in a bed way

Writing from bed. Reading in bed. Sleeping in bed. Weeping in bed. Getting a kiss on the forehead in bed. Being forgotten in bed. And so on. During a two-day event, we – 15 students of the Institut für Sprachkunst at the University for Applied Arts in Vienna – will present our work shaped by and partly about chronic illness. We’re a group of people with and without personal experience with chronic illness who participated in a seminar led by playwright and literary non-fiction writer Kay Matter. A shared starting point for the artistic contributions to the festival was the bed as an ambivalent place where many physically and/or mentally ill people spend a big part of their time.


Languages Various

With students of the Institute for Language Arts at the Angewandte Wien (Sanja Anđelković, Laura Anton, Marie Beckmann, Fred Heinemann, Sara Karimi, Hel Proißl, Jo O’Brien, Konstantin Milena Vlasich, Ralf Petersen, Sanea Hertlein, Deborah Lara Schaefer, Valerie Prinz, Valerie Zichy und Leonie Ziem) and Lecturer Kay Matter

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Access

Please note:
MASKS: Since there are immunocompromised people present, we ask everyone who can to wear a mask. (Masks are provided)

Wheelchair-Access: The theater can be accessed via an elevator behind the house. Please notify the ticket office once you are there, you will be accompanied (+41 44 267 64 64 / 078 6099342). The stage is also wheelchair accessible (not all of it, unfortunately, but you can participate in all presentations).

Some of the presentations will be made accessible online on the days of the events.

SEATING: There is a choice of regular seats, beanbags and cushions on the floor. You can chose freely and move anytime.

The event can be entered and exited at all times.

You can find a detailed access description of the individual program items HERE.

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Programme in detail:

Doors Open: half an hour before the start
Friday: 18:00 - 21:30 (doors open: 17:30)
Saturday: 12:00 - 15:30 (doors open: 11:30)

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Durational (Foyer)
Wellness Diaries (AT)
Sanea Hertlein
Videoloop

Since the Covid pandemic, the concept of wellness has moved to the forefront of public consciousness. Health has become a lifestyle, and self-optimization a daily routine. From gym workouts, to skincare rituals, from green juices to online trends. Disguised as self-care, it is sold to us as the solution to our exhaustion, stemming from the very system that depletes us. ‘Wellness Diaries’ critically explores the cult of wellness and the body’s role within. In a world where rest is only permitted if it serves productivity, the body becomes both the project and the product. Wellness trends, often framed as empowering, hinge on physical appearance and function. They demand a certain kind of body—a disciplined, able, and functioning one—as a prerequisite for belonging. ‘Wellness Diaries’ is a critical self-exploration of what it means to inhabit a body in a culture that promises healing makes us sick.

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Fr. 18:00 / Sa. 12:00
I recently saw a picture of my brain
by Sara Karimi
Dramaturg: Alireza Khosroabadi

Language: English
Duration: 15 – 20 Minutes

Sunday, July 30, 2023, 11:30 PM.
I took out my nose ring and let a man with onion breath slide me into the MRI machine.
It felt like a single-seat airplane where swallowing your own saliva is forbidden.

This is the beginning of the performance. Or the end. Or both. And in between, I begin to perform the metaphor of illness, chronically.
Through personal narrative, history, and imagination, I learn to walk with a limp around my illness, a crooked choreography that connects me to many others, in the room or outside of it.

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ca. Fr. 18:20 / Sa. 12:20
kleiner Menstruationsgesang (media library)
Valerie Zichy
recorded poems

Language: German
Duration: 5 Minutes

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ca. Fr. 18:25 / Sa. 12:25
Kunstpause (media library)
Kollektiv Wien: Leonie Ziem + Valerie Prinz + Fred Heinemann
Radioplay

Language: German
Duration: 15 Minutes

The radio play "Kunstpause" takes place 11,000 meters under the sea on a submarine. The submarine is something like an open-plan office where insurance policies are sold. An insurance policy: a bet on what will go well. In a system that does not drive the fiction of functionality by default, but by design, instead of engaging with people's needs. There, on the submarine, sorry, open-plan office, an employee decides to stop working and insists that it is an art break. Around the submarine, the octopuses are knocking, drifting, hoping, and the only ones still asking the right questions: Why are lives worth different things?

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ca. Fr. 18:40 / Sa. 12:40
A Place Out of Time
Jo O`Brien
Performed Text & Videoprojections
Readers : Hanna Donald, Cornelia Dexl

Language: English
Duration:

"A Place Out of Time" is a performance-installation that layers together relationships and moments of care with the work of being unwell. Looped narratives and brief vignettes invite viewers to join and leave as they please – to follow a thought or memory, to move away again, and to return without concern for continuity.

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20 Minutes Break

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ca. Fr. 19:30 / Sa. 13:10
Kleiner/Sprach/Tod
Konstantin Milena Vlasich
performed text, Reading with Looper

Language: German / Burgenland-Croatian
Duration: 15 Minutes

"Kleiner/Sprach/Tod" is the author’s approach to the fadeaway of a dear friend. It contains poetic parts and live sound schemes. Correlations to funeral speeches are intended. The text is both in German and Burgenlandcroatian, a minority language spoken in Eastern Austria, Western Hungary and Slovakia.

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ca. Fr. 19:40 / Sa. 13:40
pfuschen und siechen
Laura Anton + Helene Proißl

Language: German / dialect
Duration: 10 – 15 Minutes

Is tampering a kind of survival practice? A (necessary) cheating to keep 1 body alive/in the world, to repeatedly present oneself to the public with seemingly dubious means?

How can we deal with the dubious? How to deal with dying words? Dialect? The bad words, banned from the vernacular because they are too heightened, too typifying, too “indelicate”. Deppat, dump, malad, abmurksen, Murks, Pfusch.

We will paint aloud here & also tell a joke. We entertain (ourselves) with bad words & sit on the bourgeois divan.

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20 Minutes Break

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ca. Fr. 20:20 / Sa. 14:20
Sick Girls/Sad Girls (WT)
Marie Beckmann
Lecture Performance

Language:
Duration: 15 – 20 Minutes


SICK GIRLS SAD GIRLS is a return to the past. 
The sad girl as a cultural phenomenon of the 2010s is a teenage epic in room & cell: sickbed, wailing, internet. The suffering begins.
Sick Girl in reality is Insomnia: isolation, depression, art. The suffering continues.  

"Sick Girls zum Schluss heißt schließlich und endlich hier Traktat Über Die Scham Des Materials Ergibt Weder Material Noch Widerstand Sondern Summa Summarum Traktat Genannt Von Herzen Objektverlust: Ich, Wort, Tod." 


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ca. Fr. 20:40/ Sa. 14:40
The Escape of Attempt
Ralf Petersen

Language: German
Duration: 10 - 15 Minutes

A breakout attempt or an experimental breakout is described. 
Experimental arrangement using the concrete example of a historical case.

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Fr. 20:35 / Sa. 14:35
MARS PLAY (media library)
Monolog vom Ende
Deborah Lara Schaefer, Sanja Anđelković and Melina Pyschny
monodrama with phantasy elements
live performance in space

Language: German, English, Serbian (different languages)
Duration: 30 Minutes

"MARS PLAY" is a Swiss Eastern European character study offering a space to hold onto the pain. The monologue features three songs exploring the effects of an undefined disease, a human organism trying to detox history.

Mila is a 33 years old Serbian actress. Her performance portrays the illness of unleashed late-stage capitalism in both the Swiss and the Eastern Europe, post-Yugoslavian context. In physical and musical form, the artistic trio is aiming to enrich the discussion about revolutionary care practices and rise questions around the notion of home as nostalgia.

How should a person die? What dignity is to be found in sadism? What to hold on to if we are about to lose everything?