Numerous factors—be they social, economic, or of some other nature—play significant roles in how we’ve been dealing with the situation that has faced us since March 2020. One of these significant factors is what we call “resilience”.
mdw student Anna Buchegger took advantage of the COVID standstill to participate in the ORF casting show Starmania. And even after winning it with her own song Ease, the young singer remained true to her ideals: she immediately founded her own label and both produced and released her winning song on her own.
“What can we expect when we watch your movies at the cinema?” was the first question that mdw Magazine had for the Film Academy alumni Clara Stern and Peter Hengl. We quickly found out: before the audience can expect anything of their films, they’ll first have to fulfil their makers’ expectations—which are quite high indeed.
“Facing Ethnic Drag”, a long-planned mdw Gender Studies conference, had to be repeatedly postponed because of the pandemic. Finally, on June 17, it was at least possible to hold this year’s kick-off event on a virtual stage with a keynote by Jay Pather and an artist talk with Mamela Nyamza.
The final round of the competition “mdw Great Talent Award powered by Christian Zeller” was held on 20 May 2021 following a delay due to COVID-19.
After 256 years, the time had finally come: on 1 September 2021, a sold-out Schlosstheater Schönbrunn witnessed the official première of La Corona at the venue for which it had originally been composed.
From the very beginnings of the now-global movement that is hip hop culture back in the 1970s, women played a role. And even if hip hop’s historiography has for the most part centred near-exclusively on men, figures such as Silvia Robinson, Roxanne Shanté, Salt N Peppa, Lil Kim, Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliot, Nicky Minaj, and Cardi B. demonstrate how female hip hop artists have always played an important role in this culture’s development.
This music therapist’s five-month leave period to earn her degree after the fact coincided with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Sibylle Kefer explains to mdw Magazine why she looks kindly on some aspects of last year’s sudden standstill—and why, for her sixth album, she no longer wants to be dependent on others.
On 25 February, mdw conducting students participated in a master class on Beethoven’s 5th Symphony at the Vienna Konzerthaus given by Andrés Orozco-Estrada together with the Vienna Symphony.
“EINSITZEN – Conversations about Setting and Reflecting upon Contemporary Dramaturgies and their Residues” is an open discussion format, subject to the whims of the moment, that is organised as part of the mdw’s MAS programme Applied Dramaturgy in Music and Performing Arts. At irregular intervals, this series will bring before the microphone guests who hail from theatre, the fine arts, literature, philosophy, music, and other realms of life.
He does ask himself whether his story will really be of that much interest, says Enzo Brumm right at the beginning of our conversation. 25-year-old Brumm is an acting student in his fourth and final year of study at the Max Reinhardt seminar. As a teenager, he was in the youth club at the Ernst Deutsch-Theater in Hamburg, and he’s now returning there for a production—as a full-fledged actor in a production of Don Carlos.
It all began with founding the ensemble Theater Brauhaus in Litschau, which gave students the chance to perform theatrically during the Max Reinhardt Seminar’s summer break. Since then, the northern part of the Waldviertel region has become known for its “Theaterfestival HIN & WEG” and even features its own “theatre village”.
During the past academic year, two productions at the Max Reinhardt Seminar—both of which had to be premièred without a live audience—were devoted to works by Thomas Bernhard and Gert Jonke, respectively.
Stage director Wojtek Klemm has joined forces with third-year acting students of the Max Reinhardt Seminar to develop a play about showbusiness itself. Killing of Silent Hopes casts its gaze on the trials and tribulations of life as an actor/actress.
Film editors do their work in the background, and exactly what goes on in the editing suite is familiar to very few. It’s there, however, that a film’s content and message are refined and honed, and it’s editing and sound that render the images truly effective. Film Academy editing students Julia Willi and Philipp Mayer tell us about their studies, editing’s importance in film production, and the soft skills brought to bear by editors in their work.
Sci-Fi flicks with breathtaking visual effects and digital art: for a whole lot of us, the instant association here is with Hollywood. But the filmmakers behind Rubikon want to demonstrate that in the future, people should also think of Austria.
Film Academy Vienna has a new professor of directing: Jessica Hausner joined us to discuss her approach to the filmic medium and the emphases that she envisions for her teaching. This spring will see the release of a book on this filmmaker’s oeuvre as part of a series published by Film Academy Vienna.
The core feature of training for the job as cinematographer is students’ freedom to learn in a playful manner. They need time and space so that they can grow artistically, dare to experiment, probe boundaries, explore visual languages, and pursue new avenues of creativity.
It’s widely acknowledged that the Global North’s existing set of rules in terms of performance clothing and onstage behaviour can be traced back to the bourgeois culture that was in the process of becoming established during the 19th century. This was a period that also gave rise to public concert life, concert halls, and concert culture.
“Our past is also our future” (Unsere Vergangenheit ist auch unsere Zukunft) is the motto that heads the homepage of the Fritz Kreisler Department—a wonderful match in light of not only the Viennese string sound, but also the Department’s most recent project: the online presentation of the Karl Scheit Archive.
This newly published dissertation (2015) by Wei-Ya Lin promises insights into the “holistic musical concept” of an indigenous population known as the Tao on Lanyu (one of the islands of Taiwan) “that is inseparably interwoven with all areas of life”.
Contesting Border Regimes – Sounds and Images was the title of 2021’s international symposium Transkulturalität_mdw, which took place online on 7 and 8 May.
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