Austrian Cultural Forum NYC

An important recent secular exhibition was Paths of Resistance, a show about the history of Colombia that presented a number of alternatives for breaking the cycle of violence in that country.

Musical performances in the Krypta have spanned the centuries, from Germany’s Hallensia String Quartet in a concert of 20th-century music to soprano Anna Maria Pammer singing works by 12th-century abbess, mystic, and composer Hildegard van Bingen.

As a longtime friend of the Carmelites in Austria, I myself have given a number of benefit concerts in the Krypta for the Carmelite missions in India. These concerts have included performances of so-called entartete Musik, or music banned by the Nazi regime because it was composed by Jews, dissidents, or others considered “decadent” or “degenerate.” One of these performances included readings of works by Edith Stein, recently canonized as St. Theresia Benedicta. Stein was a Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun. She was put to death at Auschwitz in 1942 as a Jew.

There have been a number of world premieres in the Krypta, including solo bassoon works composed for me by Austrian-American composer and conductor Fritz Berens. Born in Vienna in 1907, Berens made his conducting debut in Linz in 1931 and fled the Nazis in 1939. In 2004 I also performed the world premiere of Danish composer Ivar Danielsen’s “Fagotissimo.” This Thanksgiving weekend, on November 28, 2009, I will give a benefit performance in the Krypta that will include another world premiere of a work composed by Berens.

Upstairs at street level, the centuries-old Carmelite church itself now also embraces the new one. A $3.3 million renovation was recently completed in anticipation of the many thousands of visitors coming to Linz during its stint as a European Union Capital of Culture in 2009. The main entrance is now handicapped accessible, and a 21st-century sound system has been installed. It features an induction loop system that transmits services directly to hearing aids for the hard of hearing.

During the year-long renovation of the main church, the Krypta was used for all religious services, including Holy Masses, confessions, and prayer group meetings. The Krypta will certainly be even more important as cultural center since a catastrophic fire on June 3, 2009, damaged the neighboring Ursulinenhof. Despite the flames reaching the Carmelite church roof, only two windows of the Carmelite church were damaged.

For further information about the Krypta and upcoming events, please visit www.karmel.at/linz

or contact
Carmelite Monastery Linz
Landstrasse 33
4020 Linz

Hours:
Monday to Friday
9:00 AM – 12:00 PM
2:00 PM – 4:30 PM
Tel: +43 (0)732 770217-0

Lynn Gaubatz, former Guest Professor of Bassoon at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, lived in Austria for several years and continues to perform and promote the works of Austrian composers around the world. She visits her friends at the Carmelite monastery in Linz twice a year, bassoon in hand, for whatever they wish.

V: How did financial support and success change your work?

K: Before, when we created our pieces, we didn’t have a lot of money for costumes, light, and so on. So the focus was on something else, on what happens between the audience and the actors, which is essential for theater. That part of it has not changed but what has changed is that we can spend more time delving deeper. It is more focused and concentrated. It is not so desperate. What has become a real challenge with success is when people realize what they like about your work and want you to keep endlessly repeating it – how do you keep growing and evolving as an artist without repeating yourself?

V: How did the collaboration with the Burgtheater come into existence?

P: We performed No Dice twice at the Steirischer Herbst. The dramaturg there, Florian Malzacher, was offered the position of a dramaturg at the Burgtheater’s Kasino annex, and he suggested us to Mathias Hartmann, the new director. Then we had a series of conversations during which we were trying to make sure that they knew exactly what they were getting into. If we wouldn’t have had the feeling that they wanted exactly what we were offering, we wouldn’t have gone there just because it’s the Burgtheater. It’s a surprising fit, because nobody would have ever imagined that Nature Theater of Oklahoma would be performing at the Burgtheater. It’s a big challenge for both sides. Mathias Hartmann took a big risk and we are dealing with the context and the expectations, especially as we are one of the shows opening the new season.

V: How does that influence your feelings towards the performance and the work on it?

P: I would be lying if I’d say that it didn’t occasionally produce a little nervousness. I’m sure there are people waiting for us to fail. And this is the perfect opportunity to fail. People might say “Who do they think they are? We loved them when nobody loved them and they were poor and wore costumes made out of garbage. Let’s see if they can keep it up.” But we still make our costumes out of garbage because we like it and we try to stick to what gives us pleasure and not let those kinds of pressures make us timid and prevent us from producing work that is as radical as we want it to be. You have to be willing to fail on a colossal level. Then the show will either be a monumental failure or it will be a monumental success. We are not interested in the middleground.

V: Failure is an important element in your work. How do you relate to failure personally?

P: Kelly and I have been through numerous failures and we’ve quit producing theater before and we came back to do it on our own terms. There are not going to be any compromises because that’s what we decided when we came back. Failure for us is just another step in the process of making the work and growing and searching. We are always trying to create something where we don’t know how the audience will react. That’s why we always do work-in-progress presentations. Even the premiere at the Burgtheater will be a work in progress because our work is always about the audience and about the expectation. It’s always an open structure that changes from performance to performance.

K: Failure opens up what you’re doing in a really deep way. In that moment of failure – where the actors are not entertaining anymore, no one’s fresh, everybody is exhausted, and the audience is half asleep – lies the opportunity for the audience and the actors to ask themselves the very questions that are at the heart of live performance and key to the work we’re creating. “What are we doing here? What is the encounter between two groups of people, one of them performers and the other one watching them? What are the rules around that? What’s it good for?”

V: You once said that you are always trying to work from the idea of theater being revolutionary and an agent of change. What do you actually want to change with your performances? What do you want the audience to take with them? What do you want them to change?

K: All great art is about reshaping minds and society. In the last several pieces we’ve taken things like everyday language or gestures and hidden them in a performance so that when you hear or see it again you never experience it the same way. When people walk out, the play continues because their mind has been changed in a way that makes them see the whole world differently. Everything’s a play then.

V: What lies within old habits and gestures? Why do they fascinate you and why are they at the core of your plays?

P: We don’t have a message to teach. It starts with the selfish desire to be surrounded by art anywhere you walk. I recorded my phone calls because I didn’t want to feel that I’m wasting my time talking on the phone while I should be making art. But if I wouldn’t call my friends, I would lose them. So I would either be a great but lonely artist, or make phone calls but never art. It wasn’t a theoretical occupation. It was just a process of making my own life into a work of art. And to discover that there’s so much material around us that we don’t take note of just makes you wonder what else there is. The whole process of making this work is to find a way to tune all of your senses to actually perceiving what is there.

www.oktheater.org
www.burgtheater.at

MUMOK – The Museum of Modern Art Stiftung Ludwig Vienna
Gender Check: The Role of the Sexes in the Art of Eastern Europe
November 13, 2009 – February 14, 2010

Twenty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, this exhibition explores issues of gender and the role of the sexes in the art of Eastern Europe.

Reflecting on sociopolitical developments in popular culture and among the successors of the avant-garde, it includes paintings, photographs, posters, sculptures, installations, films, and videos produced by some 70 artists from Eastern and Southeastern European countries since the mid-1960s. The “genderless society” propagated in communism hardly found expression in equality between male and female artists. Women artists who critically confronted role clichés through performative and body-related art did not make their appearance until the 1970s. Then, within only about a decade, this development, dubbed “latent feminism,” lost importance as a consequence of the rise of neo-conservative painting. With the collapse of the communist regimes in the early 1990s, tendencies towards nationalism, capitalism, religion, and patriarchy increased in Eastern Europe. This was accompanied by conservative notions of gender roles and provided a challenge to analytical artistic positions. The exhibition is organized on the initiative and with the support of the ERSTE Stiftung and is curated by Bojana Pejic.

www.mumok.at