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.
