Revolution in the Shadows of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?

Diary from the 2024 Wiener Festwochen (Vienna)  

By Amanda L. Andrei

 

On the cool and cloudy evening I arrive in Vienna, I walk to Rathausplatz, a tidy stretch of green park west of the city center. Between the exquisite arched façades of City Hall and the Burgtheater— the national theater of Austria and the most significant German-language theater in the world — technicians check the sounds and lights on a platform draped with a striped banner reading NO EXCUSES ANYMORE. On the other side, the same red, purple, black, and green bars with the white text: REVOLUTION NOW!

I’m skeptical. Walking among former imperial buildings of the Austro-Hungarian empire— which collapsed in 1918, following the First World War — it feels like to talk of revolution is to talk a big game. How easy to call for a new world when the old world supports it! But does revolution mean all or nothing? What role does theater play in revolution, anyway?

These are the questions I hold as I attend the opening days of the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival). Established in 1951, the festival runs for five to six weeks in May through June and showcases an array of international theater, dance, performance art, music, and other cultural events. Flipping through the program, I am intrigued to see workshops such as “The Lost Art of Organizing Solidarity: Transnational Summer School for Activists, Artists, & Academics” and an invitation to “hearing days,” a series of talks where audience and artists “will develop the rules for the festival of the future together,” critically questioning topics such as funding, labor, and private sponsorship when it comes to producing new works and developing artists. Perhaps revolution can also mean transparency.

Revolution can mean a violent upheaval to institute a new government. It can also be the orbit of a heavenly body. And it has a third meaning, one considered now obsolete: The action or an act of turning over in the mind or in discussion; consideration, reflection; discussion, debate; judicial review. In this meaning, theater and revolution are inextricably linked.

What I saw at the Wiener Festwochen turns over and over in my mind, my gut, my blood. I saw art that is cosmic in scope, considering our very life forces and dependence on them. I saw theater that is a messy, joyful experiment for creating community and overcoming shame. And I witnessed the creation of a new language springing from feminine power and rage.

As I complete my own orbit back to Los Angeles, I sense a movement within myself, a desire for more theater that revolves and heaves, drama with the power to innovate and rebel. The shift slow and internal, not the kind of revolution of textbooks and national holidays. It’s too early to tell where this motion will take me. But by the next time it comes around, I know that I will be a changed person.

“As I complete my own orbit back to Los Angeles, I sense a movement within myself, a desire for more theater that revolves and heaves, drama with the power to innovate and rebel.”

 

My days in Vienna led me to see three events: Genossin Sonne (“Comrade Sun”), a multimedia art exhibition connecting the center of our solar system with political revolution; Blutstück (“Bloodpiece”), a devised adaptation of Swiss author Kim de L’Horizon’s award-winning debut novel, Blutbuch (“Bloodbook”) about family and gender fluidity, and A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela by Brazilian theater maker Carolina Bianchi, a maelstrom of a performance that challenges us to confront legacies of sexual violence and how far art can go.

Genossin Sonne

 

Large suspended screens arranged in a circle within a dark room feel like stepping into an inverse planetarium: Instead of reclining in cushioned seats and gazing up at stars, I walk along the perimeter of the room and among celestial-themed sculptures and paintings, searching for a place to sit on the wooden platforms and gazing up at the experimental films playing on the screens. I hold an audio device that synchs up to each film as I approach it. Despite the potential for visual overwhelm, the aural experience allows me to focus on one video at a time.

The 17-minute film Chroniques du Soleil Noir (Chronicles of the Dark Sun) fascinates me the most. Created by French artist Gwenola Wagon, its monochromatic scenes of dystopia shift from one stark color to the next, mimicking hues and light filters like night vision and infrared. The visual language conveys a sense of scientific objectivity on what is otherwise a bleak yet poetic story: an environmental crisis where humans hide from the sun and create an artificial intelligence entity to revive their memories.

The film mirrors the irony of the exhibition itself: the theme is the sun, yet we are immersed in a darkened room. Our shadows eclipse the artwork around us, including a large map of an astrological chart, July 15^th, 2015 the day after Bastille Day, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille (a fortress and prison) that became symbolic of the French Revolution. Created by Brussels and Berlin-based artist Marina Pinsky, it serves as a reminder of archetypal forces and the cosmic nature of time. Upon exiting the main exhibition, I spot a large mural of solar cycles correlating with political revolutions. Most of the events listed are from Europe, which feels surprising given the international theme of the event. Still, the theory of solar maxima and political revolutions having a genuine connection is pseudoscience, more useful for poetic inspiration than actually predicting or understanding political unrest. While it may spur creative thought, I hope that viewers also see it as a reminder to be critical of perceived scientific objectivity and the portrayal of authoritative information.

BlutstÜck

 

“We had sex and now we’re burning at the stake!” yells one of the performers in mock horror and comic despair as the ensemble relates the genesis of Grossmeers, primordial entities who became human out of curiosity and became stuck in the human world. Now with bodies on land but lacking the freedom they had in the sea, they are doomed to pass on their longings and sufferings to none other than us—their descendants. It’s an inventive twist on mother-transformation folktales such as “The Selkie” and “The Crane Wife,” but on a more collective level and with a double meaning: Gross means “great” or “grand” and meer means “mother” as well as “sea.” Great/grandmother, great/grandsea, tying together land and parents into a meaning that is both familial and intimate as well as majestic and encompassing.

There’s still more at play here: additional thematic elements from Blutbuch, the debut novel by the Swiss, non-binary novelist, Kim de L’Horizon. Directed by Leonie Böhm, the performers recite monologues, sing, improvise, and interact with the audience.

“Fear is a heritage passed onto us,” they muse, wondering how to disrupt this damaging heritage. The metaphor becomes playfully vulgar but never gratuitous, as they observe how this fear feels like “a finger of shame up the ass” that doesn’t allow them to relieve themselves. It’s a potent image vibrating with themes of sexuality, control, and agency, and it demands a release.

De L’Horizon, who is also one of the performers, explains that this piece isn’t quite an adaptation — rather, the group is using the text to “explore new forms of community.” One of these moments comes when a performer (Sasha Melroch) asks audience members to turn to each other and play barbichette, a French children’s game where you hold each other’s chins in your hands and stare at each other until someone laughs.

Giggles ripple throughout the Volkstheater auditorium as some people touch each other’s faces and others do not. Another moment comes when de L’Horizon wades through rows of seats and strikes up a conversation with an elderly gentleman audience member. He offers de L’Horizon to try on his glasses, and the actor playfully dons them. They relay their fears to that audience member about bodily safety and asking if he would lend his support if de L’Horizon needed it. The gentleman agrees wholeheartedly, and the audience erupts into applause. These soft moments do indeed feel like new forms of community, possible only through playing with the text in real time, with breathing bodies, and with attentive witness.

While the play has English supertitles, they note at the beginning that parts of the show contain improvisation. As a result, some of the freshest and funniest moments may be lost to non-German speakers. Nevertheless, the earnestness and merriment are palpable, especially in the visual elements.

Zahava Rodrigo’s set of a humungous inflatable hand, bulky plastic rocks, and rain showers at the right moment reflect the frisky mythology of the world. Mascha Mihoa Bischoff’s playful costumes portray a thrift store aesthetic with a sense of humor: Pokemon characters attached to a black mesh shirt, the buttocks cut out of a pair of green track pants. Everywhere, there is an invitation to pull that darn digit from the derriere.

 

A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela (“The Bride and Goodnight Cinderella”)

 

The tart smell of whiskey soaked through a black bra. A fogged windshield, slashed from the inside with burnt pink lipstick letters reading: HELP. The bodies of women, exposed on a bed or the soil, in various stages of decay and degeneration for the “crime” of being female.

Never before have I witnessed onstage such a descent into hell, nor have I beheld such carefully crafted fury, breaking notions of how theater can function. At first, director and playwright Carolina Bianchi grounds the disturbing content with Luisa Callegari’s simple set — a white lace-covered table with a makeshift altar and below, grave-shaped dirt with calla lilies — as she sits at the table and delivers a lecture about femicide, rape, and perceived ownership over women’s bodies.

Her examples are layered and blood-chilling, eerie in how they echo throughout history. Projecting images onto the blank white screen behind her, she shows us 15^th century Boticelli paintings of a man who pursues his rejected lover, disembowels her, and feeds the remains to his dogs while later sharing the 2016 case in Brazil of a football player who ordered a hit on his postpartum mistress with the same gruesome consequences. And most notably, she relates the case of 34-year-old performance artist Pippa Bacca, an Italian woman who set out in 2008 with a fellow artist for “Brides on Tour,” a performance where they would wear wedding dresses and hitchhike from Milan to Jerusalem in a call for world peace and demonstration of the goodness of humans. Along the way, Pippa was raped, strangled, and left for dead.

With calm intensity, Bianchi tells us she will imbibe the date rape drug “boa noite cinderela,” pass out in front of us, and allow her collective, Cara de Cavalo, to continue the rest of the performance with her comatose body onstage.

The play unfurls like the mass of serpents on Medusa’s head. Every motif and symbol, from the pulsing lights to Bianchi’s voiceover continuing the grisly stories, writhes like a venomous snake in a tangled mess. The horrifying face freezing mortals’ blood: the photos of Pippa Bacca in her white wedding dress and veil. These photos and Bianchi’s obsessive research become the visage of showing the world what happens to a woman who survives rape. As the screen falls away, revealing the deep, dark stage, the Cara de Cavalo ensemble enters.

“Every motif and symbol, from the pulsing lights to Bianchi’s voiceover continuing the grisly stories, writhes like a venomous snake in a tangled mess.”

 

Ripped lace, baggy metal shirts, a skeleton sweatpants suit (costumes designed by Tomás Decina, Luisa Callegari, and Carolina Bianchi) conjure up the image of an anti-bridesmaid. They dance to a soundscape of techno beats and guitar riffs which alternate tempos and become muted (designed by Miguel Caldas), as if someone has closed the door on a blaring club. Bianchi lies on a mattress, her arm occasionally jerking as if trying to grab something. And when the collective brings her body to the hood of the car, undress her from the waist down, and pull out an endoscope camera, this Gorgon-like play becomes even more nightmarish. It’s not for catharsis or healing—Bianchi despises the notion—but to create a language for this crime that collapses the survivor’s sense of time and space.

“Only theater can handle this kind of repetition,” Bianchi declares, citing its power to resurrect ghosts and reenact dreams. Yet she indicts theater as well, calling out the institutions that keep the art form “safe,” that entertain and coddle their audiences. And theater itself is no savior, no space of redemption. Drama is a place of voyeurism, murky ethics, and the brink of death. While Bianchi builds a language for survival, she also builds a language for a new kind of theater: one that is dangerous and on the verge of self-sabotage. One that cannot be ignored.

Wiener Festwochen runs through June 23 in Vienna, Austria. More information about the festival can be found here.