VIENNA ART WEEK 2020 - LIVING RITUALS
Screening | 100. aktion 6-tage-spiel
November 13 — 20, 2020
This year’s festival will focus on LIVING RITUALS.
Contemporary artists examine the role of rituals in our society. In our society, rituals serve social cohesion and structure everyday life. In their original form, they integrate people into ritual processes and stand for both concentration and the dissolution of boundaries.
HERMANN NITSCH:
“ritual” actually concerns my entire work. i have developed and realized nothing else – especially in connection with my theater – than rituals. my action painting, the realization of my theater, my preservation and preparation of relics is to be understood in the sense of creating rituals. the orgies mysteries theatre is a cultic and ritualistic procedure. ritual expresses itself through form. ritual is connected to the earliest religions and cultic expressions. ritual is from the beginning determined by form. actions, sensually comprehensible actions, accomplishments are expressed by form. form is metaphysics. it points to transcendence. form becomes hermeneutics. the endless repetitions of rituals point to eternity. the eternal repetition demonstrates itself, makes itself visible. ritual without form is unthinkable. ritual is form, form is ritual. ritual has a form, art.
art has always served religions, until rituals and art freed themselves from the bond to the religions and became independent. art itself became religion and a metaphorical practice. my orgies mysteries theatre concentrates intense experiences, ritual in the sense of form, to the existential festival, to the concentrated, conscious sensual experience of our being.
i always say that my orgies mysteries theatre is a school of experience, of sensually intense experience. in those plays our existence is experienced in an intensified, concentrated way. the rituals of this dramatic plays provoke our vitality, push us into being. on the 7th day, sunday, the participants of the performance are released into normal life. it is expected that the experienced and lived ritual are transferred into daily life. i have outlined three rules of the order to prove this.it was about ritualizing the whole life. art should become life. life to art. but there was an amplification. beyond the ritual, the experience of being became so fundamental that the experienced moment resembled enlightenment. everything surpassed everything, filled and fulfilled with an intimate awareness of being.
VIENNA ART WEEK Online
Especially in these very difficult times, the VIENNA ART WEEK is determined to set a sign of life for art: The art week will take place as announced from November 13 – 20, 2020, but will shift its program to the digital realm – “Flying the flag together for art and culture”.
Hermann Nitsch – The Orgies Mysteries Theater
100th action, 6-day-play
August 3.-9., 1998
Prinzendorf Castle
Prinzendorf an der Zaya, Austria
Short version Film, 52 min