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For five weeks, the Free Republic of Vienna will be a REPUBLIC OF LOVE

From great classics adaptations to intimate monologues, from debate orgies to wild shamanistic parties, from music theatre to radical polit-art: under the slogan V is for loVe, the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen) | Free Republic of Vienna declare the Austrian capital a REPUBLIC OF LOVE in spring 2025! After the decidedly political edition of 2024, the Free Republic will turn inwards for the second year of its existence. It explores feelings ranging from the hot and sensitive to the dark: What is love? How do we love and how do we hate, how do we grieve and how do we hope? How is love related to desire, trust, beauty and community — as well as to ownership, power, discord and war?

The first year of the Free Republic was a year of foundations: the Council of the Republic, the House and the Club of the Republic as well as new debate formats like The Vienna Trials and the Academy Second Modernism to foster a gender-just, diverse music culture. For the first time in history, an art festival together with the population gave itself its own anthem, flag and constitution: the Vienna Declaration. ‘Vienna is a hotspot of the theatre world once more’, cheered DER SPIEGEL, and Agence France-Presse even witnessed an ‘institutional revolution’.

EVERY REVOLUTON IS AN ACT OF LOVE

Following on from last year’s great announcements, 2025 will deliver great emotions! The heart of the REPUBLIC OF LOVE is the House of the Republic, where late night shows, concerts and parties will take place back to back and a multitude of performers will invite audiences into the garden of the legendary broadcasting house Funkhaus with the Campfire series. The debate will be joined by star theorists like Eva Illouz and former Red Army Faction members alike, world stars like Laurie Anderson will sit by the fireside together with sex workers, activists will meet revellers — and the performance collective SIGNA will turn the top floor of the Funkhaus into an immersive performance installation with The Final Year.

The Free Republic will still be one thing above all others in its second year: a republic of the arts! For five weeks, artists from across the world will stage over 40 theatre and music productions, installations and community projects as well as ecosystems of love throughout Vienna: global, diverse, surprising and unleashed. Can love overcome political chasms? This is the question posed by Julian Hetzel in his performance Three Times Left is Right, in which an old leftie shares his life and love with an advocate of the new right. In La Gouineraie (The Lesbians’ Garden), the radical performers Rébecca Chaillon and Sandra Calderan focus on their own relationship, questioning the normativity of a world view dominated by the traditional image of wholesome families. The Second Woman is an entire 24-hour marathon of love and relationships. As actor Pia Hierzegger meets 100 men, queer and non-binary people, each encounter will follow its very own dynamics. In her new project Brotherhood, extreme performer Carolina Bianchi addresses male pacts and their codes inscribed with misogyny and violence, while Japanese director Satoko Ichihara playfully exposes the cuteness hype as a power construct in Kitty.

How do we bid farewell to our loved ones?

In No Yogurt for the Dead, the most recent edition of the Histoire(s) du Théâtre, Tiago Rodrigues grieves for his father in a most touching manner, while the Albanian shooting star Mario Banushi creates a universe of pictures that brings together the living and the dead in his global success Goodbye, Lindita. The production The Grief of Red Granny takes on Stabat Mater, possibly the most touching work in music history and blends it with African grieving rituals. In the project Centroamérica, the Mexican theatre group Lagartijas tiradas al sol literally overcomes borders in order to bury someone. In this year’s pièce commune, A Voracious Shadow by the Argentinian Mariano Pensotti, which will tour 15 districts of Vienna, a mountain climber meets his actor alter ego during a film project. It is the start of an equally emotional and philosophical journey through highs and lows.

Brand New Classics

The second year of the Free Republic will also continue with world literature’s great (scandal) texts: They will be given an entire series, the BRAND NEW CLASSICS. With Elfriede Jelinek’s Burgtheater, the simultaneously most unknown and most controversial play in Austrian theatre history will finally be put on stage. In Ils nous ont oubliés, France’s theatre icon Séverine Chavrier interprets another Austrian classic — Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Lime Works — as a couple’s equally touching and dysfunctional relationship. In her first work for theatre, White Widow, Kurdwin Ayub together with a star ensemble around Georg Friedrich and rapper addeN addresses the legend of story-teller Scheherazade, set in a future in which a Muslim queen rules Europe.

The classics series continues with an Argentinian Chekhov adaptation, Gaviota (The Seagull) with an all-female cast. Christopher Rüping combines Kleist’s Earthquake in Chile and bell hooks’ All About Love into All About Earthquakes: How does love feel after the end of the world? In Robin Hood, this year’s family play, Wu Tsang & Moved by the Motion deliver a celebration of friendship (and rebellion) on stage. Viennese favourite Julien Gosselin will put on a ten-hour fest of young actors all about love, art and violence (Musée Duras). And Belgian director shooting star Lisaboa Houbrechts stages the resistance struggle of a mother and woman in wartime with Moeder Courage (Mother Courage) by Bertolt Brecht.

REMEMBER IN THIS TIDE OF HATE WHAT LOVE IS

But can love triumph over death and oblivion, over power and war?

The two probably most political productions of this year’s Festival will deal both inexorably and profoundly with the Israel-Palestine conflict. Tel Aviv artist Itay Tiran stages Shakespeare’s Richard III as a ruler’s traumatic relationship with power, depicted by Evgenia Dodina. And in Perzen. Triomf van Empathie (The Persians. Triumph of Empathy), director Chokri Ben Chikha and a group of Palestinian-Israeli performers take the oldest European tragedy as an occasion to ponder the (im)possibility of understanding — or even loving — one’s enemy.

That is not enough by a long stretch: In the year of Strauss, the queer performance legend Ivo Dimchev is creating a collective, musical workout (The Strauss Technique) for the REPUBLIC OF LOVE, while star choreographer Miet Warlop returns to Vienna after her super hit One Song with Delirium and Benjamin Verdonck evokes the love of the small things and gestures in his long-awaited work ALL BEFORE DEATH IS LIFE.

The Brazilian Lia Rodrigues is taking suitcases full of fabrics and stories along to the Free Republic for her dance company’s 35th anniversary to tell a story of dance, love and art — Rodrigues’ hitherto most personal play, an artistic autobiography! Another production from Brazil is also finally on show in Vienna: the project Tapajós, which tells of the river of that name’s struggle for survival by means of women’s fates. In the gigantic project Island Love, artist Thomas Verstraeten declares his love to an entire island, together with the communities of Vienna’s Donauinsel.

From brotherly love to #MeToo, from emotional and economic structures of dependence to loving yourself, your neighbour, nature: nothing is strange to the REPUBLIC OF LOVE, as to love itself. The second year of the Free Republic will not only make Vienna a hotspot of the theatre world again, but will also train an equally loving and harsh critical light onto that very world: The two mega discourse events The Congresses of Vienna will sound out the art scene’s problematic aspects by means of Florian Teichtmeister, Rammstein and Otto Mühl as well as the debates around Judith Butler and the dismissals of theatre and museum directors in Slovakia and Hungary.

V is for loVe: The second year of the Free Republic of Vienna builds on the dialectics of amalgamation and confrontation, on beauty, inundation and celebration. Never before have there been so many world premieres, so much party and so much debate at the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen): a republic as sinful as it is revolutionary, as profound as it is oblivious, as self-critical as it is crazy! For as Florentina Holzinger, Vienna Festival regular, likes to say: Only sinners are winners! We’re looking forward to you!

Milo Rau & the artistic team of the Free Republic of Vienna

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