How Can we Act Together? Declaration of the Free Republic of Wien: Interview with Milo Rau
By Ivan Medenica*
In the office of Milo Rau, the new director of Wiener Festwochen, one of the world’s leading festivals, most of the space is occupied by a bed. This scenography of his office, as well as the entire building where the festival headquarters are located (the dilapidated and temporarily abandoned Volkskundemuseum in the Schönborn Garden Palace in Vienna’s eighth “bezirk”), reflects the Wiener Festwochen concept that Rau set up.
Similar to the program he developed as the now outgoing artistic director of NT Ghent, the Swiss director fundamentally permeates the processes of theatre creation and (emancipatory) social development. Just as Rau literally sleeps in his office, or at least that’s the impression one gets, while a good part of the festival (for example, workshops for the production of various materials) and activities (debating programs) take place in this “rough” environment, so is this concept, Wiener Festwochen, based on democratic procedures and community building.
Inspired by the tradition of the Paris Commune and the “Red Vienna” of the 1920s, Rau and his collaborators place the headquarters of the Free Republic of Vienna, as they call their festival concept, in the Haus of the Republic (Volkskundemuseum), coming up with a flag and an anthem, and initiating its revolutionary institutions and/or manifestos. In addition to the classic program, they also design various socio-performative actions, for example the Vienna Trials, where certain phenomena in today’s Austrian society, such as the right-wing and populist Austrian Freedom Party, are judged. As the ultimate expression of this fundamentally immersive, communitarian and socially conscious concept of the festival, there is a precisely designed and developed institution – the Council of the Republic. Its task was to analyze the ideas, wishes and needs of Austrian and international artists, activists and intellectuals, as well as the citizens of Vienna, thus democratically arriving at the program guidelines for the future of the Wiener Festwochen: the Vienna Declaration. As in Milo Rau’s earlier projects, the structure of the theatre play (or game) should become the binding law of the functioning of a basically social institution such as an art festival.
Although the Free Republic of Vienna offered an excellent theatre program – from those I saw, I single out the plays Rohtko by the Polish director Lukasz Twarkowski with Dailes teater from Riga and Die Rechnung by the English director Tim Etchells, produced by the festival itself and the Volkstheatre Vienna – I chose the topic of our conversation to be this extremely elaborate, thoughtful, daring and fruitful concept of the festival. At the very end of this year’s Wiener Festwochen, at the end of (a hellish) June, and when this conversation was held in the garden of the Schönborn Garden Palace, it was already quite obvious that this concept had experienced an exceptional success.
Everyone who knows your work will immediately recognize that the concept of Free Republic of Vienna is an impressive continuation of your research in the fields of both performing arts and social activism. As a self-reflective artist and thinker, you have yourself distinguished the three streams in your work: a) reenactments, dealing with “collective traumas” from the past, b) projects with a central focus on the critique of representation (although this critique is, in one way or another, omnipresent in your work), c) theatre as a “symbolic space” where you project, with the tools of theatre and the arts in general, utopian societies of the future.
Obviously, the Free Republic of Vienna, with its Proclamation, Council and Declaration perfectly fits in the frame of the utopian “symbolic spaces.” What is the essential difference between your previous projects of this kind and the Free Republic of Vienna? As this is the first time that an important international festival is the playground for such a “symbolic space,” I imagine this very fact could make a difference? More than artistic performances of any kind, festivals have always been a context for societies’ deepest self-reflection.
There are different ways to answer this question. Coming back to the trauma, I would say that the present is acting out the traumas of the past for the future. It can be acted out even unconsciously. It can be acted out in rituals, festivals, plays, institutions or whatever, and then modeled in different ways with the aim to deal with them once and for all. This is the difference between democracy and populism. Populism would just use it. There is this joke: let’s forget about the future, let’s talk about the past… And I like this antagonistic space which is the space of the present.
When you compare the different approaches I had, for example, in the city theatre in Ghent, or with projects such as City of Change, Moscow Trials or Kongo Tribunal, you see that I have always tried to reach universalism through extreme contextualization of the act of art. Here, at Wiener Festwochen, we act through the different institutions we created like a council, trials again… We react to the situation which is typical for Vienna, but also, using the context of an international festival, to global issues. I think that postmodernism brought an extreme decontextualization of the art scene. One could see the same things in Avignon, Vienna, Edinburgh… It’s like a market circuit. You would make a mix of, let’s say, five city projects, ten big names, seven “global South” projects and one collective and then, finally, you would get a kind of postmodern version of the “context.” But this is not the context, it’s just the curators’ elite deciding what “globalazied art” should look like. I wanted to turn it around and ask myself: how a festival, as a public institution, can be democratically used? For example, my father was taking care of water in a public instituion in Zurich and nobody asked him – Is water still relevant to you? When you are a curator, and you know this perfectly well, they always ask you: is theatre still relevant for you? Do you want to do only work with children, or do you want this or that? And I answer: I don’t know! Of course, I have my personal taste, maybe also an educated one, but I know – I am a student of (Pierre) Bourdieu – that my taste is only mine, it’s not objective. How to objectivize aesthetic judgement? It was always a big question in the revolutionary moments of the art. The answer is: only by including people. It’s not so important what’s written, it’s more important who reads it. We invite a hundred people who may have completely different tastes from yours and mine and this would be reflected upon and articulated in the Declaration of the Free Republic of Wien.
You had this pseudodemocartic feudalistic society, waging an uncivil war – against slaves, women and between political parties- and they also constantly fought against external enemies, the Persians, Sparta, and then this tragic expedition against Syracuse… So, why would this society every year, in the middle of an endless war, make a ten-day theatre festival which was also extremelly expensive? The only answer is: they needed it to survive. Then the real question becomes how will you turn a festival into an institution that society would need in order to survive … Here, in Vienna, I am exploring the heart of theatre through the form of a festival.
So I will come back to my question about the difference between these two structures. You are making similar, multilayered, contextualized, socially aware, inclusive projects in NT Ghent as well. If one would ask you to draw a line between an institutional subsidized theatre and an institutional subsidized festival as platforms for making “symbolic spaces,” what would this line be?
I think that, at the end of the day, in a city theatre the institution wins. It’s an architecture; you have to make a program for these buildings. In a festival, on the other hand, you really choose: this happens here, this happens there, this happens nowhere – in a virtual space. This is really a big difference.
Another difference, a rather shadowy one, is that theatre is an institution and festival is a story. We have been telling stories at NT Ghent as well, but at the end of the day it is more about how 50 people, although strongly connected to the city, function together. Here, in the festival, we are not 50, we are not even 5,000, we are really 50,000 people interconnecting all the time in different ways.
Knowing your work, my first impression when I read about what you want to develop at Wiener Festfochen was that you have always needed a big festival as a platform.
It’s interesting that you say this, because now I see it exactly in that way. Yes, it’s true… Now articles are appearing in which all the lines of our program are retrospectively connected: this was an answer to that, it’s logical that this came after that, they obviously planned it like this… Some things were planned, of course, but some were not. Anyhow, it’s super nice to read these kind of analyses. The festival has this strength like, let’s say, a Netflix series where you always want to see the next instalment: then you understand that you are really telling a story.
Let’s then go to the story of The Free Republic of Vienna. Referring to Viennese classical Modernism, with figures such as Schönberg, Freud and Klimt, and one could add those from theatre like Schnitzler and Von Hofmannsthal, you declared that the story of The Free Republic of Vienna was one of a Second Modernism. You attribute to it the notions of global, delimited, utopian, radically political and radically aesthetic. Some of these qualities could easily be recognized from the very list of the performances – for example, the fact that they are made by artists coming from different parts of the world. To justify other such qualities, one had to be able to see the majority of the program. As this is almost impossible, I would like to ask you to elaborate on the notion of the Second Modernism and its relation to the chosen program.
The first modernism opened up the space of European art for globalization. But the makers have never been “globalized,” they didn’t have their own voices, so national cultures still dominated… Schönberg had fifty female followers but they never produced. So, we said that we would make an academy that fulfils the dreams of modernism. Its fellows would come from all the continents; they would be mostly female. And what happened at the end? We made two concerts with five composers each which made, by importing the popular traditions of the different cultures, a really new music.
Schönberg says that now you may think his music is only arithmetic, that it’s nothing, but in a hundred years you will all sing it. It never happens because Schönberg’s melodies are not good. There is this well-known quote: “modernity never happened.” Modernism never worked, for example, in music, but when it becomes a utopia, then it becomes at the same time super popular and super touching. When you see these two concerts of ours happening, the dream of Schönberg comes true: because you have modernized it.
When we dive into the world of The Free Republic of Vienna and its Second Modernism, it can have an association with the projects of Christoph Schlingensief, namely Passion Impossible, Wake Up Call for Germany 1997 or Chance 2000 for Graz. The most interesting could be the last one because it was also made for a festival (Steirischer Herbst), also in Austria and also in the context of the rise of right-wing parties. A few days ago, the Austrian right-wing option won the elections for the EU parliament and in 2000 the Freedom Party of Austria (FPA) interrupted Chance 2000 for Graz. Do you see some parallels in what Schlingensief was addressing at the end of the 90’s and the challenges you are dealing with?
Schlingensief was kind of referring to (Joseph) Beuys, but he undoubtedly started a whole movement with projects which created institutions, media events… a whole fake reality that mirrors society. Our trial projects are also mirroring society and making an alternative one. This is a kind of empowerment of the civic society and ritualistic practices that we, in continental Europe, destroyed at the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century.
In historical terms, modernism was one of the last attempts of this kind. Then came WWI and WWII, the Cold War, the invasions by the USA and Russia and then it was a bit over with the European dream. (laugh) With Schlingensief’s projects and with what we are doing here – working with institutions, creating TV shows, (and Schlingensief also made a party and a church) – this kind of crazy dream comes true once again. One could say that with this kind of project art becomes a real practice of society. So, to summarize it, this is a way of thinking about art that Schlingensief somehow started.
The difference is, and this comes also from the fact that he is a generation older than I, that Schlingensief was raised in the postmodern mood, so at the end of the day the attitude he had in the projects you named is a kind of provocation, a gesture of irony. What people are realizing now, at the end of Wiener Festwochen, is that we are really writing a Declaration, really implementing it, really changing the institution…
You are saying that, unlike Schlingensief, your approach in making theatrical and multimedia activism essentially belongs to modernism? Or second modernism, if you prefer.
Voilà! But you know, in history there is never a lost step. Without modernism there wouldn’t be Schlingensief , without Schlingensief there wouldn’t be the second modernism and so on… Postmodernism was saying that modernism was shit, that everybody would finish in a Stalinist-like organized society (which was really close to the modernist dream). Postmodernism is organic: nobody should interfere, you should not have rules… What has happened in these last years is that modernism comes back and says: we have somehow to organize ourselves, because if we don’t do that, if neoliberal thinking continues (with omnipresent and constant moneygrubbing), we will be all dead in twenty years. The question of our times is – how can we act together?
We analyze the subtle, historical rooted differences between your second-modernistic and Schlingensief’s post-modernistic approach to social criticism in the arts, but the target of this criticism, the enemy is still the same, even the political party is the same… Is there a difference between today’s right-wing populism and the one from the nineties? Is this enemy transforming itself as well?
If one refers to the Austrian context, which makes sense because Schlingensief made some of his most important projects of this kind not only at Steirischer Herbst in Graz but here, at Wiener Festwochen as well, the answer would be: yes, the enemy is the same. The history of FPA is very simple. I know it now very well because one of our projects this year was Vienna Trials. It’s a civic, democratic, juristic procedure fashioned by means of performance (like my previous projects The Zürich Trials, The Moscow Trials, The Congo Tribunal) which targets the FPA. It is really a postfascist party, made by the same people that were in the fascist, Nazi party. Then in the seventies and eighties they started to be liberal, still populist but liberal, and in the days of Schlingensief, with (Jorg) Haider as their very popular leader, they started to declare a kind of “second fascism” and they became what they are still today. With its present leader, (Herbert) Kickl, the FPA started reusing the fascist vocabulary, with notions such as “fortress Austria.” When we confront them with this, they say that it is true but then claim that, as this was eighty years ago, their voters don’t see this parallel – so, the parallel doesn’t exist. It’s a bit absurd, but they have become exactly what they were. They are the same and they are growing. The 10% on the top of the party just wants power, it’s a pure Machiavellism. The 90% of the party, or better said the voters, like in Hitler’s time, they have tribalistic social ideas. It’s not negative per se, but then this 10% turns it into something very destructive and dangerous for civilization and the planet… As you were referring to the elections for EU, I would say that we have now a global alliance of fascism. In the old days it was Germany and Italy and then you could say: we will bomb them and then it will be over. Today you don’t even know where would you start to bomb. (laugh)
We are coming to the end of your first year as the head of Wiener Festwochen. I imagine that everybody is now waiting for the Declaration of FRV to be launched. I would like to hear your personal opinion on some of the topics that the Declaration raises. What do you think about gender quotas in arts? Or, is the concept of an ecologically sustainable theatre festival – sustainable? How to deal with the carbon footprint in a context in which productions coming from overseas should be presented?
On the one hand, it is a dilemma and it stays a dilemma. On the other hand, there is a dialectical fight between the carbon footprint and the political handprint, as they call it. One would say: we do this action, there is the carbon footprint, but we do it with a clear aim to present the work of ten artists from Africa or China. But still, we have to balance these two things…
Speaking of the quota, I think there is no other way. You have just to declare the quota. Obviously, the quota is a very bad thing. But if today you cast 50% male artists and 50% female through a law, in one generation you won’t need the law anymore. For example, you had to introduce in the constitution the female right to vote; nowadays nobody would ask how this right was achieved. For a certain time, my mother couldn’t vote in Switzerland. And now we completely forget that at one point, in some parts of Switzerland, it was just pushed through by the state, because the first vote was against the law.
Here, in Free Republic of Vienna, we give the rules, then we publish them, redefine and refine them if needed, and finally everybody knows the rules: it’s a political act. I think that making rules means liberating. In real society, we can vote for whatever we want but if this doesn’t fit into the frame of human rights, for example women’s rights, it will not work… Our rules here are made in the most democratic way we can do at the time.
I come back to the example of water. If I came to Vienna to take care of water, nobody would give me any power. They would say: you have a good expertise in water, we appreciate your approach, but we are only interested in you delivering the amount of water we need; you can decide whether to take it from the Danube or from the mountains, and that’s it. But the freedom of art is much bigger – and that’s how we survived under the FPA. They made fifty different accusations against the Wiener Festwochen, both in the municipal and the national parliament, but they didn’t have any chance against the freedom of art – which is good.
Postmodernism says – no machine, everything has to be organic. And now the question is how are you going to bring together the idea of a machine and the idea of growing in freedom? I think that a festival is a very good space to do it on very different levels.
You have a very elaborate concept of the Council of Republic, with 31 members who are international artists, thinkers and activists, and 69 “burgers” of Vienna that represent all of its 23 districts. How has this concept worked in reality?
In reality it was quite simple. We had ten working groups and they started working even before the beginning of the festival on what should be adopted or not. Then they prepared the papers, the laws, etc. And then, every week, we had two days of discussions with experts who had approximately 5 minutes each, and then the final 10 minutes discussion in the Council itself – a very strict time regime. Then the laws were adopted with some changes or without them. That’s how, at the end, this Declaration will be made.
You paraphrase Marx in the first theses of your Ghent Manifesto. Is rendering the processes of representation themselves visible and real an ultimate political achievement of theatre and arts? How do you see this question from the perspective of your first year at the head of WF?
Absolutely! I think it’s the only way you can divide art from non-art. You can take the example of what we are doing here: we act as if we had a council, and at the end what council decides becomes a law, a real institution… Jean-Luc Godard said it in another way: making a film means criticizing how films are made and changing the way of making films. I think that making arts means changing the way works of art are thought, produced, distributed, etc. Storytelling, emotions, colors, composition, dramaturgy… all of this is super important. But the decision whether it is art or simply a conservative representation of what you see is exactly in this. I think that art always gives an answer to the question why something was done and done in that particular way and how by doing it you change the way in which we organize ourselves, or understand why we are here and – all very basic questions.
*Ivan Medenica (PhD), works at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts (Belgrade) as a professor of The History of World Drama and Theatre. Medenica has given guest lectures at Humboldt University (Berlin), The Yale School of Drama (USA), AGRFT (Ljubljana), and NATFIZ (Sofia). He is an active theatre critic and has received six times the national award for the best theatre criticism. He was the artistic director of two major theatre festivals in Serbia, Sterijino Pozorje and Bitef. He was a fellow in the Academie Schloss Solitude in Sttutgart and the International Research Center for Interweaving Performance Cultures (Freie Universität) in Berlin. He is a member of the IATC Executive Committee and its Vice President.
Copyright © 2024 Ivan Medenica
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques e-ISSN:2409-7411
This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
