops will be offered three times each over the course of the festival. Participants will be limited to fifteen persons per workshop. Registration is requested at produktion@brut-wien.at. A detailed programme of the workshops is available at www.brut-wien.at.

By and with FrenchMottershead Experts Andreas Muhar (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Institute for Landscape Development, Recreation and Conservation Planning [ILEN]), Margarita Lachmayer and David Prehsler (University of Vienna, Faculty Centre of Biodiversity), Andreas Duscher (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Research Institute for Wildlife and Ecology)

12 to 8pm, performances every half hour
Nic Green with Beth Hamer (Glasgow)
Slowlo (performance)

“We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.”
Thich Nhat Hanh

In Slowlo, British performance artist Nic Green working with Beth Hamer will be unveiling the wild being, the woman. To accomplish this she and guerrilla gardener and boat builder Hamer will be creating a moon-shaped dwelling located somewhere between sculpture, performance, and architectural elements. The structure brings the view for the surroundings sharply into focus: sky, the Earth, birds, those around us – and will show the fascination that they radiate. While the sun is slowly setting, the focus of the performance shifts from the surroundings to the inner landscape of performer Green, who will be releasing from inside her La Loba – the wolf woman. The idea that humans are the centre of the universe is put to the test by La Loba, and also draws parallels between the taming of nature and the nature of the woman, which Green leaves undisguised and which breaks out of her entirely uncensored, uncultivated and unfiltered. www.nicgreen.org.uk

12 to 8pm, durational
united sorry/Frans Poelstra & Robert Steijn (Vienna)
Green Conversations/L’après-midi des faunes, or size matters! (performance)

The duo united sorry continues its year-long project Green Conversations as part of Up to Nature and is deeply burying itself in the woods around the Vogeltennwiese. Inspired by Vaslav Nijinsky’s ballet solo classic L’après-midi d’un faune, which tells of a faun’s erotic desires, Poelstra & Steijn will be relocating this mythical scenario from the stage out into nature, transforming themselves into horny mythical beings in leather pants. Equipped with oversized phalli, the two performers will be speaking with and answering questions from the audience – they shy away neither from questions about form or size, nor from brief dances or interludes with panpipes. As embodiments of eroticism and life’s sexual energy, united sorry will be providing an intensive experience of the surrounding nature. www.unitedsorry.com

By and with united sorry

2, 4 and 7pm
Johanna Kirsch (Vienna)
My Name Is Ape or The Little Tree Theatre (performance)

“I am the product of what surrounds me. I have no roots. I would love to know what it would be like to be wilderness, but I am not – I’m rather a degenerated ape.” Johanna Kirsch

In her performance My Name Is Ape or The Little Tree Theatre, artist Johanna Kirsch sits down in a tree. She does this firstly in order to change perspectives, to examine her position in this setting, and attempts to find her human self. She is searching in this context for the moment when human beings stopped feeling themselves as a part of nature. In her attempt to approach what makes up the essence of a tree, she also explores the feelings that arise when you bite the hand that feeds you and how and why the degenerated ape can climb up the tree at all.

By and with Johanna Kirsch Dramaturgical advice Gin Müller

2:30 and 5pm
nadaproductions (Vienna)
NATURE (performance)

Duo Amanda Piña and Daniel Zimmermann undertook field research in Chile’s Patagonia region, Peru, the Amazon, and the Mexican desert for its most recent brut production NATURE. What started in nature and made its way onto stage is now reversing direction. As part of Up to Nature, the stage performance has been adapted for the Vienna Woods. This performance draws attention to the ways humans shape their relationship to the so-called “natural environment”. NATURE reveals the absurdity of the seemingly ordered balance of forces between nature and culture.

Concept and performance nadaproductions (Amanda Piña/Daniel Zimmermann) In cooperation with Valerie Oberleithner, Raphaël Michon Costume Diego Rojas Sounds Christian Dergarabedian Production direction Angela Vadori

With the kind support of the City of Vienna’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Austria’s Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture.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.

8pm
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
Loose Lips Sink Ships (Vienna)
Concert

Loose Lips Sink Ships is a collective of Viennese singer-songwriter friends founded by cellist and singer Meaghan Burke (Cheating on New York), songwriter Werner Kitzmüller (who just recently sent his critically acclaimed album “Evasion” out into the world), Simon Usaty (Protestant Work Ethic), and multimedia instrumentalist David Schweighart (Tupolev). They were quickly joined by the wonderfully weird violinist Matthias Frey (Sweet Sweet Moon) and artist Mimu Merz. They mostly play unplugged, which makes them all the more unreserved. The mixture between honest kitsch, straightforward irony, and acoustic instrumentation is reminiscent of some sort of modified Wienerlied (Viennese-based folk music). Loose Lips Sink Ships tenderly calls its music Viennese Hyper Ballad or Biedermeier Punk.

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Admission free