The Wiener Festwochen was established in 1951. Emerging as a »demonstration of Austria's will to survive«, it was to prove to the world that a city marked by the ravages of war and its aftermath was able to engage in cultural activities.

Undoubtedly, the Wiener Festwochen today serves a different function and fulfils different tasks. Vienna has become an undisputed cultural metropolis, and the Wiener Festwochen has evolved into an innovative event based on international co-operation. Yet this is precisely why the Wiener Festwochen cannot tolerate stagnation. Proven approaches may lose their significance in the face of a changing co-ordinate system of international relationships and traditions. Thus it is an objective of the Festival to search for new aspects, to inspire discussions of current artistic production and thus to provide an answer to - not only artistic - developments.

The final countdown has started! With the 13th May the first eight years of brut draw to a close: the baton can be passed on and the co-production house once again re-invented. But beforehand, everything that brut had been in the past eight years will be celebrated one last time: performances, theatre, dance, concerts, club nights, debates, workshops – a variety of formats and contents that were always meant to interact, mesh, crossbreed and co-exist. Expanding scopes and spaces for agency, transcending boundaries and intensive content-based work have all been goals of the artistic programme.
Eight years in eight days. The grand finale will serve as a platform for artists who have been closely connected with brut during these past years. The aim is to show once more the diversity of the programme, bring together the people who have defined brut’s image and create an atmosphere in which the artists, the brut team, former colleagues, partners, professionals and the audience can come together to exchange and most of all, celebrate.

As everything started with the Vienna theatre reform’s mandate to establish an internationally relevant co-production house for the independent scene, it is only logical to start the final countdown with an open debate, discussing how working conditions have changed within the independent scene.
The graphic design collective Atzgerei has been busy these last years making sure that brut’s visual identity is burnt into everyone’s memory far and wide. Freshly graduated from the academy, brut was the Atzgerei’s first big assignment. This year, they celebrate their 10th anniversary and their last brut design with the current programme. Reason enough to dedicate an evening to the grand collectives and celebrate their anniversary and farewell from brut together with the Fearleaders, Subchor and MusikarbeiterInnenkapelle. Thanks, Atzgerei, you’re amazing!
Crucial impulses for performances in brut have come from the experimental music scene these past years: formats such as the electro-acoustic VELAK Gala, the online platform klingt.org and the cross-over series BRUTTO. The second night is dedicated to them. The three platforms join forces to curate an exciting programme of concerts, sound art installations and video works. In the emptied out brut office, Jan Machacek invites to a “shadow dance” from far-away Mexico to say good-bye.
International co-productions and guest performances have been an important pillar of the programme. Comically melancholic theatre maker Zachary Oberzan from New York and Amsterdam-based glam duo Florentina Holzinger and Vincent Riebeek are among the artists who have a particularly special place in the brut hearts. Flanked by the queer sirens Stefanie Sourial and Denice Bourbon, they present insights into their current work on the fourth night, before La Grande Doris opens brut im Konzerthaus for her ultimate sweat-bathed performance party à la Uhlich.
Sunday is the day of rest, so accordingly, the beamers are activated in the bar and the public is invited for a walk down memory lane with a video marathon of the big hits of the first brut era, accompanied by coke and pizza.
Monday night kicks off with a class reunion with current and former colleagues and then the brut bar opens its doors with a farewell playback show featuring Sturzhelm Binder and gesterngirl.
The night before the grand finale has a performative line-up from alpha to omega in store: Oleg Soulimenko and Jasmin Hoffer premiere their musical Baby, united sorry and Theater im Bahnhof call on the Grim Reaper, les Rabtaldirndln are trés en vogue and Magdalena Chowaniec screams her heart out in the bar together with IDKLANG. Meanwhile the brut office accommodates Andrea Maurer’s Office of Farewell Matters and Joonas Lahtinen offers food for thought on the loo. Last but not least, the unpredictable God’s Entertainment sends the brut im Konzerthaus in exile.
At the grande grill finale everything approaches the inevitable end: Thomas Kasebacher and Laia Fabre flog the silverware at their auction Everything Must Go!, Michikazu Matsune reads farewell letters from the internet, Robert Steijn writes one himself, Anat Stainberg investigates speech as a physical act while Julius Deutschbauer toasts with champagne, the FOURDUMMIES are in charge of snapshots for later nostalgia, Frans Poelstra gets the audience in the mood with sentimental sounds and Theater im Bahnhof ask uncomfortable questions. In re-uniting SV Damenkraft/Gustav/Sissy Boy Tomka, the revival of Orlanding the Dominant as a concert draws the line all the way back to the origins of the queer focus in the brut programme and its first hit production. And after that, all there’s left to do is celebrate as if there was no tomorrow.
Our beloved audience deserves particular gratitude for approximately 210,000 visits to brut during the past eight years. Admission to all events in the grand finale is free. So far so brut!

"The experience of uncanniness teaches us that the stranger is not someone who threatens us from outside; rather the stranger is inside us and our identity is always already contaminated from the beginning." Anneleen Masschelein: The Unconcept:
The Freudian Uncanny in Late 20th Century Theory

With this year’s focus on uncanny bodies imagetanz coaxes our inner demons out of the dark: In times when threat and danger seems to lurk around every corner, and a culture of fear persistently gains ground in contemporary society, imagetanz brings
together international and local artists to launch a performative counter-attack. With a radical and playful approach, the festival focuses on the gaps in our rationalisation processes, where doubt, anxiety and fear can grow and sheds new light on how – with
what strategies and tools - we negotiate otherness. Balancing on the fine line between fascination and fear, rationality and irrationality, the human and the non-human, the productions of the festival explore the strangely familiar, offer sweet thrills and lead us relentlessly into the unknown. With powerful performances and an array of immersive situations, the imagetanz artists challenge our senses and activate our body as sensitive tool for orientation. An invitation to embrace the unknown with more intensity and less anxiety!

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In its last season before the new artistic team takes over, brut launches a one-year series called Secret Ingredients. Alongside co-productions and guest performances, brut delves into the secrets behind artistic success and spices up the programme with a few particularly delicious treats. Local and international artists who have closely collaborated with brut during the past years give insight into their artistic processes and interests. In addition to their new productions, they offer a wide range of personal encounters, in which they invite the audience to stick their noses deeper into the pot and discover the inspiration  for the chefs’ recipes – sometimes as a starter, and sometimes for dessert. The menu includes private cooking sessions with Doris Uhlich, a dark-room dance tea with Kate McIntosh and an exhibition and symposium on transgender and intersex visibility conceived by Gin Müller & Gorji Marzban. Secret Ingredients sheds new light on artistic work and creative processes and offers a platform for encounter between the artists, the institution and the public.

Happy New Year in a BRAVE NEW WORLD! The dystopian visions of a world battered by crisis are in the centre of our January/February programme. But the artists not only turn their attention to the near future, but equally to the blind spots of history, the consequences of unresolved conflicts and the very real fetters of humans caught in the web of a world of mass surveillance. Lise Lendais delves into French colonial history in Algeria and its consequences. Based on personal narratives and historical documents from the “Pieds-noirs”, Algerians of French descent who left the country after it gained independence, she traces frictions and remaining gaps. The story of the twins from Ágota Kristóf’s novel The Notebook is particularly grim: Tossed into an inhumane end-war period, two boys develop equally inhumane strategies of survival. Forced Entertainment, the undisputed grandmasters of theatrical storytelling, attend to Hungarian-born Ágota Kristóf’s equally simple and sober language on stage to unfold an absurd scenario of survival in the absence of warmth in a minimalistic, straightforward manner. The Vienna-based Finn Joonas Lahtinen develops the ideal situation in a bunker after an ultimate MCA (maximum credible accident) for his piece YOYO – You are On Your Own. The performance takes place in the air-raid shelter underneath the University of Music on Seilerstätte. It sheds light on the relationship between future scenarios, fear and an individual’s options to act against the background of today’s affluent society.
Darkness is the new light! Video artist Chris Kondek and editor Christiane Kühl use the legend of Prometheus to deal with total surveillance of people in digital communication technologies. In Anonymous P., they immediately make visible the digital footprint left by the blameless average consumer of smartphones and guest at brut during the actual time of their visit. In view of spots of escalating political crises and looking at the renaissance of approaches of political activism in the arts, this is an issue that cannot be left uncommented in the programme. Headed by the title WHAT IS TO BE DONE?, the sociologist and philosopher Oliver Marchart, the artist Jonas Staal, who is known for his alternative world summits, and the Ukranian curator Vasyl Cherepanyn discuss the role art could and does play today in organising the public sphere based on current case examples.
Treats for the artistic, culinary and critical palets are found in the series Secret Ingredients, in which artists spice up the programme with a few delightful additions. Forced Entertainment, for example, invite to an English Breakfast, where they revive unrealised project ideas from their 30-year career over baked beans and all kinds of fried stuff. The Rabtaldirndln delight the audience by presenting songs from their splinter band Marianna and Sonja’s Schlager-Wurlitzer (Smash-Hit Jukebox) at the bar. As part of the production Anonymous P., the company and the audience are joined by web activist and game developer Wolfie Christl to reflect on digital data surveillance in our everyday lives. Also the audio visual installation Prologue…Epilogue will be shown following Lise Lendais’s performance at the Institut français, dealing with the issues of memory and history. And admission to all of this – is free!

CLOSER explores the transformation of intimacy in contemporary society, between the poles of proximity, attraction and alienation. brut’s November-December focus tackles questions of gender equality, emancipation and oppression, the mediatization of intimacy, and the extremes of phobias and desires that color the subjective psychologies of how we deal with proximity. Freischwimmer Festival gives the topic a kickstart, showcasing seven performances that embrace the festival focus INTIMATE. Emerging artists from Austria, Germany and Switzerland question where borders between public and private can be drawn and what role intimacy plays in contemporary performance. After the festival a series of premieres continue this investigation. In their new production, OBJECTIVE POINT OF VIEW Michikazu Matsune and Maxim Ilyukhin play with notions of strangeness and familiarity, juggle perceptions and misperceptions of the other, and ask themselves what brings two people closer to one another on stage. notfoundyet (Thomas Kasebacher/Laia Fabre) looks for proximity in the mash-up of pop culture and folk dance traditions: they investigate new forms of touching, moving and socializing, and strive to create a „community of sensations“ with the audience. In FRÜHLINGSOPFER (THE RITE OF SPRING) She She Pop shed light on their relationships with their mothers and push the issue of female sacrifice in society and family into focus. united sorry and Theater im Bahnhof confront questions of aging and death, only to elegantly side-step any somber feelings and propose an concert performance that re-visits danse macabre with a tremendous lust for life. CLOSER also provides the setting for intimate dialogues: Superamas’ Philippe meets Belgian artist Miet Warlop as part of the series It’s a date!

What’s new in Theatre, Performance and Live Art

The fusion of private and public life is the ubiquitous topic of our times.  Social networks, reality TV, spying scandals and surveillance – all these have become everyday phenomena. But how exactly does this translate from private life over into the intimate? This year’s newcomer festival sends seven artists and groups out on the search for intimacy. They find it in Danish television and on Austrian farms, in slippery radio shows or gyms, at the taxidermist’s, in unusual family stories or in a very private dance performance in a public space. www.freischwimmer-festival.com

FREISCHWIMMER 2014 is a joint project of Sophiensæle Berlin, FFT Düsseldorf, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt am Main, brut Wien and Theaterhaus Gessnerallee Zürich. Funded by the Berlin Capital Cultural Fund and the Governing Mayor of Berlin – Senate Chancellery for Cultural Affairs as well as by the City of Düsseldorf’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the City of Frankfurt am Main’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Karl Hofer Gesellschaft, Autorenstiftung Frankfurt am Main, the City of Gießen’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Gerda Weiler Stiftung, Fazit Stiftung, Institute of Applied Theatre Studies, Hessen Ministry of Science and Art, the City of Vienna’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the Federal Province of Upper Austria, the Austrian Federal Chancellor’s Office, Austrian Cultural Forum Brussels, the City of Zurich’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Pro Helvetia Schweizer Kulturstiftung and Migros Kulturprozent.

Festival pass € 40 full price/€ 25 reduced/€ 20 with the brutkarte*
Day pass € 18 full price/€ 12 reduced/€ 10 with the brutkarte*
Single ticket € 14 full price/€ 8 reduced/€ 6 with the brutkarte*

Borders zigzag through our lives, as demarcation lines between cultures, identities, countries and many more, enabling us to make sense of the world, but at the same time creating categories of understanding that demand constant re-visiting and re-defining. For the past seven years brut has been persistently challenging the boundaries of artistic disciplines, gender identities, pop culture and contemporary performance, in order to undermine the status quo and to create productive cracks in the foundations of our thinking. Artistic innovation relies on permanently testing the scopes and limits of agency again and again. Starting in its eighth season with the key topic Borderless, brut presents a number of performances that all topple the border between the stage and the audience, theatre and the outside world, lived identity and artistic appropriation, dreading and dreaming.
In her new solo performance, Universal Dancer, Doris Uhlich goes all out. Unwilling to settle for the alleged invariability of circumstances, she herself becomes the epicentre of a virulent tremor that bears the potential of swelling into a mass movement. Gin Müller and Gorji Marzban bring the personal biographies of three transgender persons onto the stage in TRANS GENDER MOVES. As they share their transformation processes, they transgress conventional ideas of gender and sexuality, aiming for a self-defined gender identity. In All Ears, Kate McIntosh engages her audience in a major eavesdropping operation. In an utterly subtle and charming manner, she weaves the communal shared time into a story she eventually uses to carry off the audience to unknown places. Watch Out: Visual artist Vlad Basalìcì and choreographer Ivana Müller combine their two pieces It is what it is and We Are Still Watching in a double bill and transform the theatre space into a social lab, in which a temporary community is formed. Proposing very clearly scripted scenarios, they invite the audience to observe closely and to read between the lines, while subtly leading them from their role as passive spectators right into the centre of action. Florentina Holzinger deals with a borderline experience of a somewhat different kind: she had suffered a bad accident on stage during a performance of Kein Applaus für Scheiße last year. In her new production, Recovery, she faces the trauma and tackles the question, in what ways healing can be derived from art.

A showcase by brut, DSCHUNGEL and Schauspielhaus

For the end of the season brut houses its sixth big clearance sale under the slogan Alles muss raus! Just before the summer break several highlights of the past season can be seen at the sensational special price of €4.99 each. The Alles muss raus! festival gives the local audience the opportunity to catch up on what they have missed and to see their favourites again. The festival is also loved by international guests, curators, producers and journalists as it gives them a chance to get to know young brut artists in the space of five days and to bring them out into the world with festival and guest-performance invites!

The themes of folk culture and folklore have conquered contemporary performance, and not just in Vienna. The artistic exploration revolves around lived practices and social realities beyond the theatre. Thus, for example, folk dances draw their significance not primarily from the virtuosity of the performance but from the social components, the community-founding practice. As a social phenomenon, however, folklore practices are also subject to ideology and consequently ambivalent. For many artists it is precisely this ambivalence that is particularly interesting. The
Village People key topic takes up this discussion, examines the fiction of tradition and enriches it with the potential of the imaginary.
Simon Mayer is taking up the folklore tradition of his Upper Austrian homeland at the end of April. The Graz Theater im Bahnhof and the Gaststubentheater Gößnitz jointly undertake the attempt at a theatrical village sociology performed at the Schlingerhof restaurant in Floridsdorf. And with their EINKOCHEN enterprise the Rabtaldirndln go into the nitty gritty of the Vienna bobo society. On 1 May, the Rabtaldirndln continue the Village People key topic and invite people to a picnic of a passion-play type with a transcendental apparition in the Prater. In Verfassung Doris Uhlich updates and abstracts the community-founding potential of folkdances by relating tradition and pop music to one another. Afterwards the myvillages.org collective opens the International Village Shop in brut. Here, new local products are introduced that have been conceived and realised together with the residents of various villages. In a lecture performance and an installation, questions of tradition, authenticity and identity are addressed. In addition, as part of Village People, Thomas Kasebacher and Laia Fabre offer a workshop that analyses the structures of folk dances and explores the possibilities of inventing fictional folk dances.

“When you care, you use your attention, your intelligence, your awareness. No bullshit, no money, no magic, no cowardice.”
Sarah Vanhee

The 2014 edition of imagetanz delves into one of our core human competences: care! With the double-edged motto “Who cares?” imagetanz presents radical and playful positions from local and international artists, traversing personal and public issues, sociopolitical and artistic questions.
While Vienna tops the charts in worldwide surveys of health care and social services, providing its citizens with universal care, the artists of the festival expose the system’s loopholes and parallel universes exploring the social and performative dynamics of the interpersonal. Using the focus on care as its compass, imagetanz navigates the troubled waters of the present-day and searches the horizon for possible futures. It cross-examines existing strategies of care against the backdrop of increasingly precarious living and working conditions: uncovering shadowy dealings in elderly care and confronting us with the challenges of social inclusion and equal rights for everyone. The notion of “everyone” is crucial to the festival, as artists set out on a quest outside the art institution to test the hypothesis of a Lecture For Every One, spreading thoughts about living together at meetings and assemblies around the city like a friendly virus. They call for a basic income dance  to advocate the unconditional redistribution of economic resources between members of society. In a search for new dimensions of tactile interpersonal relationships and empathic practices, imagetanz experiments with nanopolitics at the intersection of politics and performativity and a desire for psychic solidarity.
Linking practices of care to the artistic context, the festival explores the exchange between performer and public, playfully shuffling roles and dynamics and focusing on expectations and desires. But in the end, who cares for the artists?

After the longstanding curatorship of Bettina Kogler, this year’s imagetanz Festival is the first curated by Katalin Erdödi, who took over the artistic direction of the festival in April 2013.

Sustainable development has been the catchphrase of the past decades, so it might be high time for a change of perspective... How about sustainable failure? Let's see where we might end up, if we embrace failure not only in artistic practice, but also in socio-political and economic discourses. Failure need no longer be a taboo and it can be much more than a faux pas on the road to success. In November and December brut’s key topic Sustainable Failure considers the potential of failure as an active strategy and possible form of self- and societal critique. Resisting the drive to succeed and to "perform" in the art field, as well as in a broader societal context, not only enables us to question our privileged (successful, well-performing) position, but also to deconstruct the rules and norms that define the subjective poles of success and failure. Failing in this sense can create space for something else, perhaps for something new.
With Normarena Jan Machacek tackles the challenges of performing critical whiteness on stage and questions how a privileged position - and the norms that enable us to perceive it as such - can be criticized from the inside. In The year I was born Lola Arias reconstructs the turbulent history of Chile at the time of military dictatorship and explores how children cope with the roles that their parents played in complicity or in opposition to the regime and what it means for both generations to strive for - and often fail at - achieving social change. In their piece Western Society Gob Squad attempts to polish off the discrete charm of Western Society and accomplishes its critique by failing miserably... With humor and irony Ivana Müller’s IN COMMON addresses prevailing European political rhetorics that insist on what we have in common, and plays a game of winners and losers, where very quickly minority and majority is formed and positions collide on one another to reveal the differences and tensions in contemporary societies. Bernadette Anzengruber parachutes us into a speculative future scenario in DICK: after the victory of The Nuclear Feminists the new social order outlaws heteronormativity, the dominant discourse of former times. In an underground club founded in resistance to this turn of events, we meet Dick, the host of the evening, whose character unravels before our very eyes during the performance. Before 2013 comes to an end, brut rolls out the red carpet for Martin Schick and Damir Todorovic, who are here to celebrate the last days of luxury with their work HOLIDAY ON STAGE. They deal a critical blow to our desire and drive for success and raise awareness of the responsibility that Western society's privileged position implies vis-á-vis the rest of the world. In addition to the performances, to help ease our uneasiness towards accepting, or even attempting failure, brut has put together Crash Course Failure, a theme day of lectures, discussions, film screenings and performances.

Austria is approaching the climax of an extraordinary election year. There’s electioneering for votes, discussions and debates. Votes are being projected, evaluated, and packaged in trends, tendencies and graphics. It is promised that Austria will stay just the same, and will become much better. The voters that are being courted usually remain silent, but this isn’t the case at brut. The collective around the theatre-maker and queer activist Gin Müller is getting involved in the hot phase of the election with Rebelodrom, offering a platform for various activists from Vienna – their topics in the political struggle for the centre of society are guaranteed to be unacceptable to the majority. With Spaniard Roger Bernat you can diligently practice voting the evening before the national election. For Pending Vote the auditorium will be transformed into a parliament where the audience tries out the rules of various democratic systems. “If politicians continue to act up, then we’ll transform acting into politics!” (Roger Bernat). On election night, the six leading candidates for the MISSWAHL 2013 by Barbara Ungepflegt invite you to come vote for them directly in the brut polling station – they’ll make the fools of those people’s representatives just re-elected, elected into or out of office. Once the political circus has slept off its hangover, tended to the wounds of campaigning and, during the first coalition negotiations, opened up serious gaps in their memories of the past few days, Rimini record once again the power of voices from an entirely different point of view. In Remote Wien, a swarm of individuals listens to an artificial voice over headphones that they trust to guide them through the public urban space. Within the city’s everyday goings-on they ponder the question of how community is actually formed. Moving from the public to the private space, the artist collective Bouillon Group from Tiflis invites you to a typically Georgian feast celebrated by the toastmaster – called "tamada" in Georgian. The tradition of giving a speech at the table will be addressed during the communal meal. And in VIENNA’S NEXT TOP ARTIST by God’s Entertainment the election takes a different turn: Viennese artists have the opportunity to raise their voices and participate in the competition for the highly attractive EMMA 7 Award with their project suggestions. The new monthly concert format BRUTTO gives a voice to artists from a variety of scenes and genres and expands the musical common ground towards other disciplines.

A showcase by brut, DSCHUNGEL and Schauspielhaus

Just in time for the end of the season, brut is having its fifth big clearance saleunder the slogan Alles muss raus!. Several highlights of the past season are being offered at sensational special prices. The festival is loved by both local crowds and international guests alike and offers the last chance to again enjoy dance and performance to the fullestbefore the summer break! It is an important platform for curators, producers, journalists and guests from around the world to get to know young artists and bring them out into the world.

“How can I use ballet as material in order to sound out my limits as a dancer and choreographer, to confront myself with a dance language and dance world that are foreign to me? How can I approach this foreignness without immediately pigeonholing my own observations in order to make myself familiar with the foreign as quickly as possible? This trilogy is characterised by curiosity about that which is unknown to me.” Doris Uhlich

Finally, Doris Uhlich’s acclaimed ballet trilogy SPITZE, Rising Swan and Come Back is complete and can be seen in full at brut in June. Uhlich, who meanwhile is one of the most successful choreographers for contemporary dance in Austria, stages ballet in a completely new way in collaboration with her dramaturgists. The contents of all three projects move beyond mere ballet and aren’t just pure movement analyses. In fact, the focus is on the people who approach, return to or move away from the ballet system. For Uhlich ballet represents a world in which one fails, gets up again, gets thrown to the wayside or works one’s way to the top. Sound familiar? www.dorisuhlich.at

The imagetanz festival has been around for more than 20 years and is interested in finding the moment when choreography and society clash – ideally with the greatest willingness to take risks. Every year the tagline harbours a motto which, at the same time, serves as a loose framework. In this sense, the imagetanz 2013 festival is marked by galactic, universal, primordial material, spherical, eternal, and future aspects. The theme of science fiction is thus bound to occur and becomes particularly interesting when the vision has already become part of the past. Presumably only the bare body remains on a material level as the last human, primordial material substrate; on an immaterial level, however, remains only the spirit – or mind & spirit: both levels play recurring roles in the festival. Fertilisation, mothers, and black holes touch the themes of continuity and suggest that the event horizon never disappears. Maybe only viewing it from a large distance and a bit of esoteric for lubrication can bring the true meaning of current earthly problems to light.

The turn of the year and never-ending litany of end-of-the-year reviews are barely behind us. Yet brut isn’t just looking back onto the year with this key topic, but is looking back onto entire lives instead. The goal of this retrospective, however, is not the melancholy glorification of yesteryear, but the question of the past’s potential in the here and now.
Doris Uhlich makes an utterly unusual Come Back possible for five former ballet dancers. Far removed for their normed physical techniques, she thus asks very specifically about the political potential of a contemporary (ballet) revolution.
The performers in Oleg Soulimenko’s Made in Austria can safely be described as models of successful integration – Oleg himself is Viennese by choice with Russian roots. Post-immigrant theatre without any gestures of affectation, for once, comes instead with the self-confidence of participants who have made it in Austria. In this revival and co-production with the Wiener Festwochen, the performers look back onto their own history of integration in eight very personal tales.
The performance collective She She Pop is also experienced with questions of coming to terms with history. Instead of asking their fathers, this time they have invited women of similar age from the former East Germany onto the stage. Together they will open the drawers of the past and ask what remains. To what extent are very personal experiences of a childhood and adolescence in West Germany (She She Pop), respectively in East Germany (their doubles), defining for an identity 20 years after the fall of The Wall?

Three remarkable projects which it’s worth looking back for, but especially worth looking into brut for.

The world has become more confusing. Increasing numbers of possibilities must be compared with one another.
New and newer interpretations mean to make the order of things comprehensible. People long all the more for meaningful explanatory frameworks in order to escape the arbitrariness of meanings. In November and December brut is addressing the construction and deconstruction of structures of meaning with four productions and a lecture. Choreographer Anne Juren and visual artist Robert Rauschmeier base their performance Lost & Found on a fictitious history of dance stretching from the beginnings of civilisation to the near future; yet the lost and now reinvented work is no chronological historiography, but rather a collection pursuing the essence of dance in narratives. Andrei Andrianov and Oleg Soulimenko again examine the cultural influences of contemporary performance art in the East and the West in their new joint work Old Chaos, New Order. Turning Turning by Flemish artist Sarah Vanhee, however, is a choreography of the unexpressed: three performers rid themselves of their unreflected flow of thoughts on the stage. They will be prattling away, uncensored and unobstructed by moral, political or intellectual obstacles. And finally, at Kate McIntosh’s Worktable the audience will get the unique chance to abandon itself to blind destruction, but not without having to assemble another wrecked object in exchange: deconstruction and reconstruction as do-it-yourself performance.

News from Theatre, Performance, and Live Art 

Let’s not delude ourselves: the neoliberal society of exploitation has long since arrived in the arts. Not only in the narrower sense of the copyright discussion, but also in the conditions of art production. While from an economic point of view the artistic “Me Incorporated” leaves an aftertaste of self- and external exploitation, it allows for a differentiated “getting involved” in the artistic sense. It activates processes that give rise to content-specific added value. According to this year’s Freischwimmer projects this specifically means: escape, break out, set sail from this system! Use human capital for meaningful purposes! Be unjust in criticism and play with the signs, logics, and systems! This is brut’s fourth time participating in the festival. For groups that have meanwhile become successful, such as God’s Entertainment or Die Rabtaldirndln, the Freischwimmer Festival was an important step towards trans-regional reception of their artistic work. Two groups from Vienna are also going on tour this year: studio 5 and Joonas Lahtinen, among others. www.freischwimmer-festival.com

FREISCHWIMMER 2012/13. “Neues aus Theater, Performance und Live Art” is a joint project by the Sophiensæle, FFT Düsseldorf, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt a.M., Kampnagel Hamburg, brut Wien, and Theaterhaus Gessnerallee Zurich. Supported by means of the Capital Culture Fund Berlin, the City of Vienna’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Austria’s Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture, the City of Zurich Culture, Migros Culture Percentage, the Culture Department of the Canton of Zurich, the Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council, the Cultural Department Hamburg, the Office of Culture of the Federal State Capital Düsseldorf, and the Foundation van Meeteren Düsseldorf.

Festival pass €40/€25/€20 with the brutkarte*
Day ticket €18/€12/€10 with the brutkarte*
Single ticket €14/€8/€6 with the brutkarte*

Freedom of speech is a fundamental right in Western society. It defines the right to express yourself freely and to impart opinions in public. But what happens over the course of a paradigm change in media toward Web 2.0? The leading questions in the age of the Internet are the following: what can, may and is meant to be said at all, and what must remain unsaid? How and where is freedom of speech being exploited on the web? Five productions from Germany, Austria and Belgium examine this issue within the scope of the key topic Freedom of Speech from September to the end of October 2012.
A fragmented public on the web has replaced the classical sender-receiver model, the age of the single programme and the one broadcast draws to a close. Thus it is indeed unclear whether the genocide in Rwanda might have happened with today’s usage of the media. HATE RADIO from the International Institute of Political Murder shows how a radio station became an instrument for murder and how words could kill. The re-enactment of a radio broadcast from 1994 is not a mere reproduction of documentary material: theatre as a medium itself becomes the place of enlightenment in this context.
The Austro-Mex Group around Gin Müller has already accomplished this media change and in Melodrom/The Making of a Rebellious Telenovela makes contact with activists and authors around the globe. Thus an authorship of many voices is created in which the contents are carried further and visualized in the media by many identities following the principle of a circulated distribution of information. In an "Open Source Tool (OST) to create Rebellion“ they discuss about joint political action, love and a back-breaking media conspiracy.
In contrast, Pieter De Buysser and Hans Op de Beeck in their Book Burning Project examine criticism of the fragmented public on the web. Considering the boundless amounts of data available via the WWW, both artists present suggestions about how to deal with this information overload. It is all about the necessity of finding filters in order to reorganise the information that has become confusing in the meantime. While the burning of books has always been an act of censorship historically, De Buysser and Op de Beeck transform it into an act of liberation. Consequently, freedom of speech no longer solely means the freedom to say something, but also the freedom to remain silent.
Data Dealer. Legal, illegal, scheißegal. [Data Dealer. Legal, Illegal, What the Hell!] transforms inexperienced Facebook users into astonished data dealers and with much wit and irony is dedicated to the cutting edge subject of the right to personal data in the digital era.
What does a responsible handling of data mean? Finally, Assassinate Assange concludes the key topic with the Internet messiah, who has turned from being the celebrated liberator to the persecuted. Angela Richter has been concerned with the subject of hacktivism for several years now and conducted personal interviews with Julian Assange for this work. Apparently the scandal itself was less about the contents of the confidential diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks since no big news was revealed in this process. It is rather the issue of “treachery” as such. And that is punished by the public in its very own way. Freedom of speech once represented the basic condition for the functioning of certain techniques of power and authority. Other procedures, such as enforced political conformity, control, censorship or active restriction are no longer needed in the era of Web 2.0 since the events and information multiply, chase after each other and drive themselves out of awareness. The contrast of that what is allowed to be said and that what is not allowed to be said is replaced by the difference between what gets through and what falls by the wayside.

Now for the fourth time already, at the end of the season it is time to go bargain hunting with brut Wien, DSCHUNGEL WIEN, and Vienna’s Schauspielhaus because: Everything must go! This year’s big summer sale will be taking place from 20 to 24 July. Last season’s highlights will be showing again for five days at the sensational special price of just €4.99 a piece. Six productions will be on sale in brut and, as an extra, they will also be offering the free performance Letters of Friendship by Andrei Andrianov & Amanda Piña which came into existence within the scope of the exchange project Music here, Music there. Moscow – Vienna in Moscow. This will be its Viennese premiere. The two artists will also be participating in the opening performance of TEATRO by nadaproductions, which THE STANDARD called “a potential hit”. Doris Uhlich will be showing a sketch in the Stadtkino with Sneak Preview, and the Argentine-Swiss duo Laura Kalauz & Martin Schick will again be stopping in brut with their Freischwimmer production CMMN SNS PRJCT, which has been a worldwide success. Deborah Hazler/Nanina Kotlowski and Kerstin Olivia Schellander in their current imagetanz-production offnature allow naked skin to become a costume, and united sorry (aka Frans Poelstra and Robert Steijn) are Lost in Space forever. Andrea Maurer & Thomas Brandstätter/studio 5 present the literal conclusion to this cheerful Everything must go! series with their wonderfully humorous and enigmatic work THE END.

Everything must go! is not only the conclusion of the season. Each year the festival attracts international guests, producers, and journalists who will be carrying the full load of Viennese and Austrian productions out into the world. Everything must go! is the first Austrian platform that guarantees attention for subsequent artist generations far beyond national borders. brutproductions tour the whole world and are invited to acclaimed festivals – also owing to these showcases. brutproductions have played outside of Vienna more than 600-times since 2008. But Everything must go! also offers the local audience a chance to see missed highlights from the brut programme again, and this for an unbelievable price which will set every bargain hunter’s heart aflutter.

This year’s key topic Green Rules reaches its preliminary climax in the early summer: united sorry will be continuing their Green Conversations salon on the grass with a cultivated happening in the Türkenschanzpark and subsequent revelry in the TÜWI Pub in May. They will be conjuring spring and celebrating artistic and political beginnings and awakenings.

In June as part of the Up to Nature Unplugged Festival, the Vogeltennwiese in the Vienna Woods will become a brut outdoor performance venue. Across three days, artists from Vienna and Europe will be presenting 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. On the occasion of the festival’s opening, Finnish artist Antti Laitinen will be felling a tree on the Vogeltennwiese: he will be cutting it into pieces over the course of the festival and then reassembling it later to ultimately put it back up as a sculpture at its original location. The British live-art duo FrenchMottershead in co-operation with Viennese forest experts will be designing interactive workshops in which the theoretical knowledge about the location’s typical features are transformed into practical, experiential events. Nic Green from Scotland will be constructing a dwelling in which she and the audience will be drawing out unexpected secrets from the supposedly natural forest. Viennese artist Johanna Kirsch, however, will be making herself at home in the branches in her performance My Name Is Ape or The Little Tree Theatre in order to juxtapose humans’ evolutionary step down off the tree with their revolutionary moments climbing up it again. The cheerful Berlin concept choreographer Martin Nachbar will also be taking on animism in Animal Dances by becoming a greenfly, a lapdog, and a belling stag. Ingrid Fiksdal, Ingvild Langgård and Signe Becker from Oslo will be guiding the audience on a nightly parcourse into an enraptured world full of mythical beings, ghosts, and sweet shivers of creepiness. nadaproductions will present an unplugged version of its current performance NATURE, and united sorry/Frans Poelstra & Robert Steijn will intensify all these experiences as mythical creatures in high heels.
The bar brut deluxe will indeed also go open air during the event to ensure unpredictable effects during the concerts by Owl & Mack and Loose Lips Sink Ships as the night wears on.

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.

The festival will be touring during the summer to Bristol (29 June to 1 July), Oslo (24 to 26 August), and Kuopio (28 to 30 September), where the productions will be adapted to the respective local environments.
“Because nature is our wilderness, but nature’s wilderness is us.” Helen Cole, artistic director Inbetween Time, Bristol

With the equivocal thematic priority Community works! brut wants to show over the coming weeks that community can work and – in the best case – can also function. Theatres are under increasing pressure to justify themselves and must attract new audiences and partners beyond established structures, not least to push forward their own “diversity”. Since its outset, brut has considered itself as an integrative house and works for good reason on an international and cross-border level. Yet with thematic priorities such as Community works! brut continues to look at its immediate neighbours and local communities. This is made possible through site-specific and participatory projects, and in close cooperation with communities such as Vienna’s queer scene with which brut develops a large part of its programme. Thus: Community works!  But staying on the ball and establishing new relationships are called for.

To kick off the thematic priority, the internationally acclaimed artist Nadia Ross and her STO Union company will present their work. Ross, who has withdrawn from the centre to the periphery, allows herself to test new forms of cooperation in the secure space of the small community of Wakefield, moving beyond artistic self-exploitation and in a direct, immediate work process with the locals. It is the common effort on the representation of the contents that is foregrounded, instead of the final artistic result. STO Union will be presenting two projects which have developed under these prerequisites: their new piece Intimacy with a Thousand Things will be continued in Vienna and is being presented as a work-in-progress. In addition, in cooperation with people living in the Wohnpark Alt-Erlaa, STO Union has produced a very personal evening about experiences of limits and, at the same time, presents a portrait of this special Viennese social housing project. God’s Entertainment collective, based in Vienna, also continues its work with communities this year, showing the development of their play MESSER-MORD: KLINGE STECKTE NOCH IN DER BRUST (NACH BÜCHNER’S “WOYZECK”) [MURDER BY KNIFE: BLADE STILL STUCK IN THE CHEST (BASED ON BÜCHNER’S “WOYZECK”)] from Berlin, which they elaborate together with ex-convicts from Berlin and Vienna. Beyond purely documentary theatre, collages of the lives of ex-convicts – moving from the crime, through imprisonment, and onto resocialization – come into being over the course of the evening. Working with students of Polytechnical courses and professional schools, the tat ort collective, on the other hand, is planning an architectural-artistic intervention with which brut will quite literally be opening up the city and the Karlsplatz over the summer.
Oleg Soulimenko will be introducing Made in Austria in the rotating Donauturm [Danube Tower] in May in cooperation with the Wiener Festwochen: the performance includes people from various countries and with different cultural backgrounds who have “made it” in Austria. It is a commentary beyond the problematisation of marginal social groups that shows where the new so-called “middle of society” is located.

In March 2012 the festival imagetanz will be assembling local and international artists from the fields of choreography and performance. Each year, the festival’s motto contains a new term that refers to  current social developments and themes that the artists take up in their projects. It acts as a sort of loose bookends for the contents, holding the festival together. So this year’s motto work  is directly based on current debates. Financial and market mechanisms – indirectly and to an unlimited degree – increasingly inform the individual, who perceives work as the “natural purpose of all effort” and regards the division of the day into work and regeneration periods as completely normal. Correspondingly, the everyday life of the individual is very concretely and very directly characterised by work. The festival addresses this very point in order to break the cycle. imagedance 2012 instead considers work in the sense of a reappropriation of possibilities for action. In short: do not work more, but differently!

In this vein, the mysterious Inferno collective reveals the craft of the performance within the framework of Opening; Daniel Kok from Singapore is directly guided by consumers in that he developed his work using online survey results. In Presentation, Krõõt Juurak opens her performance toolbox which has accompanied her over the past decade. Next, everything becomes extremely practical: Andrea Maurer & Thomas Brandstätter weld, hammer, and sew; Lieve De Pourcq produces and processes pictures with a video, slide, and overhead projector. Lea Martini and Rodrigo Sobarzo de Larraechea, in contrast, base their performance on the fact that dance has continually been a reaction to crises. Nine artists from Turkey, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Austria will be holding meetings during the entire festival in the Kunstraum Bernsteiner as part of the EU-project Europe in Motion. Supported by choreographer Jonathan Burrows and visual artist and former broker Gerald Nestler, they will be reflecting upon their own works and, beyond this, upon the essence of current problems – in the economy and finance sector in particular. Crisis or apocalypse aside, music (Magdalena Chowaniec) and reflection of gender roles (Andros Zins-Browne, Deborah Hazler/Nanina Kotlowski/Kerstin Olivia Schellander) are given their space this year too. With Kein Applaus für Scheiße [No applause for shit], Florentina Holzinger and Vincent Riebeek refer to Ann Liv Young, Jeremy Wade, and Ivo Dimchev – and this much is clear: their applause is guaranteed. This will also hold true for Spanish artist Cuqui Jerez, who at the moment is generally regarded as an international shooting star and is touring throughout Europe. For imagetanz 2012 she will be presenting a production that she developed especially for Vienna. After the work is finished, the farewell party entitled Love for Gold  will allow you to forget concerns such as “Is there still time to invest it all in gold?”.

Doris Uhlich, who within the shortest time has advanced to become one of Austria’s most popular choreographers, is connected with brut more than any other artist. Her first solo projects celebrated major successes during the imagetanz festivals in 2006 and 2007. Even then it was without question that Uhlich is a very extraordinary choreographer who addresses political topics in her works in a highly personal manner. Since then, she has developed a great number of her works with brut and toured worldwide. After five years of co-operation, it is time to look back and focus on her key works in a special show of her works. The cheerful Ulrich series opens with SPITZE (2008) [POINTE]. In this examination of classical ballet, Uhlich meets with Harald Baluch and Susanne Kirnbauer, former first soloist with Vienna’s State Opera. While SPITZE addresses the standardising restrictions in classical ballet, in her piece mehr als genug [more than enough] (2009), possibly her most personal work, Uhlich examines how a body can become a trademark. Uhlich’s productions often deal with the special gestures of everyday life, with the very individual dance language of her guests. With her unique research piece und (2007) [and], she embarked on the search for the traces and patterns that a life leaves on the body. For the revival of the piece under the extended title und jetzt [and now], the former performers come together again and test what is still possible and where it all has led. Within the process of life inscribing itself onto the ageing body, the performance Uhlich (2011), being shown at brut for the first time, takes a look into one’s own future: Gertraud Uhlich, the artist’s mother, represents the artist on stage in the production – as a prediction of what her own body language and gestures will look like in thirty years. The piece premiered at the 2011 Wiener Festwochen. And, finally in this series, the successful production Rising Swan (2010) should not be missed.
The shows are complemented by an analysing roundtable talk with Milli Bitterli, Susanne Kirnbauer and Doris Uhlich, a lecture by the theatre scholar, author, and Uhlich collaborator Judith Staudinger, and the video documentation Johannen (2009) [Johannas]. To complete the programme, brut will additionally be showing one of Uhlich’s very first works: Impatiens walleriana (2007), dealing with the younger generation in botany, but also in the theatre business. It thus also traces the path that Uhlich herself has taken. Aside from looking at Uhlich’s works over the past five years, Alexander Schellow dares a first glimpse at the presently developing production Come Back with his installation Back Ground 01. And, for everybody who finally want to take part themselves, Doris Uhlich is offering an open workshop at the end of this retrospective where everybody can become a Pop Swan. Everything dances? Everything Uhlich!

brut will be hosting five international productions from Finland, Sweden, Russia, and Estonia under the title Baltic Games in January as part of an international exchange programme. The Finnish Baltic Circle Festival is focussed on the performance and experimental theatre scene of countries neighbouring the Baltic Sea and is considered one of the most important locations for new discoveries from the Baltic region. The festival has succeeded in building a cultural bridge between Eastern and Western Europe. For the Baltic showcase in brut, the selected performances and projects fit in with the brut programme in content and form, while the stage formats range from a documentary theatre evening via feminist party and concert performances, site-specific works, on to playing with the world’s future. YKON, a group of visual artists from Helsinki, are responsible for the latter: with YKON Game, they developed a simulation that works with the players’ political and social imaginations. There are only active performers in this project, no passive audience. While the future is reinvented in YKON Game, Juha Valkeapää and Taito Hoffrén from Helsinki withdraw into a tent with their minimalist performance 10 JOURNEYS TO A PLACE WHERE NOTHING HAPPENS and, over coffee and pancakes, talk in a very humorous, charming, and musical way about Nordic attitudes toward life, describing the dreariness, vastness, emptiness, and their everyday lives. At the beginning and end of Baltic Games, the ÖFA-kollektivet and the artists Riina Maidre and Maike Lond from Tallinn invite to performances which are located somewhere between a party or concert and stage performance. ÖFA is a group of Swedish artists of all genres realising emancipated, collective works free of hierarchies. The group specialises in the performance design of party events in which the audience is very humorously made the evening’s protagonist. Estonians Lond and Maidre present in their stage show PostUganda – perhaps best described as a post-feminist concert performance – an energetic and pleasurable evening that references pop elements in order to ironically, self-ironically, and critically examine clichés about women. The production Two in your House by Moscow’s teatr.doc represents the most explosive work in the Baltic Games programme. The group has developed an evening of documentary theatre based on a specific example of the political persecution of artists aligned with opposition political parties through the national secret police in Belarus. During the Baltic Circle Festival in Helsinki in November 2011, as part of the exchange, brut presented a showcase of three of its own productions and a club night.

In Christoph Schlingensief’s legendary production Kunst und Gemüse, A. Hipler, Theater ALS Krankheit [Art and Vegetables, A. Hipler, Theatre ALS Illness] a performer chanted “Video belongs on every stage!” the whole evening long. Under this title in autumn brut is focusing on the often difficult and passionate relationship between theatre and film. Since the use of film and video onstage has become almost commonplace nowadays, the question arises as to whether or not new formats can be developed from the combination of the two media beyond its decorative function. Ten productions and projects within the framework of this thematic priority develop their own artistic avenues for the use of film and video onstage.

The opening event with this theme is Gin/i Müller and the revival of the production Who Shot the Princess? Boxstop Telenovelas, operating at the turning point between melodrama and militancy. An accompanying three-day symposium entitled Melodrama and Rebellion redefines the relationship between melodrama and politics, gender and art. At the end of September the video pioneers of Gob Squad will present their current production Before Your Very Eyes, a live show “with ACTUAL children” and about the kids’ lives, in fast-forward. For ten days in October God’s Entertainment will be squatting brut im Konzerthaus, setting up a temporary film studio. Clearing the occupied stages will be unavoidable despite the closing gala event with red carpet. In Was bleibt? [What Remains?] artificial horizon/Milli Bitterli sounds out definitions of the interplay between architecture, camera, choreography, and live performance. Doris Uhlich is also moving along the borderline between dance and film, developing a vignette in and for the Stadtkino Wien. With its unusual cinematic city portrait Bonanza the group Berlin shows how theatre can manage completely without live performers.

In November Lisa Kortschak is again adding music and sound to the silent film Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid – with a variety of different band formations she shows how various live musical interpretations affect the exact same film. To conclude the main focus, in Red Herring Diederik Peeters makes the suggestive power of a film’s soundtrack the subject matter of his performance. Legendary video pioneer Chris Kondek presents a fictional documentary evening of theatre in which he searches for a missing filmmaker whose trail completely vanishes in Cuba, where the performers find themselves alone. Kondek will further be searching for the presentability of the sublime in video and film in an artist’s workshop. Students of the Art and Digital Media Course at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna will also present a confrontation of video and performance media with one another over the course of an evening. And the Rabtaldirndln shot a movie last summer – but because the supposedly genuine Raabtal Dirndln (a folk music group from Styria) sued, they were involuntarily forced to put a stop to shooting. Now the ending of their film can only be told on stage. In Angela Richter’s drug elegy Berghain Boogie Woogie, viewers can ultimately no longer be sure whether they are sitting in a theatrical performance, a cinema, or perhaps even in a hip club – playing with unusual combinations of video and theatrical elements the film aims to transform perception and, in the end, provides for suspenseful confrontations and unexpected surprises.