Program

Director Susanne Kennedy’s new production reflects on the pandemic situation in general and the vulnerability of the female body in particular. Constraint, isolation, unequal treatment – what does it mean to be alive?

Following her invitation to stage Arnold Schoenberg’s "Pierrot lunaire" at the Wiener Festwochen in 2021, the choreographer and dancer Marlene Monteiro Freitas, born in Cape Verde, finds an inspirational accomplice in Lulu.

Three women are being interrogated at Europe’s high-security border. A Yazidi woman from Iraq who has fled the Islamic State; an Afghan woman who managed to escape her violent husband; and a Libyan woman whose life thus far has been defined by poverty, hunger and sexual assault.

This year, on three separate evenings, the Wiener Festwochen have invited internationally renowned female authors whose writings explore possible paths towards that future.

Indeed, it is the apocalypse, the radical destruction of Western art and civilisation, that Julien Gosselin imagines here.The French director is renowned for his visually stunning adaptations of great novels (Houellebecq’s "Elementary Particles" and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666).

"Song of the Shank" is Jeffery Renard Allen’s stage adaptation of his eponymous novel as a monodrama. In his composition for a countertenor and for the Ensemble Modern, George Lewis imagines how "Blind Tom’s" music might sound today, while visual artist Stan Douglas opts for subtle images.

The prophetess Sibyl writes people’s fates down on oak leaves and places them on a heap of leaves at the entrance to her cave dwelling. But then the wind picks up and everything is swirled into a muddle. All control over the prophecies is lost.