Four Performances, Four Perspectives: Join us for a one-hour journey through four unique 15-minute performances at Kultursommer 2025 — new creations developed within our Huggy Bears Mentoring Program. Each excerpt is a first glimpse of works that will have their full premieres this November.
📍 Venue: Kultursommer – Nordwestbahnbühne, 1200 Vienna
📅 Date: Sunday, 27 July
🕡 Time: 18:30–19:30
all Kultursommer Performances are free of charge.
Here you can go to the full Kultursommer Program.
The Huggy Bears projects 2025
Simone Benini & Miriam Budzáková – “The Sandpit”
We are in the sandpit, in a hot magma. Swimming through our inner volcano. Meeting the plurality of our being, not yet crystallised in a shape. The heated body flows like a river of lava, through those innumerable possibilities. It has all already happened and here we are, playing again. Early playground games with geological despair. Smelling the ancestral struggle, exhaustion. Ambiguous, yet recognisable. Dying in a sabbiatura, a worthless cure for the rheumatism of the soul. Clean pores, open wounds. What a bliss! Kamikaze, wash me in the cascade! Let me be a martyr of dance.
François-Eloi Lavignac – “Fifth Position”
fifth position. A certain way to cross the legs, use the turn out, root your feet to the ground. Only from there, in this constant rotation, emerges the language of ballet. Paradoxically, a perfect fifth is physically unattainable. fifth position puts ambition, desire and sexuality in collaboration and combat.
Most narrative ballets depict a tragic love story, like the one depicted here.
This ballet becomes a subversive sacrifice to access a taste of imperial status. Discipline is the factory crafting fuckable bodies, privileged bodies, a weapon muting its own identity by way of self-sexualisation.
Laureen Drexler & Giorgia Scisciola – “PIERRE”
PIERRE is a journey of countless feelings colliding in existential incoherence. Two beings navigate numbness, contradictions, and the fragile space between control and surrender. Inspired by marble’s strength and transformation, it’s a metaphorical exploration of oppression and discovery of identity beyond definition.
Flora Renhardt & Maria Melotti – “sk8er grrrl”
Skateboarding, dancing, balancing, jumping — breaking clichés, exploring new movements. “sk8er grrrl” is an homage to FLINTA people in the skate scene. With punk attitude and a strong DIY approach, Flora Renhardt and Maria Melotti transform Bears in the Park Art Place into a skatepark. They mount, screw, construct, and deconstruct. Following the traces of the feminist Riot Grrrl movement, the artists discover freedom in skating, creating a space for both friction and gentleness.
About the Huggy Bears Supporting Program
Huggy Bears is our mentoring program at Bears in the Park (11th district, Vienna), dedicated to supporting emerging performance artists as they develop their first major stage works. Through dramaturgical, technical, and production support, Huggy Bears nurtures new voices in Vienna’s performance scene. More info, here.
Supported by: City of Vienna and BWKKMS