This November 2025 we are launching the very first ACT OUT Streaming-Festival. Six selected performances from Austria will be presented online to representatives of Austrian cultural forums and embassies, international event organisers and members of press in two pitching-sessions with the artists. All recordings, including the pitching session, will be available to watch for four weeks following the event.
The tour-ready productions represent different genres of the performing arts. All of them have been successfully supported by the ACT OUT tour- and residency programme in recent years. Register below for the festival entrance code and the pitching sessions.
Pulsating sounds, ecstatically dancing bodies, a sense of freedom. In their dance performance 4 A.M., choreographers Olivia Mitterhuemer and Farah Deen invite their audience to delve into the spheres of House culture…
Part of Pitching Session – Part 1 on Thu., 13 November – 10 AM
Strongly influenced by the Afro-American and LGBTIQ+ community, House culture emerged in the clubs of Chicago and New York in the early 80s. Dance and music were primarily shaped by discrimination, oppression and the need of expression.
Referring to the inclusive and non-judgmental character of the culture, the music’s repetitive and upbeat quality serves as the central anchor for the four performers’ physical experience. Inspired by various encounters with the European and American scene, they bring different human relationships on stage, all within a spectrum between self-doubt, distance, intimacy and ecstasy. An homage to the House club as a safe place, where social conventions disappear. At 4 A.M., House beats and physical exchange open up a space of danced transcendence and collective freedom — based on the performers‘ personal experiences as white women and women of colour being socialised in Europe.
CREDITS
Concept & Choreography: Farah Deen & Olivia Mitterhuemer
Dance: Farah Deen, Paz Katrina Jimenez, Olivia Mitterhuemer, Rosa Perl
Dramaturgy: Philippe Riera
Music Edit: TJ Hicks
Light Design: Stefan Ebner
Costume/Set Design: Magdalena Neuburger
Production: Verena Pircher
Funded by Stadt Wien Kultur, Stadt Salzburg Kultur, Land Salzburg Kultur, BMKÖS, Bildrecht. With the kind support of ARGEkultur Salzburg and SZENE Salzburg.
Photos: Christine Miess (1-4) / Raphael Mittendorfer (5-8)
House Beating is a performative artwork that spans across media of choreography, composition, and art installation. It evolved from a practice of embodying the ideals of modernist architecture. Together, the collective of artists…
Part of Pitching Session – Part 1 on Thu., 13 November – 10 AM
(re)interprets Le Corbusier’s and Xennakis’ revolutionary concepts of performing space and recontextualizes them in the contemporary architectural reality. Powerful physical choreography consists of complex partnering movement vocabulary rooted in urban dance and the study of bodily innate architecture. House Beating explores borderline physical abilities of the body in dialogue with an organically morphing wooden entity. The work anticipates the moment of emergence, creation, construction. The organic and the inorganic continously meet and engage in the shared process of space creation. Virtuosic musical score inspired by Xennakis and Cage compositions for percussion is the driving motor of the performance.
CREDITS
Concept: Hygin Delimat, Schayan Kazemi
Choreography: Hygin Delimat, Elias Choi-Buttinger
Music: Maria Anna Chlebus, Alex Georgiev/Voland Szekely, Schayan Kazemi (including variations of original compositions by Steve Reich and Iannis Xennakis)
Art installation: Andreas Buttinger
Wood performers: Weng Teng Choi Buttinger, Andreas Buttinger
Produced by the Body Architects with the help of STUV Anton Bruckner University
More: https://architects.hygindelimat.com/house-beating/
Booking: write@hygindelimat.com
Photos: Vojtěch Brtnický
inSTABil is a virtuoso stage play about balance, togetherness and lots of staffs: good old stability…a desirable state for land, people, things and relationships. One would think. But doesn’t the challenging and exciting lie in the…
Part of Pitching Session – Part 1 on Thu., 13. November – 10 AM
…opposite? The both artists are going on a balancing act of unpredictability and explore it with their experimental and exquisite object manipulation.
CREDITS
Author & Artist: Christiane Hapt & Sebastian Berger
Outside Eye: Lukas Wiesner
Coaching: Sonja Apfler
Stage design: Michael Liszt, Sebastian Berger, Ewald Hapt
Light Concept: Andreas Zemann
Produced by: Company FENFIRE
(www.objektmanipulation.at)
Supported by Zirkusakademie Wien, Flowmotion Studios, Sirene Operntheater, The Arts and Culture Division of the Federal Chancellery of Austria, Cultural Department of Vienna.
Photos: Ruediger Breitbach (1) / Markus Moosmann (2 & 3) / Maria Gabriela Berger (4)
Stay-at-home housewives? Doing what they’re told? Not these women! They defied traditional gender roles and successfully asserted themselves in a male-dominated world: Whether it’s Zheng Yisao (1775–1844)…
Part of Pitching Session – Part 2 on Fri., 14. November – 10 AM
…who commanded a pirate fleet of over 200 ships in China and negotiated numerous treaties with the rulers, or Carola Rackete, who rescued 53 people seeking refuge from distress at sea. They are all united by the sea, resistance and breaking with convention. This story is about them and their sisters of the sea. Their lives represent a personal declaration of independence. They stand up against prejudice, norms and restrictive living conditions. They are role models and convey strength – a quality that women were often denied in the past. And they are proof that the myth of the inferior woman is no longer tenable: ‘Pirates, the sea belongs to us!’
CREDITS
Freely adapted from texts by Effe U Knust
Director: Nico Wind
Choreography: Ariane Oechsner
Set design: Tanja Peinsipp
Assistant: Marianne Huber
Intern: Marleen Zeirzer
Music: Steffi Baron-Neuhuber
Production: Natalja Kreil
Cast: Nina Dafert, Mia Ferreira, Maja Karolina Franke, Gat Goodovitch, Maartje Pasman
Documentation: Anja Bačovský (camera), David Pujadas Bosch (camera, editing)
Performance rights: © rua. Cooperative for Text and Direction, Berlin
Photos: Barbara Palffy
We celebrate the women who have inspired songs.
We celebrate the women who have written songs.
We celebrate the women who cleaned the rooms in which songs were composed…
Part of Pitching Session – Part 2 on Fri., 14. November – 10 AM
…ALBUM, the muse at work, by dancer-choreographer Naïma Mazic with percussionist-vibraphonist Evi Filippou and a record player, is based on nine of countless songs named after romantic partners of jazz musicians or written by female composers. Hear and now: polyrhythmic choreographies of care and inspiration. Informed by the divine figure of the muse, ALBUM manipulates her position, questioning the patriarchal utilization of reproductive labor. n ï m company shares a record of nine love stories by co-musing with Carla Bley, Moki Cherry, Mary Lou Williams and more. Being named after a jazz ballad, having grown up in a jazz club and a BigBand, dancer/choreographer Naïma Mazic started to investigate songs that she felt drawn to dance to – endless tunes named after women, dedicated to romantic partners that are managers, producers, mothers, artists. ALBUM is an interaction between these songs and music written by female composers. Shared polyrhythmic choreographies between dance and music, together with percussionist/vibraphonist Evi Filippou and a record player, tell stories of creative and reproductive labor and the patriarchal structures that distort them. The performers’ bodies, movements, and musicality shift from tune to tune, from A side to B side, to contain a relationship that swings from intimate to professional and inspiring to possessive. The piece unfolds like a concert – between nine tracks, narratives emerge, passing through New York Jazz clubs, Viennese bedrooms, and your living room. Communing with the goddess, arranging scores of text, biography, and feminist utopias, and honoring the legacy of displacement, labor, and fragmentation* within the historically Black American jazz tradition, ALBUM proposes co-musing as a politic of care. We celebrate the women that have been lazily mythologized**, just as the nine divine muses.
*Fred Moten
**Daphne Brooks: Liner Notes for the Revolutio
CREDITS
Director, concept, choreography, dance Naïma Mazic
Vibraphone, drums, percussion & musical arrangements Evi Filippou
Music by Mary Lou Williams, Carla Bley, Charlie Haden, Alice Coltrane, Bill Evans, John Coltrane, mathias rüegg, Lil‘ Hardin Armstrong Dramaturgy, co-concept Maeve Johnson
Text Maeve Johnson & Naïma Mazic
Stage Design, research Hanna Naske
Concept development, poster design Is Ali
Costume design Naïma Mazic
Costumes Tamara Yael
Dance coaching Cat Paz Jimenez
Outside eyes Sara Ostertag, Vera Rivas, Alaa Alkurdi Musicologist Harald Kisiedu
Production more2rhythm, Naïma Mazic & Senem Kahraman
Co-production brut Wien
Thanks to Gabriela Reyna, Mael Blau, Golnar Shahyar, Andrej Prozorov, Imani Rameses, Makisig Akin,Anya Cloud, Robyn Schulkowsky, Marcela Giesche, Meg Stuart, Doug Weiss, Klara Kostal,Julian Schönfeld, Elisabeth Naske, Miro Wahba, Ingrid Oberkanins
Supported by the Federal Ministry of Art, Culture, Civil Service and Sport, the City of Vienna’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Porgy & Bess – Jazz & Music Club, Vienna, Bears in the Park, Vienna, LAKE Studios Berlin.
Photos: Naima Maleika
What happens when everything suddenly changes, when control over one’s own body collapses, and the relationship to space, time, objects and others feel like an outdated operating system that can’t handle the…
Part of Pitching Session – Part 2 on Fri., 14. November – 10 AM
…update? When reality loses its structure — OUT OF ORDER, as if the system has shut down? Familiar terms and habits lose meaning. There are no points of reference, no concept. This is where CieLAROQUE sets their work thiS is nOt a sunset. There’s no reference point, no concept. The four performers search for new order. They look at each other, yet their gazes miss. Their bodies are present, and yet not. A state between existence and possibility, making them vulnerable yet curious. Amid the unfamiliar chaos, gaps and in-betweens emerge, creating a language of togetherness. Not a language of certainty, but a alliance in becoming. A fragile, dynamic landscape emerges, vulnerable and resilient at the same time.
CREDITS
Concept, artistic director, Choreography: Helene Weinzierl
Assistenz: Luan de Lima
in cooperation with the performers: Jolyane Langlois, Jadwiga Mordarska, Alberto Cissello, Eli Hooker
Music: Oliver Stotz
Text: Luigi Guerrieri
Stage: Brigitta Schöllbauer
Costumes: Luan de Lima
Production: Lena Obenaus
A production of CieLAROQUE and SZENE Salzburg.
Supported by Stadt Salzburg, Land Salzburg and BMWKMS
Contact: production@cielaroque.com
web: cielaroque.com
Photos: Bernhard Mueller
The pitching sessions take place online on Thursday, 13th November (Part 1) and on Friday, 14th November (Part 2)from 10 to 10:40 AM. All artists will be present and answer questions about their production. Please register below for one or both sessions. Afterwards, both pitching sessions will also be available as recordings.
4 A.M. – A House Dance Piece (contemporary dance)
house beating (site specific performance)
inSTABil (contemporary circus)
Über Piratinnen (theatre / circus for young audiences)
ALBUM, the muse at work (contemporary dance)
thiS is nOt a sunset (contemporary dance)
REGISTER:
To register for the festival and/ or to see the replays of the pitching sessions, please send as an e-mail at actout[at]freietheater.at.
ACT OUT is an international residency funding programme for independent theatre and performance artists and groups. ACT OUT is funded by BMEIA – Auslandskultur and administrated by IG Freie Theaterarbeit. In addition, ACT OUT online offers an online-video platform where artists / theatre groups can upload recordings of their stage productions. ACT OUT online serves, amongst others, as a selection catalogue for Austrian Cultural Forums who are interested in streaming Austrian stage productions.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us by email at actout[at]freietheater.at
