NTGent colours programme of prestigious Wiener Festwochen festival
| 22 March 2024The Wiener Festwochen is one of the most well-known and prestigious arts festivals in Europe. Milo Rau, house maker at NTGent, is the current artistic director of the festival, which takes place from 17 May to 23 June in the Austrian capital. For his first edition as curator, Rau is living up to his reputation: for five weeks, Wiener Festwochen combines top shelf art with activism. No wonder NTGent is well represented in the programme. These are the selected performances:
✊🏾 Medea's children, a creation of Milo Rau and NTGent. The children on stage intertwine a real-life criminal case with the classic tragedy Medea, the most notorious case of relationship conflict and infanticide in Western literature. Medea's Children will have its world premiere at NTGent Schouwburg on 18 April.
✊🏾 How Goes the World - Histoire(s) du Théâtre V by Tim Etchells, in which four performers engage in an absurd orgy of rise and fall, sound cues and feverish memories. The prestigious NTGent series Histoire(s) du Théatre has been running since 2018. For each new show in the series, a renowned creator delves into the history of his/her/its theatre. Etchells followed in the footsteps of Milo Rau, Angélica Liddell, Faustin Linyekula and Miet Warlop.
✊🏾 The NTGent production Liebestod - Histoire(s) du Théâtre III is also part of the Vienna festival. In this chilling monologue, Spanish performance artist Angélica Liddell gives an insight into her decades-long artistic practice, and her fascination with bullfighting, blood, religion, pain and death, from a real-life bull arena.
✊🏾 The Making of Berlin, a performance by our house maker Berlin that ingeniously tells the true or false story of a Berliner who dedicated his life to the Berliner Philharmoniker and sees his ultimate dream fulfilled.
✊🏾 Finally, theatre maker Kris Verdonck is also heading to Vienna with his brand-new performance EXHAUST/Ajax, which will premiere at the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL, from 1 May to 23 June at NTGent. During EXHAUST, a truck engine is exploded in public space by running it at far too high a speed, a metaphor for the bankruptcy of the dogma of eternal economic growth.
