Vienna Dec 2006

Vienna

The next two weeks saw Jan and me travelling to Vienna twice to see shows in the New Crowned Hope Festival. It was an interdisciplinary festival, taking the last pieces of Mozart as its starting point. It was a celebration of Mozart's life, but with no Mozart! Artists from all kinds of third-world countries converged on Vienna, dreaming up the sort of utopia that Vienna and Europe could be in the future. I was lucky enough to see Kaaija Saariaho's new opera, Simone Weill. It was supposed to star Dawn Upshaw as the title role, but unfortunately Dawn had been diagnosed with cancer, and was going through therapy for that. Keep that lovely lady and fantastic artist in your prayers! I also saw Faustin's piece with our whole gang of Congolese buddies, and New Zealand director Lemi Ponifasio's piece Requiem. I also was so glad to get to know the works of video artist Lynette Wallworth from Australia. My favorite piece of hers was a dark room into which you are invited to carry a white bowl. In the room, there are three seeming spotlights onto the floor, which are actually video projections. When you put the bowl under this pool of light, you see worlds of fascinating underwater creatures, as if under a microscope. When I talked to the artist later, she told me that these images were from scientists' underwater nocturnal films of the spawning of coral. So you basically were holding a world of creation in your hands! Beautiful!!!

Among all the amazing people at this festival was Alice Waters, the founder of San Francisco Bay area's restaurant Chez Panisse. (Pictured at right) She was one of the instigators of the "slow food" movement, using local vegetables which are in season, supporting responsable and sustainable farming, and returning to the use of cooking and eating meals together as a the important part of social fabric that it is. Alice raised awareness in Vienna of the richness of their own organic farmers, and raised the challenge to Viennese school administrators to be the first city in Europe to feed their children only organic foods. She gave a beautiful sit-down dinner of local farmers' foods, and I was lucky enough to be included. Delicious!! And enlightening! I'm embarrassed to say that I lived in the Bay area almost four years, and never once ate at Chez Panisse! It is on the top of the list the next time I'm in town! Check out her entry in Wikipedia.