The Vienna Declaration: Milo Rau on his plan to transform the Wiener Festwochen
On transparency, sponsorship and the creation of a festival constitution.
Hello, and welcome to Café Europa. This week I’m in Belgrade where the temperature is gradually creeping towards 40 degrees and it looks like it will stay there for a while. I’ve basically moved in to the café near my apartment where they have air-con and play PJ Harvey near continuously.
For the purposes of this newsletter however, we’re back in Vienna. I was there in May for the opening of the Wiener Festwochen, the first under the artistic directorship of Milo Rau. From the irreverent opening ceremony on 17th May, with guest spots from Pussy Riot, a message of solidarity from Elfriede Jelinek and a choir clad in brightly-coloured balaclavas, it was clear that change was on the cards. The festival’s final day, the 23rd June, saw the release of the Vienna Declaration, a plan of action for transforming the festival. I’ve written a little bit about this in The Stage already but I wanted to explore in more depth what this means for the festival’s future.
You know this part by now. If you enjoy this newsletter and find it valuable, please share it with others who might also like it or consider becoming a paid supporter. I also have a Ko-fi account, if you want to support my writing that way.
Milo Rau likes a manifesto. When the Swiss director was appointed artistic director of NTGent in Belgium in 2018, he released the Ghent Manifesto, a ten-point plan for the kind of work he hoped to make there that has largely been realised. This year saw Rau, in his first year as artistic director of the Wiener Festwochen, proclaim itself as the Free Republic of Vienna, a space of resistance and an arena for change.
The final day of the festival saw the release of the Vienna Declaration, a document put together by a Council composed of 80 Viennese citizens – including high school students, the undocumented and those with experience of homelessness - that is at once a constitution and a roadmap for changing the festival from the inside over the coming years. Here is the Declaration in full:
First: A versatile programme needs versatile perspectives. Programme design must not be the privilege of a small group of curators. The Free Republic of Vienna will therefore introduce an alternating advisory committee for the programme with local and international expert members.
Second: Comprehensive structural change instead of lip service. The Free Republic of Vienna will define binding quotas for invitations, co-productions and new productions. The global womxn composers platform Academy Second Modernism serves as an example.
Third: The festival belongs to the audience – including the audience that has not yet joined. The radical interconnection of programme design, publicity measures and price policies will serve to call all members of society. The Volksstück/pièce commune, which toured the entire city in cooperation with 23 partners, is a first step in this direction.
Fourth: The political handprint is as important as the ecological footprint. The Free Republic of Vienna will develop a sustainable production, presentation and touring model together with partners from throughout the world. It will provide a stage for the socio-ecological transformation.
Fifth: Change begins inside the institution. Only a team that reflects the entire scope of society can stage a festival that is relevant to the city and the world. The Free Republic of Vienna will aim to depict the whole range of urban societies in its staff structures.
Sixth: Debate instead of backroom diplomacy. The Free Republic of Vienna will develop plain processes and public formats that can be called on in case of controversies and when demands are raised to exclude guests or cancel artistic projects.
Seventh: The stages of this city are for the people who live in the city. We will develop arts projects together with local communities every year. In line with a modernism without borders, we hold that global exchange fosters urban diversity.
Eighth: The Free Republic of Vienna turns theatre into a space of debate. In order to negotiate social realities, we need formats that allow for quick and sustainable reactions to current events. The debates triggered by the Vienna Trials are a first example of this.
Ninth: We are committed to a respectful working environment and against every form of discrimination and violence – in front of, on and behind the stage. Codes of conduct will be developed and implemented together with expert support.
Tenth: Who finances the Wiener Festwochen, who reaps the profits? The Free Republic of Vienna will reinforce measures for the critical examination of the past and present income and fundraising structures of the Wiener Festwochen GesmbH with regard to social and climate justice.
“We have to make the institution strong”- an interview with Milo Rau
“The idea was to tackle the structure from top to bottom,” says Rau, when I spoke to him the day after the closing night of the festival. “It’s part of a bigger project to democratise and open up the festival.”
At heart of this is a responsiveness to both Vienna’s history and its geopolitical status, as a major European capital, the fifth biggest city in the EU. It’s a very diverse city and yet Austria was also the first country to vote a right-wing populist party into government, with the Austria Freedom Party (FPÖ) back in 2000. Located between eastern and western Europe, Vienna is also a city in flux in a way that Rau finds concerning. “In the east, something has developed that you could call illiberal democracy, and in the West, we still have liberal democracy with strong institutions.” But things are shifting, says Rau, “and, in Austria, I think the shift will happen in the next year.”
Central to the Declaration is the idea that a festival should serve the city in which it sits – that it should be for everyone. “The audience are the voters. They are the members of the Free Republic of Vienna.” While this approach has, he says, been described as “an elitist crazy leftist thing” in some quarters, purely in terms of numbers the festival has been a success. This year, 96% of the 49,000 available tickets were sold. “From a liberal or even neoliberal point of view, including people in this way, means that this year we have the fastest ticket sales ever.”
Rau remembers one artist telling him that whenever he arrives at a festival and takes a taxi from the airport, he makes a point of asking the driver about what’s happening in the city and if they were aware there was a festival going on. In most cases, he says, “the taxi driver would say: What are you talking about?” In Vienna, the festival has been “hyper-present” – there were very eye-catching posters of people in brightly coloured balaclavas everywhere you turn – which means that “everybody immediately has an opinion about it.” They may not like it, they might be critical of some of the decisions, but they are invested in the fact it is happening. “This is a start. This is a good sign.”
“I'm from Switzerland,” Rau continues. “There we have this basic democratic approach. As a population, we are always voting for things that we have absolutely no expertise in, but it's like a ritual that we get involved.” In this way you gain an understanding of the issues involved, says Rau; you become better informed. He thinks “it's super important that we recreate this everywhere.” This democratic process is, he says, also how theatre works, “you are touched by it, and feel part of it.” For Rau, there’s a clear link between “the revival of democracy and the revival of this kind of open approach to the festival.”
It is, he says, very important to have institutions that people are invested in. Around the world, there are various civil society movements that he describes as almost being like “nations inside the nations.” Rau cites the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra), a mass social movement of rural people fighting social inequality in Brazil, with whom he has collaborated in the past, most recently on Antigone in the Amazon. While they are a prime example of this, there are, he says, other similar smaller movements within Europe. “I thought, why not use a festival as a possibility to reconnect all these movements to the cultural institutions and political institutions we already have in our democracy.” Bringing the power of civil society back inside the institutions, is at the heart of what they are trying to do with the framing of the festival.
There’s also a drive to ensure the festival operates as space for free and healthy debate. Drawing on Rau’s previous experiments in forum theatre, The Moscow Trials and The Congo Tribunal. The Vienna Trials took place across three weekends and multiple hours throughout the festival. This was an attempt to create a theatrical form and a framework in which to have often sensitive and emotive conversations. The Court of the Free Republic of Vienna was established featuring real lawyers and with testimony from various experts, activists and academics.
The first of these Trials, which took place at the end of May in Vienna’s Odeon Theatre, explored the “wounds of the Covid-19 pandemic.” It was an attempt to ask questions about the social ramifications of the government’s handling of the pandemic, the feelings of abandonment felt by those most at risk and the psychological impact on children and teenagers, among other issues. Did the measures imposed by the government impinge on people’s human rights? Spread over three days with one of Austria’s leading lawyers as the presiding judge, the public trial format was intended to kick-start a wider debate.
Perhaps inevitably the festival itself was also the source of debate and not free of controversy. In the run-up to the opening of the festival, the appearance of Greek-Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis was eventually cancelled because he had not taken a clear position against Russia’s war on Ukraine. There were also accusations of anti-Semitism for inviting public figures, including the Nobel-winning writer Annie Ernaux, who is a vocal supporter of the BDS movement, and Greek economist and former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, to participate in the Council. On this, Rau did not back down. There is, he says, a tendency “to label everybody who criticises Israel in any way as an anti-Semite, which has been appropriated from right wing parties. It goes very far, and it's quite absurd.”
His response was to highlight the need to listen to one another and ask questions of ourselves. A festival should acknowledge difference. It's vital says Rau, “that you take the time to understand the complexity of life in a very emotional but also rational way, and to give yourself the time to do so, to try and better understand what might be in the head of somebody else without labelling people immediately, as we do not just in our political spaces, but everywhere.”
While some of the points on the declaration are long-term goals, some they were able to implement more immediately. One of these was the establishment of the Academy of Second Modernism, a reaction to the fact that the Modernist movement was, according to the festival website, “elitist, exclusively European and, of course, almost exclusively male.” A direct attempt was made to change the landscape, says Rau, “by creating a global institution of female composers.” The academy will invite ten female and non-binary composers to Vienna every year and produce their work with “a network of 50 of the biggest concert houses on the planet.”
Other things will be introduced over time, including a code of conduct, the absence of which was felt during this festival, says Rau, “because there was no plan to deal with shitstorms.” A code of conduct will help them better weather the future shitstorms they will likely face and is, he says, a necessity when programming the kind of bold, risk-taking work made by artists including Florentina Holzinger and Carolina Bianchi.
Questions surrounding sponsorship are a particularly live topic in the cultural sector at the moment, most recently, in the UK, with asset management company Baillie Gifford, with whom the Hay Festival suspended their sponsorship deal, and with whom the Edinburgh International Book Festival ended its relationship following a campaign by Fossil Free Books. There has been a lot of discussion about the this decision and its consequences.
Such discussions have been active during this year’s Wiener Festwochen as well. As Rau explains, one of the talks they had during the festival was about the environmental impact of the petrochemical industry in Louisiana. Later it was pointed out to him that Erste Bank, one of the festival’s biggest sponsors, also funds the petrochemical industry in Louisiana. Asked what the festival was going to do about this, Rau suggested the activists publish an open letter, in order to open up a dialogue. “It’s better not to cancel, but to try to develop strategies together,” says Rau pointing out that while the bank supports the festival directly, it also gives to the city. “The public money is bank money too.” All money is in some way compromised, he explains; you have to find ways of working within this system.
Placing information about sponsorship and funding out in the open is a vital part of this process. “Total transparency makes it possible to improve things,” says Rau. “At least everyone can see the situation. Because when you don't know, how can you change things?”
The festival willingly subjected itself to public scrutiny. The third of the Vienna Trials was titled “the hypocrisy of the do-gooders” - the whole thing was streamed live and is available to view here - and concluded with a debate surrounding festival funding and whether it had been misused. One participant, the former politician Alfred Noll, acting as prosecutor, even argued that the hosting of the trials themselves constituted a misuse of funds. The festival was acquitted.
The limits of the trial format were, however, tested during an earlier session about the clearance of the pro-Palestinian protest camps at Vienna University. Some invited witnesses, including one councillor who had accused the festival of giving space to anti-Semitism, refused to attend. Twice during these sessions, the microphones of those speaking were switched off for making political statements. The jury said, as a consequence it was unable to reach a verdict.
This year also saw the festival relocate its offices to Vienna’s folklore museum, which had been repurposed as the House of the Republic, a space for workshops and talks, a space where students and activists could gather. In the beginning, Rau was not wholly sure if this was a good idea, but over the course of the festival he saw the positive impact of this experiment in cohabitation and collaboration. Transparency once again played a large part in this. “You are accountable every second,” he said. But it also opened the possibility for interaction. “If you have a question, you can at any moment, meet everybody from our festival. You can ask immediately, and immediately get an answer.” This set-up allowed them to have what amounted to “1000s and 1000s of small meetings.” It was also a social space. There were – inevitably – parties, and the parties fuelled further discussions. Future collaborations were born there, says Rau.
Throughout our conversation Rau repeatedly stresses that the Wiener Festwochen is a much larger organisation than NTGent, a city theatre in Belgium. As artistic director in Ghent, he could push change through quickly. Here, he says, it’s more complicated. You’re accountable to more people and there are more layers to the decision-making process.
The artistic directorship of the Wiener Festwochen is one of the biggest gigs in the German-speaking theatre world. The process of trying to make lasting and systemic change in any organisation of this size can, says Rau, “be very antagonistic and implosive and even toxic.” He was, he says, a little apprehensive about this to begin with – and he has certainly faced his fair share of criticism - but with the support of his team, the Council of the Republic and the hundreds of people who have participated to date, it has, he says, been “a really beautiful process, that makes us stronger, that makes the festival stronger, and perhaps makes the institutions stronger.”
In the European elections, which took place midway through the festival on 9th June, the FPÖ came first with 25.5% of the vote, placing them ahead of the ruling conservative People's Party. The FPÖ have said they intend to build on this momentum at the parliamentary elections later this year. In this kind of political climate, having strong institutions is essential. It’s important to remember, he says, that Hitler’s rise to power came about, in part, because “the institutions were so weak that they just collapsed.” There’s an argument, says Rau, “that to go against the majority is anti-democratic, but I think democracy lies in the institutions and we have to make the institutions strong.” This is as true of the cultural sector as anywhere.
What’s clear is that this year’s festival was just beginning. From autumn onwards, various council sub-committees will be working on concrete measures that will be implemented incrementally during the coming years. Realistically, says Rau, it will take the full five years of his mandate to implement all of the steps - and to ensure they are irreversible. But, he says, “I'm more or less confident that in five years we will be there.”
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.
ECHO (Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen) – Having previously worked together on NASSIM, writer Nassim Soleimanpour and director Omar Elerian team up again for a piece about exile. As with Soleimanpour’s previous work, the piece will be created to be performed sight unseen by a different performer every night, though it sounds like they’re taking this approach to the next level in this new show. The lactors due to perform include Meera Syal, Toby Jones, Benedict Wong, Sheila Atim, Adrian Lester and Jeremy O. Harris. Presented as part of LIFT and billed as an experiment in “concept touring for the age of climate crisis,” it plays London’s Royal Court between 13th-27th July.
Galway International Arts Festival – The Irish multidisciplinary summer festival runs from 15th-28th July. Theatre highlights from the 2024 programme include Druid’s Endgame, directed Garry Hynes, Enda Walsh’s installation Changing Room, Reunion, a new play by Mark O’Rowe and Unspeakable Conversations, a provocative new piece about disability by Christian O’Reilly co-written by and starring Liz Carr and Mat Fraser.
Thank you for reading! You can contact me about anything newsletter-related on natasha.tripney@gmail.com