The Whole City is Theater
The multidisciplinary festival Theater Mania 1: Snowstorm kicks off the year with unusual performances. Local as well as international directors—among them, Guy Cassiers, Aida Karic and Jérôme Bel—will take audiences by storm. In doing so, they’ll be blending genres and even mixing the character of the collaborations: guest productions will be brought to Linz; then again, works that could only have been created and produced in Linz will be staged here (January 13 to February 20, 2009).With the arrival of summer, Theater Mania 2: Sunburn will shift the performance locations out of doors into parks, gardens and courtyards. As for content, an arc will be spanned very far indeed—from traditional Kuttiyatam from India, the oldest theatrical form still being practiced, all the way to contemporary artists from Europe, Asia and Africa such as Brett Bailey, Jean-Michel Bruyère, Luk Perceval and theaternyx (July 27 to September 2, 2009).
Linz09’s Doppelgänger Festival (October 9-18, 2009) will bring together contemporary masters of shadow theater and puppetry in the Hafenhalle09 venue constructed expressly for the Capital of Culture year.
We’ll conclude the big year with That’s the Way to Do It dedicated to that quarrelsome, anarchistic, cheeky little headbanger of the theatrical world—Kasperl as he’s called in these parts, Pulcinella in Italy, Mr. Punch in England, Vitéz Lázló in Hungary, Guignol in France, Don Cristobal in Spain and Petruschka in Russia (November 11-21, 2009, Hafenhalle09, located at the corner of Industriezeile and Derfflingerstr.).
