These last 4-day weeks have just whizzed with a great atmosphere in the (short) day job and two compact extremes of Viennese culture on the weekend.
Friday night saw the performance of porno.lyrix in the Reading Room in Margareten. It was a bilingual performance by Franz Mayr, Carina Nekolny and Sylvia Petter, with tongues very much into cheeky cheeks. Based on original texts in Viennese dialect by Carina Nekolny and translated into English by yours truly, the performance was accompanied by the exhibition of artwork by Jakob Nekolny and craft work by Carina. Here’s my rendering of the official Reading Room Summer Programme:
“An artificial porno performance, bilingual in word, image and sound by and with the “Kunstkolchose ahoj”. A peep n’ byte form of the performance was part of the Margaretener Kunst und Kulturmesse. For reasons beyond our understanding it was excluded (censored?) from the programme of the Wiener Bezirksfestwochen.” The original texts were part of the Vienna Poetry Academy’s contribution to the Vienna Festwochen in 2006. So much for censorship.
At the other end of the cultural scale was Chamber Music in the Mozart Haus on Saturday night with works by Mozart, Haydn and Mendelsson. (On the Thursday night, Barenboim gave a free concert at Schoenbrunn where he tried to symphonise the little night music, probably forgetting that small can be so beautiful.)
Now off to prepare for my workshop on Saturday…
