by Elisabeth Ritonja | Sep 24, 2023 | 2021, 2021, Tanz
According to Greek mythology, Dido, who came from Phoenician royalty, was the founder of Carthage. She fled her homeland to escape her brother and, by acting intelligently, obtained enough land in the new land where she had arrived with followers and ships to build Carthage. Described as a tall, beautiful, wise and untouchable queen, she fell in love, through the intervention of the gods, with Aeneas, who, having fled Troy, asked her for the right to stay. The love story, which ends tragically, has been adapted many times in literature and found its way into some 90 operas. Henry Purcell created “Dido and Aeneas“, from which ‘Dido’s Lament‘ gave rise to one of the most famous and beautiful mourning arias in operatic history.
“Dido” by and with Korhan Basaran at wortwiege in the Kasematten Wiener Neustadt (Photo: Julia Kampichler)
“Dido” by and with Korhan Basaran at wortwiege in the Kasematten Wiener Neustadt (Photo: Julia Kampichler)
“Dido” by and with Korhan Basaran at wortwiege in the Kasematten Wiener Neustadt (Photo: Julia Kampichler)
Turkish dancer and choreographer Korhan Basaran made a guest appearance at the wortwiege festival “Europe in Scene“, this time subtitled “Sea change”. He presented his dance piece “Dido” in which he himself slips into the role of the woman loved and then abandoned by Aeneas. The gods demand of Aeneas to leave Dido alone in Carthage to sail across the sea with his people in order to found a city himself, namely Rome. This breaks the heart of the once proud woman. Basaran condenses the action to the last moments of Dido’s life, after she has been abandoned by Aeneas, and makes visible all the emotions that heartbreak can bring. In Dido’s inner monologue, he concentrates on the existential emotions that arise at the moment of abandonment. Small paper boats, folded by the audience under his guidance at the beginning of the performance and placed on the stage floor, make it clear: it is the sea that has brought the two lovers together, but ultimately also separates them again. Underpinned with musical layers by composer Tolga Yayalar, Purcell’s Dido Lament resonates from the start. If at first it is only the harmony sequence, transposed into electronic sounds, that can be heard delicately, at the end Dido herself will sing along the refrain of this lament loudly and emotionally fiercely moved. Yayalar also created the auditory perceptions of the horn of a large steamer, the chirping of birds, ominous-sounding demon noises, and the cracking and crackling of burning wood. Ataman Girisken also contributes significantly to the success of the production with his visuals. Depending on the mood, he bathes the space in glittering blue and white wave refractions, provides it with a twinkling starry sky, transforms it into a dark cave or triggers frightening moments when Dido meets her death at the stake. Red tongues of fire blaze until the figure of Dido lying on the ground visually dissolves. The billowing conflagration that follows also remains palpable in its abstractly designed undulations, which at the same time seem incredibly aesthetic.
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“Dido” by and with Korhan Basaran at wortwiege in the Kasematten Wiener Neustadt (Photo: Julia Kampichler)
“Dido” by and with Korhan Basaran at wortwiege in the Kasematten Wiener Neustadt (Photo: Julia Kampichler)
“Dido” by and with Korhan Basaran at wortwiege in the Kasematten Wiener Neustadt (Photo: Julia Kampichler)
Korhan Basaran’s Dido is wracked by painful convulsions, but also reveals that defensiveness that results from wounded pride. An expressive facial expression makes every single emotional emotion visible. Be it despair, fear, hope or disgust. The tall figure in a long skirt, the upper part of the body clad only in a shirt, conveys in a contemporary way the image of Dido that has been handed down in tradition. But Basaran also slips into Aeneas, who, lantern in hand, affirms to Dido that it is not his will but that of the gods why he must leave her. It is the brilliantly crafted melange of his expressive dance, the selected text passages from Virgil and Christopher Marlowe that he recites, the atmospheric visuals as well as the music that create a harmonious, emotionally gripping stage event. With Basaran’s interpretation of Dido, he continues to write a tradition that has captivated countless generations to date and, judging by the audience reaction, continues to emotionally grip them today.
This article was automatically translated with deepl.com
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by Elisabeth Ritonja | Sep 11, 2023 | 2021, Theatre
Man moves and fights against gravity from his first days to his last. This is one of the core statements of Aleksandar Acev, who was invited by wortwiege to the casemates of Wiener Neustadt. As part of the festival “Europa in Szene”, in the special “Sea change” edition, he rocked the hall with his production “Lucy was not long ago”.
Acev is a “body language teacher,” author, director as well as a university lecturer at various European universities, where he imparts his knowledge to acting students. Moving on stage and finding the right expression for the character and the situation is one thing. Observing people in everyday life and analyzing their emotional state or even their character in a few moments – this is also possible with Acev’s Bodylanguage knowledge. Both mediation approaches are thematized in his performance – however not theoretically dry, but made visible with his grandiose use of the body.

Lucy was not long ago (Photo: Julia Kampichler)
Lucy the monkey is considered one of those ancestors of man who practiced the upright gait and thus established our way of life on two legs instead of four. Acev approaches this topic with a great deal of knowledge, body awareness and a large dose of humor, and delighted audiences across all ages with his story of animal and human movement history.
His brilliant show ranged from an easy introduction, the explanation and pointing out of many possible human gaits to four grandiosely performed, different shoulder looks and the resulting different forms of expression. With Lucy on one side of the stage and Scully – a miniature human skeleton – on the other side, he had brought two artificial antipodes to him, which he filled with life.
Lucy was not long ago (Foto: Julia Kampichler)
Lucy was not long ago (Foto: Julia Kampichler)
Particularly entertaining was the part in which he demonstrated his observations of jogging people: he juxtaposed one type, characterized by its looseness and bouncing gait, with another who, with his upper body bent backwards, seemed to be stuck in his past. Still others, who rush headlong into the future, without ifs and buts, or those who, bent with grief, nevertheless set off on the run – all of them and many more were alternately imitated by Acev almost every second. In the process, the performer juggled words just as well to accompany his performance.
The different ways of greeting, submissive, deprecating, fearful or hopeful triggered just as cheerful moods as the references to the direct Lucy kinship in the field of male sports greats. The tennis player Djokovic beating his chest with a clenched fist, the famous, unforgettable headbutt of the soccer player Zinédine Zidane – against the Italian Materazzi at the World Cup – or the wide-legged goal celebration of his colleague Ronaldo: all these short and yet so striking movements, demonstrated by the mime, made it clear that Lucy and her kind cannot have been extinct for so long. The evolution of man’s fusion with his chair – this was another theme that served as an eye-opener for one’s own movement patterns. Who hasn’t lounged at the office chair without energy on several occasions, who hasn’t had the feeling of being fused with his keyboard, and who hasn’t felt prompted to expose his body to sporting activities more often?
Probably the most amazing thing about Acev’s performance is the realization that with this kind of “edutainment” you can gain knowledge in a short time that you wouldn’t get by reading books for hours on end. And it does so in a highly enjoyable way. All who have seen “Lucy was not long ago” have been given a new observational insensitivity by the artist at the bottom. What a great side-effect, triggered by a theatrical event as part of the wortwiege festival.
This article was automatically translated with deepl.com
by Elisabeth Ritonja | Jun 7, 2022 | 2021, Tanz, Wiener Festwochen
Bouchra Ouizguen has been part of the touring schedule of cooperation partners in contemporary dance for several years. France and Belgium play a prominent role in this; but the idea of supporting productions across countries is also becoming more and more popular, especially in the festival business in this country.
Although she has now staged her seventh production, she is still a border crosser in contemporary dance. In interviews, she repeatedly says that neither she nor her dancers have had any training in this field. What distinguishes her work, or rather the beginning of her work on this project, is the tracking down of people who still master traditional song and dance forms.
In “Elephant”, Ouizguen has set herself the goal of bringing Moroccan dance and music onto the stage in order to snatch them from oblivion and disappearance. As a metaphor, she has chosen the elephant, which is an endangered species and may already be extinct in the coming century.
Together with three other protagonists – one younger and two older women who have already worked with Ouizguen – she presented the result of her musical and dance search for clues in the programme of the Wiener Festwochen at the Odeon. She intuitively and creatively processes the material she finds into a one-hour piece. A piece that not only reveals the traditional, but also wraps this traditional in a new cloak.
Before her spectacle begins, however, the stage floor is cleaned by two women with large floor rubbing cloths. Then they come on stage – no longer dressed like cleaning ladies, but in festive robes – with two other dancers to clean the space with the help of incense. Here it becomes clear that what will be shown is partly taking place in the ritual realm. And indeed, a dancing creature appears with a colourful headdress, trimmed all around with bright bast strings. Soon it is whirling across the room.
Elephant (Foto: © Beniamin Boar)
Elephant (Foto: © Beniamin Boar)
Elephant (Foto: © Beniamin Boar)
Elephant (Foto: © Beniamin Boar)
Unlike at the very beginning, the music is not coming from the tape now. Now it is the women themselves who sing live on stage. Polyphonic litanies form the main volume of the musical events. Starting with a female singer, they are echoed by the others and at the same time rhythmised by them with the help of djenbes, small bongo drums. This musical setting remains the same throughout the performance, but the individual danced scenes change. One witnesses a solo performance by the youngest woman, who collapses in exhaustion, whipped up by the music, which gets faster and faster. But the women also perform an impressive group choreography.
It forms the artistic climax of the performance. Designed as a contact improvisation, it is, however, anything but improvised. After pieces of clothing have been pulled offstage – which can be understood as a haunting metaphor of human demise – and the women have intoned a litany of lamentations, the three dancers group themselves into a single organism. They move it through the hall in ever new combinations with the help of lifting techniques. The impression is that they hold each other in their grief and pain and never let each other fall. This is a highly emotional and meaningful scene. It shows people in an exceptional situation that they can only overcome through mutual cohesion. How they connect with each other, let themselves fall into the others, are pulled or pushed by them, how they nevertheless do not go down in their loudly articulated pain, but support and hold each other over and over again, can also be read metaphorically to the highest degree.
The mixture of traditional music and new choreography does not seem artificial at this moment, but quite natural. It enables the audience to think far beyond the dance. The fact that Bouchra Ouizguen’s work almost automatically finds itself in a larger, cultural-historical context also makes her work interesting for other disciplines such as musicology, cultural anthropology or sociology.
This article has been automatically translated with deepl.com.
by Elisabeth Ritonja | May 24, 2022 | 2021, Theatre
Michael Köhlmeier became known in the German-speaking world not only for his novels, but mainly for his personally coloured stories about Greek mythology. The Schauspielhaus in Graz invited him to give a reading on this very topic. The author and multi-creative, even song lyrics and compositions come from his pen, told about the origin of the Greek gods and their world in Olympus up to the creation of mankind and the beginning of the Trojan War.
Those who know his CDs on the subject, which he recorded more than 20 years ago, may have been a little surprised. Köhlmeier presented the Greek mythology in a highly amusing conversational tone with many finesses that make a good narrator. In just a few words, he achieved very lively characterisations of the gods and humans, which he sometimes also endowed with a habitus typical of them. That he described Zeuss as a particularly good lover, constantly on the lookout for new adventures, was obvious and handed down over thousands of years. Peleus, the later husband of the sea nymph Thetis, however, he characterised with the remark that the latter was very fond of saying “yes!”. While the audience smiled at this, they did not yet know that they would later be grateful to the narrator for this “yes! At that point, namely, when after countless enumerations of the gods his name came up again and the great pondering began as to who this Peleus had been after all. “You remember, that’s the one who always said ‘yes’,” Köhlmeier skilfully jogged many a memory. This is just one of many examples of how well he knows his narrative craft.
Along the genesis of the gods, one also learned all kinds of interesting cultural-historical facts, such as the invention of the guitar by Hermes, who achieved this feat as an infant on his first day of life. Or also that the artists simply “lied” in their depiction of Leda and the swan. Leda had taken the form of a goose during her union with Zeuss, but this is not visible in the paintings. One could marvel at the preservative power of divine armpit sweat just as much as at an original action by Odysseus, who hoped that he would not have to go to war with it. The statement that this made him the first conscientious objector in history was, like so many humorous comparisons, very well received by the audience.
In addition to all the sometimes meandering life stories and incidents, the author also shared his personal thoughts on how this mythology came to be. He pointed out that this storytelling, which took place from generation to generation, began when there was no rule-of-law structure. Also interesting was his idea that these narratives could also relieve people of a burden. To learn that one’s fate is not unique in this world, that acts such as murder and manslaughter, adultery and betrayal or character traits such as cowardice and arrogance, exuberant anger and vanity and all the resulting suffering have always existed, meant a relieving realisation for many people.
The idea of taking Michael Köhlmeier on stage in Graz, someone whose name has charisma beyond the theatre scene, was rewarded with a very well sold house. A clever move at a time when some audiences are still hesitant to accept live cultural offerings.
Michael Köhlmeier filled the Graz Schauspielhaus with his “Evening of Greek Mythology”. A good idea to get still hesitant audiences back into the house after the pandemic-related break.
Michael Köhlmeier became known in the German-speaking world not only for his novels, but mainly for his personally coloured stories about Greek mythology. The Schauspielhaus in Graz invited him to give a reading on this very topic. The author and multi-creative, even song lyrics and compositions come from his pen, told about the origin of the Greek gods and their world in Olympus up to the creation of mankind and the beginning of the Trojan War.
Those who know his CDs on the subject, which he recorded more than 20 years ago, may have been a little surprised. Köhlmeier presented the Greek mythology in a highly amusing conversational tone with many finesses that make a good narrator. In just a few words, he achieved very lively characterisations of the gods and humans, which he sometimes also endowed with a habitus typical of them. That he described Zeuss as a particularly good lover, constantly on the lookout for new adventures, was obvious and handed down over thousands of years. Peleus, the later husband of the sea nymph Thetis, however, he characterised with the remark that the latter was very fond of saying “yes!”. While the audience smiled at this, they did not yet know that they would later be grateful to the narrator for this “yes! At that point, namely, when after countless enumerations of the gods his name came up again and the great pondering began as to who this Peleus had been after all. “You remember, that’s the one who always said ‘yes’,” Köhlmeier skilfully jogged many a memory. This is just one of many examples of how well he knows his narrative craft.
Along the genesis of the gods, one also learned all kinds of interesting cultural-historical facts, such as the invention of the guitar by Hermes, who achieved this feat as an infant on his first day of life. Or also that the artists simply “lied” in their depiction of Leda and the swan. Leda had taken the form of a goose during her union with Zeuss, but this is not visible in the paintings. One could marvel at the preservative power of divine armpit sweat just as much as at an original action by Odysseus, who hoped that he would not have to go to war with it. The statement that this made him the first conscientious objector in history was, like so many humorous comparisons, very well received by the audience.
In addition to all the sometimes meandering life stories and incidents, the author also shared his personal thoughts on how this mythology came to be. He pointed out that this storytelling, which took place from generation to generation, began when there was no rule-of-law structure. Also interesting was his idea that these narratives could also relieve people of a burden. To learn that one’s fate is not unique in this world, that acts such as murder and manslaughter, adultery and betrayal or character traits such as cowardice and arrogance, exuberant anger and vanity and all the resulting suffering have always existed, meant a relieving realisation for many people.
The idea of taking Michael Köhlmeier on stage in Graz, someone whose name has charisma beyond the theatre scene, was rewarded with a very well sold house. A clever move at a time when some audiences are still hesitant to accept live cultural offerings.
(Foto: ©Udo Leitner)
Text was translated automatically with deepl.com
by Elisabeth Ritonja | May 12, 2013 | 2021, 2021, Theatre, Wiener Festwochen, Wiener Festwochen
Can you make a preliminary reading of the text? This taboo-breaking was actually overdue. The meta-message of “I love you mother” – which is now being uttered in an inflationary manner on Mother’s Day – perpetuates an image of the mother that in many cases is purely a façade. There are countless children who have experienced physical or even psychological suffering at the hands of their mothers – but no one talks about it. Except for the “great savage” of contemporary theatre, Angélica Liddell. In her latest production, “Todo el cielo sobre la tierra” (El sindrome de Wendy), she pushes all the mothers off their supposed throne, which they have ascended qua the birth of their children, and shouts at them that there is no reason for them to claim a “dignity surcharge” for themselves.
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Angélica Liddell at the Vienna Festival (Photo: Nurith Wagner-Strauss)
What may sound a bit theoretical in these lines is not grey theory at all on stage at the Museumsquartier in Vienna. On the contrary, the work commissioned by the Wiener Festwochen 2013 really gets down to business there. Angélica Liddell is known for not hiding her emotions in a pent-up state, but on the contrary for really “letting it all hang out” on stage. If she were to verbally vomit out on the street or among friends all the weariness that she unleashes on the audience in the theatre, one would probably take a few steps back from her. In the theatre, however, you are supposedly sitting safely in your seat at some distance. The safety, however, is limited to physical integrity. Liddell raises her hand against no one – but she shoots her arrows of words at anyone and everyone who can hear her furious tirades. No one is exempt, as she makes it clear that she hates all people, especially crowds, and that it is only exceptional people, those who stand out from the crowd, who interest her. With her keen powers of observation, she scrapes all the social cement from the seams of interpersonal behaviour and relentlessly exposes the poverty, the pain but above all the stupidity of the masses. Alcohol, drugs and tablets – this triumvirate she detests above all else, because it makes people boring, infinitely boring. In the main part of this evening – which Liddell skilfully inserts into poetic images – she spares not only the audience but also herself in no way with her insults, which are like endless machine-gun salvos. Her physical constitution allows her to catapult her message against ugly mother-love over the edge of the stage in a grandiose choreography of movement. With the exception of a few minutes in which she sits on a chair and drinks mineral water from a plastic bottle to replenish her fluid balance, she is in constant motion, dancing, running, hitting objects, singing and shouting what her voice can give. “The house of rising sun”, in the version by Eric Burdon, provides her with an adequate musical layer, the lyrics of which point out that the mother should prevent her children from doing things that will harm them later. It is pointless to try to flee from this concentrated energy of intense stage performance and haunting blues interpretation. The length of this declaration of rage alone is enough for the audience not to be able to escape it permanently. Quite the opposite. The mental injuries the artist describes do not seem unfamiliar to many in the audience seats. It is not only the tense, continuous attention, but above all the repeated, almost imperceptible nodding of heads that makes it clear to many people that they know what terrible experiences Liddell is addressing here. And yet she makes it clear that mothers are not only perpetrators but also victims. That they only ever replicate what they themselves have experienced and so one Wendy gives birth to the next, this in turn to the next and so on. And all of them impose their “shitty experiences” – as Liddell puts it – on the next generation. Completely unreflective and therefore culpable. However, the play would not be very suitable for the theatre if the author, director and actress in one person had not added many more layers. Like the one in which she makes it clear that women who choose men who can mother them above all suffer from the so-called Wendy dilemma. “The people I love are all so small,” Liddell aptly describes this emotional relationship. But this also means that these women feel that the end of a relationship is catastrophic. As if the life entrusted to them had been snatched away, they bleed emotionally seemingly without end. An emotional state Liddell demonstrates in all her plays. A suffering that seemingly threatens to destroy her – and yet there is always a new Liddell and with this new Liddell a new performance.
Sindo Puche and Zhang Qiwen in Angélica Liddell’s play at the Vienna Festival
The small earth island heaped up in the middle of the stage and overhung by menacing crocodiles symbolises not only Peter Pan’s “Neverland”, where the children never grow up, but at the same time – as becomes clear at the very end of the performance – the Norwegian island of death Utøya, where 69 people, the majority of them teenagers, were shot by Anders Behring Breivik. The artist imputes to him the Peter Pan syndrome, that longing not to want to grow up, and thus gives her own interpretation of this horrific mass murder. In addition to Liddell’s own stage presence, however, there are two people in particular on this evening who, at first glance, appear to be completely unrelated to the psychodrama. Sindo Puche and Zhang Qiwen, 71 and 72 years old and from Shanghai, take one lap after the other around this island of horror in an enchanting sequence of light-footed waltzing steps. The woman in a yellow, flowing evening gown, her partner in a tailcoat, they dance to the music of Cho Young Wuk, interpreted by the Phace ensemble. Placed at their sides of the stage, the rest of the acting troupe, three men, one woman and Liddell, pause to watch the dancing in silence. In this moment, charged with great poetry, all that had previously been brought up is forgotten. Grief and pain, anger and powerlessness – they no longer play a role. Only the waltz music and the couple completely immersed in it from a distant culture in which the waltz has no tradition whatsoever enchant the audience. It becomes clear what keeps Angélica Liddell – and not only her – alive. It is moments like these that represent escapes from that everyday life that seems unbearable. Whether it is a dance, whether it is immersion in a book, whether it is empathy with someone’s suffering or thoughts of a dear, lost person. In all these states of being, we find ourselves in a flow that completely lifts us out of the everyday and brings us closer to ourselves than ever before. This theatrical interlude is not, as one might initially think, unrelated to what was shown before and after. Even Liddell’s demonstrations of masturbation and the narration of her preference for “perverted” sexual practices are directly related to her indictment of the emotional exploitation of children by their mothers, including her outbursts of rage, hatred and the deeply felt pain of abandonment. For it is precisely these states of flow that counteract the grief and violence, the pain and suffering with what amounts to an emotional liberation. A – figuratively speaking – brief erasure of the thought hard drive in which life becomes bearable. It is not surprising that the nihilist Liddell, who abhors any promise of salvation, finds peace in these exceptional emotional states and that the search for it can take on an addictive character. Those who were still receptive after this dense kaleidoscope of life learned at the end that youth is the only human state for Liddell in which life reaches its peak and is worthy of admiration. And so it was logically the handsome young Lennart Boyd Schürmann who held up a mirror to the “great savage” with impunity. He alone was allowed to hurl in her face the realisation that her actions were completely irrelevant, even offensive to many people, but it was also he alone who was able to appease Liddell with his beguiling gaze, so that peace returned in the end. A supposed peace, mind you, that will probably only last until Wendy, or Liddell?, is abandoned again. Theatre to empathise with and to reflect upon, with a gain in insight and the potential to spark social discussions about the false common sense of mother sanctification