Onstage.

(From BusinessWorld (Philippines))

Byline: Juan Antonio Lanuza

Spring visitors to Vienna, Austria, can look forward to this years' Vienna Fest-wochen 2004. The festival has two programs: a performing arts program and a music program.

The performing arts program includes two world premieres and five commissioned productions and presents a wide range of contemporary theater forms in 10 international joint productions. One of its highlights is the Proust Project which explores the author's cycle of novels, In Search of Lost Time.

The core of the performing arts program is comprised of two contrasting Greek tragedies. Peter Sellars' production of Euripides's Children of Herakles that deals with the young Athenian democracy's controversial discussion about the primacy of the right of asylum over all other interests of the state, will not be shown in a traditional theater space but in a place commonly reserved for debates - the historic hall of the imperial chamber of representatives in the parliament building. Fascinated by Sophocles' rarely performed tragedy The Women of Tachis, Luc Bondy encouraged English dramatist Martin Crimp to write a new play: Cruel and Tender, that transposes the ancient plot into an uncanny present.

The program's Ibsen cycle presents new productions of A Doll's House, The Master Builder, and Peer Gynt by Thomas Osetermeier and Peter Zadek.

Under the title "February 1934 - Das Worterbuch des Schweigens" (February 1934 - The Dictionary of Silence), four commissioned productions center on a taboo topic of recent Austrian history: the civil war between the worker's militia of the Social Democrats' Schutzbund and the paramilitary units of the Austro-Fascist Dollfus regime, which took a nationwide toll of several thousand dead or injured in February 1934.

The successful series forum-festwochen ff will be continued in 2004. It will be dedicated to the …