From Laurie Anderson to Elfriede Jelinek, from Carolina Bianchi to Miet Warlop, from Lia Rodrigues to the Red Army Fraction, from Japan to Palestine, from the Rammstein case to the Pelicot trial and from #MeToo to Revolutionary Love: The Vienna Festival | Free Republic of Vienna declares the Austrian capital a REPUBLIC OF LOVE in spring 2025!

Last year, Vienna experienced the rebirth of Europe’s biggest crossover festival: the Vienna Festival was declared the Free Republic of Vienna – the first festival ever to have its own anthem, parliament, flag and constitution!

100,000 visitors live and several millions online made Milo Rau’s first year as Artistic Director of the legendary festival the most successful edition of all times: “Vienna is a hotspot of the theatre world once more”, cheered DER SPIEGEL, Agence France-Presse witnessed an “institutional revolution”.

This morning, Rau unveiled his 2025 programme at Vienna’s mythical Funkhaus, the former Reichssender, founded by Adolf Hitler. After an antifascist fire ritual, the artistic director, together with the iconic group SIGNA, directors Lisaboa Houbrechts, Kurdwin Ayub and Itay Tiran, the Band of the Republic LUV and many other guests guided through their sinful and radiant programme for upcoming spring.

Can artificial intelligence create real emotions? Can there be love between right and left wing activists? Should the band Rammstein, ex-terrorists and radical shamans be given a stage? Can we make art about the Gaza war? And what are the classics of the future?

From 16 May to 22 June, Vienna will be transformed into a republic of the arts. Activists, musicians, performers and philosophers from all continents will stage hundreds of theatre and music productions, installations and rituals, accompanied by a broad philosophical programme, including f.e. Laurie Anderson’s State of Love, Lea Ypi’s Europe Speech or the Revolutionary Love symposia.

In the Viennese REPUBLIC OF LOVE, everything is to be mixed! The ritual series Campfire meets the Brand New Classics, the newly founded Band of the Republic LUV joins the female composers of the Academy Second Modernism. Brass bands play with Congolese tenors, an Eurovision Song Contest winner meets an Iraqi Oud player: because V is for loVe!

Artistic Director Milo Rau himself presents four new shows: Elfriede Jelinek’s scandal-ridden piece Burgtheater; The Seer, a radical play about war-photography, coproduced with the Venice Biennale and Schaubühne Berlin; the three-day-events Congresses of Vienna on Cancel Culture and #MeToo; and The Pelicot Trial about the eponymous case that shocked the world last winter.

Be there when all the secrets of the REPUBLIC OF LOVE are revealed – and when the Vienna Festival opens with a 90-minute music-politics-mystery ritual in front of 50,000 people on 16 May 2025. Join the REPUBLIC OF LOVE, as sinful as it is revolutionary, as profound as crazy!

For as Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger, Vienna Festival regular, likes to say: Only sinners are winners!

While the world tours of Rau’s most recent creations Antigone in the Amazon and Medea’s Children continue, Rau and his team are currently rehearsing their upcoming show The Seer in Mosul, Iraq.

“What a coincidence that right now, 22 years after the American invasion of Iraq, another seer’s speech has reached us: THE SECOND COMING, the American translation of Elfriede Jelinek’s dark, prophetic play about Trump’s election victory.” (Milo Rau)

Nobel Prize Winner Jelinek, translator Gitta Honegger and Rau immediately decided to present it in a double reading at the very moment of Trump’s Inauguration yesterday (20.01.) – simultaneously and live from Mosul (Ursina Lardi) and New York (Nicole Arsani-Cox).

Starting yesterday (20.01.) at 1pm Washington Time, 7pm Vienna Time and 9pm Mosul Time, Jelinek introduced this first global reading of her work with a statement. THE SECOND COMING was followed by a Q&A with Honegger and Rau, moderated by Frank Hentschker.

This cooperation of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center New York, the College of Fine Arts Mosul and the Vienna Festival is part of the Resistance Now! campaign, in whose name 200 European cultural institutions joined together to fight the destruction of the fundamental rights and freedom of opinion by the new authoritarianism.

But that’s not all: the new year begins with yet another premiere. The mythical series Histoire(s) du Théâtre, curated by Milo Rau, is receiving its sixth instalment, following parts staged by Liddell, Linyekula, Warlop, Etchells and Rau himself.

With No Yogurt for the Dead, world famous director Tiago Rodrigues attempts to imagine his father’s last words – premiering this Thursday, January 23 at NTGent, Belgium.

Don’t miss THE SECOND COMING GLOBAL READING in New York and Mosul and Rodrigues’s heart-breaking Histoire(s) du Théâtre VI in Ghent!

WHAT A YEAR
THIS WAS 2024

“Artistic freedom under attack”: Initiated by the Vienna Festival, the European Theatre Convention, Opera Europa and Prospero – Extended Theatre, the leaders of 200 high-profile cultural organisations from across the European Union have collectively raised their voice against an “acute threat” to artistic freedom and cultural autonomy.

By signing the RESISTANCE NOW: FREE CULTURE open letter, they express concerns about the “attacks, bans, layoffs and cutbacks” to cultural institutions that are designed to undermine a “diverse European culture”.

It is an unprecedented drive that connects leading institutions from 39 countries, including all EU Member States, urging the European Parliament to “finally take an explicit stand” on cultural autonomy and implement a “Freedom of Culture Act”.

The open letter (published a. o. in The Stage, Le Soir and Nachtkritik) is launched today 18:30 with a discussion event in Strasbourg, in presence of the initiators of the campaign – Milo Rau, Matej Drlička, Barbara Engelhardt & Heidi Wiley (ETC) – and former French Minister for Culture, Catherine Trautmann.

The discussion will be followed by a performance of the UBU Prize-nominated play Medea’s Children, part of the 10 Days with Milo Rau program organized by Maillon – European Stage.

The Open Letter is available from today for the general public to sign. Join the RESISTANCE NOW! Tour and become part of the largest campaign for European Culture to date!

When Milo Rau ended his celebrated Europe Trilogy in northern Iraq with Empire in 2016, Mosul was still occupied by the terrorist militia ISIS. Two years later, in the newly liberated city, Rau and students from the Fine Arts Academy of Mosul set “a new benchmark for modern adaptations of classic texts”: Orestes in Mosul.

The play toured the world – but “can a Greek tragedy help heal a scarred city?” as the New York Times asked critically at the time. As a possible answer to this, Milo Rau, together with NTGent and UNESCO, founded the Film School in Mosul.

Now the collaboration is entering the next phase: Milo Rau and the actress Ursina Lardi (Compassion, Lenin, Everywoman) are currently researching in Mosul on their new play The Seer, freely based on Philoctetes by Sophocles – a piece reflecting on the connections between art, resistance and war.

At the same time, the focus series 10 Days with Milo Rau starts in Strasbourg. Rau’s adaptations of Greek classics Antigone in the Amazon and Medea’s Children are at the center of the program – both productions have just been nominated for the main Italian theater prize Premio Ubu as Best Foreign Play!

In addition to films, debates and seminars (a. o. Realism as Ethics), another highlight will be the Strasbourg stop of the Resistance Now! Tour on November 30. After Rau’s speeches in Prague and at the Jewish Museum Hohenems, the expectations are high.

Only this much should be said: the city of the European Parliament will see more than just another debate – but the beginning of a completely new level of campaigning for European culture.

Don’t miss the Resistance Now Tour!

“A veritable manifesto of what the operatic genre can be today”, was how critics judged Milo Rau’s “revolutionary” staging of Mozart’s opera La Clemenza di Tito at the end of October. But can art really change the world? Or at least resist the current rise of the far right around the world?

This is the question posed by the Resistance Now! Autumn Tour, which – after several open letters, columns, controversial speeches and talks in Amsterdam, Stockholm, Belgrade, Antwerp, Liège, New York and Taipei – will be making five further stops in Europe next week, starting today, Tuesday, in Vienna.

“Milo Rau dedicates the Vienna Festival to Love”: A few weeks ago, the  Funkhaus (Vienna state radio station) was closed, but the Vienna Festival has declared it the headquarters of the Republic of Love: As a kick-off, Rau welcomes today Croatian activist Srećko Horvat, Hungarian producer Nóra Büki and the dismissed General Director of the Slovak National Theater, Matej Drlička, in the legendary Funkhaus.

Together they will discuss the necessity of international solidarity in the fight against the global rise of the radical right. “If we let the dominoes fall one by one, they will all fall,” as Rau recently told the Czech newspaper Denník. “Let us realise that unless somebody stops these people, they will continue until the end.“

“Heart-ripping” (The Stage) or “the boundaries of opera have been pushed” (DeTijd) wrote the press after the premiere of La Clemenza di Tito last year. Milo Rau’s interpretation of Mozart was voted both in the Netherlands and in Belgium in the best-of-the-year lists.

But can “Beauty save the world”, as Rau claimed in his disputed opening speech at BITEF Festival in Belgrade – or are we “witnessing the end of art”? Judge for yourself: tomorrow, Wednesday, Milo Rau’s “Trial against Mozart” (Le Monde) will be shown in Geneva, in a completely new version!

But that’s not all: While Rau’s first intrusion as a curator in the world  of opera – with Florentina Holzinger’s radical performance SANCTA – “was criticised by Austrian bishops and is now a sellout in Germany” (The Guardian), his mining opera JUSTICE, an “opera like never before”, was named one of the “most important new productions of the season” in the critics‘ survey of Opernwelt.

Antigone in the Amazon was honored with the “Politika Award” last week and is traveling to Taiwan, while Medea’s Children, which depicts Medea’s bloody story with child actors, continues its Europe tour in Ghent, Prague and Strasbourg. “The most important aspect is creating a safe, trusting space,” as Rau’s long-term collaborator Peter Seynaeve said in an interview.

But is a safe space conceivable when there occures mass fainting in the audience? Are Florentina Holzinger and Milo Rau really “the most important directors in the world today“ (DIE ZEIT)? Or do they rather “push theatre beyond its limits”, as the Art Basel Journal puts it – into the unbearable?

“Art is our weapon,” as Milo Rau wrote in The Guardian and Le Monde last week. Join our RESISTANCE NOW! Tour in a.o. Taipeh, Vienna, Prague, Cologne, Strasbourg the coming month. Because art is as dangerous as it is endangered, as beautiful as it is cruel!