The Irish-American punk rockers kick off their European tour in ViennaRaucous and bursting with Celtic pride, The Dropkick Murphys have been mixing Gaelic folk with punk for 20 years and counting. The Boston originals, not ones to rest on their shamrocks, are now touring in support of their latest album 11 Short Stories of Pain and Glory, the first...
Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny is a call to action, demystifying the assaults on contemporary democracy through the lessons of history.Putin, Orbán, Brexit, Trump: Recent world events have made many feel helpless, confused, despondent. An answer: Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Concise, clear, and solidly fact based, it distills years of top-level scholarship covering the century’s...
Social criticism meets dance at Imagetanz, the annual experimental dance festivalExploring the symbolism and imagery of dance, the annual Imagetanz festival is still going strong after first taking the stage in 1989. In acknowledgement, this year’s edition kicks off under the motto “Welcome Back,” and opens with The Inheritance, a review of past performances from the last 25 years –...
Devious, hilarious and insightful, The Party tears into the contemporary British intelligentsiaThe utter haplessness of the political left is one of today’s great unsolved mysteries, with legions of pundits wondering what happened to the idealism of the 1960s generation. A baby boomer herself, acclaimed British director Sally Potter certainly offers an answer in her latest film The Party, a...
Vienna Independent Shorts celebrates stylish strokes of avant-garde cinemaIn this age of shortened attention spans, when smartphones are streaming video-on-demand, cinema’s short form is making an unexpected comeback. Originally the movie format of carnival sideshows, short films today do what their feature-length cousins can’t: act as an experimental playground where creativity can run wild.Locally, many of the best are...
Faruqee’s pulsating compositions make their solo debut in EuropeMost revolutions turn stuffy with time. But the Secession certainly tries to cultivate its reputation for unconventional contemporary art it has enjoyed since its foundation in 1897, even installing a temporary swinger club in its basement (next to Klimt’s Beethovenfries) for Swiss artist Christoph Büchel’s exhibit in 2010.Yet sometimes, understatement is...
The Burgtheater surtitles Aeschylus’ trilogy in English.With matricide, murder, revenge, adultery and deceit, Aeschylus’ trilogy the Oresteia covers the final chapter of mythology’s most accursed family, the house of Atreus. One of the most recognizable Greek tragedies (and the only surviving trilogy), this surreal and vivid version is brought to the stage by director Antú Romero Nunes, winner of...
