One Programme, Many Paths, New Horizons
The initial cohort of students to enter the artistic and academic master’s degree programme Contemporary Arts Practice (CAP) at the mdw’s Artistic Research Center (ARC), launched in the winter semester of 2023/24, is now on the home stretch—and their final projects will be presented as part of a festival from 9 to 13 May. Over the past four semesters, 16 students have engaged deeply with forms of artistic expression, techniques, and processes, also pursuing intensive work on the deepening of their own artistic language, various modes of collaboration, the scholarly undergirding of artistic practice, the cultural landscape’s socioeconomic and/or socio-political structures, and competencies relevant to managing organisations and oneself. The core focus of this programme is on developing and realising artistic and/or arts mediation projects. These projects are situated within the four study profiles Improvisor*Composer-Performer (IComP), Interartistic Music Practice/Elemental Music-Making (IMP/EM), Music Mediation/Community Music (MV/CM), and Transmedia Performance (TMP). Alongside pursuing their individual artistic projects, the students have also realised a total of around 30 performances, lectures, and concerts over the past four semesters. The programme’s diverse group of students came from bachelor’s degree programmes situated in areas such as Instrumental Studies, Music Education for Voice and Instruments (IGP), Law, Linguistics, and Comparative Linguistics. Their accordingly diverse perspectives enriched the development of their projects enormously and facilitated an up-to-date and collaborative approach to working on and realising them.
The aforementioned festival will feature presentations of the following final projects:
Arachne is a lecture-performance on Nika Bauman’s eponymous music theatre work. Baumann uses storytelling, music, and performance art to interweave rituals, femininity, and affinity, inviting her audience to lose itself in the spiderweb that results. (TMP)
BODIES – eine alternative Betrachtung […an Alternative View] combines photographic and musical engagement with the human body in its transformation of “photo|graphic scores” into sound and motion, inviting us to discover a new perspective. (Viktoria Hofmarcher, IComP)
The CAP programme points out various approaches to reflecting upon and broadening your own artistic work as well as discovering new perspectives.
Viktoria Hofmarcher
Gedankenkarussell im Phonodiktat [A Carousel of Dictated Thoughts] is a performative audio essay on becoming a parent. Musician and poet Max Zaloudek, dancer Florent Golfier, and actor Susanne Hahnl blend performance art, music, and literature. (IComP)
I think that the CAP programme is something you should do if you’re aiming for variety and versatility both in your own artistic practice and on an interpersonal level.
Max Zaloudek
Greygreenblue – gesammelte Zwischenräume [… – Collected Interspaces]. Together with Ahoo Maher, Sophie Schollum develops a transmedia performance out of sounds, projections, and texts. An engagement with various tempos from our lives and details that usually remain hidden. (IComP)
I think the CAP MA programme is fantastic because it lets you access a very broad array of contemporary expressive means while still going in-depth on those topics that interest you most of all. And you get to know lots of great artists, too, which gives rise to fruitful exchange.
Sophie Katharina Schollum
HÖRT MAN DAS NOCH? [CAN YOU STILL HEAR THAT?] investigates transformative concert experiences with classical music that integrate elements from the realms of improvisation and contemporary music theatre—an approach used here to recontextualise Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. (Selina Pilz, MV/CM)
Humbah is an artistic research project focused on the interconnections between all living creatures that attempts to cultivate affection for smaller life forms. (Laura Steiner, IMP/EM)
I Don’t Know so I Go into the Forest. This is an immersive and interdisciplinary contemporary music performance inspired by Women Who Run with the Wolves. Four pieces for solo clarinet, performed in a space staged as a minimalist forest, embody ritual, repetition, and transformation. (Elena Arbonies Jaurequi, MV/CM)
In ihrer Seele [In Her Soul]. In this project, Russian-speaking women living in Vienna create a theatrical work by way of an elemental music-making-based approach. Their work tells of how each of them experienced the events of the past three years. (Olga Rybakova, IMP/EM)
MEINE SOFTGUN, DAS KONDOM UND ICH [MY AIRSOFT GUN, THE CONDOM, AND ME]. In Austria, the German term Heimat [which refers broadly to the concept of “home”—Trans.] entails drinking beer, everything staying as it has been, drinking some more beer, and a dash of right-wing populism. But all that’s over, now: Anna Buchegger seeks to reclaim Heimat for us. (Anna Buchegger, TMP)
I think the CAP MA programme’s pan-artistic orientation is very forward-looking and socially relevant. If you want to be an expert in approaches of that sort, then CAP is a degree programme I can certainly recommend.
Anna Buchegger
M4A is a community music project that involves improvisation by both professional and lay musicians. This group will perform in the festival at the mdw without losing the connection to its home base at Kulturzentrum 4lthangrund. (Angelo Beltrame, MV/CM)
Oblivious Transfer is a monthly improvisation series featuring inter- and transdisciplinary dialogue between the most varied musical, artistic, and cultural genres. The CAP programme’s festival will witness the presentation of four works created in this context. (Marko Arich, IComP)
A unique way to earn a master’s degree in an inter- and transdisciplinary context, drawing inspiration from the diversity of interactions and expanding your own horizon in the process.
Marko Arich
WUTCH is a performance art experiment that investigates and mixes the labels WITCH and BUTCH such that a lecture, a witches’ circle, a workshop, and the boundaries between seeing and being seen will blur together. (Ada Günther, TMP)
Further information on the CAP programme and admissions.
