5 March 2020

Annotation on 11 May 2020: The festival 'Wiener Festwochen' will happen due to coronavirus measures in an altered form. The start date remains the same: On 15 May, the projects will be shown in chronological order following the original programme as 'gestures' via digital tools. On 16 May, the opening speech by Kay Sara and Milo Rau will be streamed live from the Burgtheater in Vienna. Details of 'Festwochen 2020 reframed' are published at festwochen.at (English / Deutsch).

Highlights of Wiener Festwochen (15 May - 21 June) explore the current political and environmental situations of our world by tracing the history of the last hundred years

Fashion.at previewed this year's Wiener Festwochen programme which is published already at festwochen.at (English and German) as well as via bi-lingual printed catalogue. Last mentioned introduces with moody, dark texts by Gustav Mahler and Bertolt Brecht into the festival which focuses on the world's current political and environmental situations.

From 15 May until 21 June, more than 40 productions will happen at various locations through the city. The festival will be opened with new interpretations of Beethoven's oeuvre on 15 May in front of the Vienna City Hall at Rathausplatz. On 16 May, the opening speech 'Against Integration' by Kay Sara and Milo Rau is scheduled and will be live-streamed from the Burgtheater in Vienna. The speech, referencing Brazil's agro-industry, the indigenous people of the Amazon and the planet's health, is about the tension between cultures, the environment and capitalism.

One of the Wiener Festwochen 2020 main productions will have its Vienna premiere (world premiere happened 2018 in Manchester) one day later on 17 May at Museumsquartier. The music-theatre-Gesamtkunstwerk 'Everything that happened and would happen' by German composer and theatre-maker Heiner Goebbels is an exploration of destruction and collapses of the last hundred years. Heiner Goebbels is even one of the artists who will guide through the KHM Kunsthistorische Museum for presenting his view on the art museum's collection.

Image: Heiner Goebbels: Everything That Happened and Would Happen (2018). An Artangel commission. Photograph: Thanasis Deligiannis.

Save the date for another theatre production! On 3rd June Bertolt Brecht's 'The Mother' in a new interpretation by The Wooster Group under the direction of the group's founding member Elizabeth LeComte will have its world premiere. The original play premiered 1932 in Berlin and is announced to be set into context of today's situation in Soho where The Wooster Group resides in New York City. 'The Mother' will be performed in English with German surtitles.