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Curtains Up

A new season and a new director begin at the Burg
Michael Bürgermeister
01/09/2009

A plump woman in sunglasses, black top and gold jacket, sits at a table surrounded by a collection of African art works, telling a tale of her innumerable lovers with the help of a microphone, a dark haired woman in a peasant dress stands playing an electric guitar while a bearded man in open necked shirt and dark trousers dances in modern style phenomenally.

This is one scene from Isabelle’s Room created by Belgian playwright Jan Lauwers in the wake of his father’s death in 2002, after he inherited over 5,000 African art works from his father’s collection. Many dance and theater-goers in Vienna will already have seen it at least once if not twice, here in the course of the ImPulsTanz festival.

But not at the Burgtheater, and not in English. Also in English, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma will be performing Life and Times- Episode 1 at the Kasino am Schwarzenbergplatz, the most experimental stage of the three Burgtheater group that also includes the Akademietheater on Lisztstraße.

Is a revolution in the offing? Will Vienna’s many theater fanatics take to the barricades in defense of their sacred “Burgtheater Deutsch”?

The former Burgtheater director Achim Benning reacted calmly to the question:

“There have, naturally enough, been very many English-speaking guest productions in the past,” he said, “though I don’t know of any productions with English speaking actors of our own. The ensemble of the Burgtheater certainly can’t make English-speaking theater.”

Both groups will be guest productions, staged within the “Artists in Residence” program of the Burgtheater.

Jan Lauwers (b.1957) studied painting at the Academy of Art in Ghent 1976-80, but rebelled against the intellectualism of the late-70s art scene by turning to performance. He has since established his own niche in the theater and dance world and has a significant following in experimental theater and dance as well as among a broader public. Not as well known is the Nature Theater of Oklahoma – described as “Off- Off- Off-Broadway” – which won an award at the Salzburg Festival in 2008. If Jan Lauwers is inspired by Warhol and Beuys, leading lights Pavol Liske and Kelly Copper, of the Nature Theater are more inspired by the American composer John Cage, the quirky Fluxus artist Alan Kaprow and the Nouvelle Vague French director Jacques Rivette. Chance plays a large role in their works, moves being determined by dice or cards, and interest in what they describe as ”opening up” to everyday phenomena, relying on a “naïve curiosity” to refresh the scenes.

Of course these English-speaking productions are just the beginning at the Burg. Many will be curious to see what Mathias Hartmann, the new 46-year-old, German director of the Burgtheater, was doing at the Schauspielhaus Zürich before coming here. This debut season at the Burgtheater and its affiliated Akademietheater includes his Zurich productions of Thomas Bernhard’s Immanuel Kant and Kleist’s Amphitryon.

Audiences will also have the opportunity to see how well he can work with the Burgtheater’s formidable ensemble of actors – when both the “subjective” Faust Part I and the “objective” Faust Part II are premiered on the same night on Sept. 4th, with Tobias Moretti playing Faust and Gert Voss, Mephistopheles.

 

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