Handle with care featuring HUGGY BEARS Part 1 & 2
With contributions by Ale Bachlechner and Helena Araújo
As part of the 2024 imagetanz festival, HUGGY BEARS will host a two-part showcase of Vienna’s young performance scene. In a special edition of brut’s Handle with care series, the audience will be granted exclusive first glances into four projects and their respective phases of development.
Ale Bachlechner – Crying and Lying
Crying and lying are two activities with which you can reliably ruin your life. Strikingly, they are often associated with femininity. Tightly interlacing live performance and prerecorded video Ale admits publicly to her strong craving for a satisfying narrative and captivating dramaturgy of life. The concept of a hopefully quick, linear and progressive succession of milestones in your so called private life and career is countered by the figure of the queer late bloomer who hits those milestones late, in the wrong order or never.
Ale Bachlechner is an artist working with performance and video, based in Vienna and Cologne. In her performative work, she investigates communication and affect, ways of relating and the pitfalls of neoliberalism. Her works vary in size from solos to working with a team of several performers, artists, musicians and technicians and include the temporary dating agency Twelve Roses (2013), the participatory performance coaching institute This Is Not A Competition (2016), the online TV series Studio Hallo (2018), the solo performances Men and me (2019) and Crying and Lying (2023/24) and a long term collaboration with dancers and choreographers Artmann&Duvoisin. She has studied Comparative Literature in Innsbruck and Art at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and has held several teaching positions. Her monograph I'm Sure Everybody's Doing Their Best was published by DISTANZ.
Helena Araújo – and it gets better
and it gets better is a work-in- progress by Helena Araújo that inhabits spaces between dance, theatre and performance. Set on a fake beach, the research gives a warm spotlight to the mental health of artists in the performance art world. Using humour, disobedience and cabaret flamboyance elements Helena exposes the everlasting rocky pressures of the art market along with her anxieties. To survive the industry waves she also tries to find beachy coping mechanisms. and it gets better challenges the underrepresentation of mental health in the art world and addresses the impact of the art market on artists' well-being.
Helena Araújo is an enthusiastic femme maker and performer, lover of plot twists and a clown full of kitsch and bad jokes. She is originally from Rio de Janeiro and currently lives in Vienna. Helena, as a maker, is interested in leaving space for different artistic languages to coexist and blend together. In this space, the conventional values and expectations projected onto these languages, and how they are supposed to relate to each other, are free to be challenged. Helena's works have been shown in various places such as Radiant Nights Festival (BE), Moving Futures Festival (NL), FDS Festival (CH), Spit Festival (AT), Festival Circolo (NL), Pinkbus Platform (CZ) and PingPong Cabaret (IR).
About Bears in the Park and the Huggy Bears Mentoring Programme
Since 2016, Huggy Bears has been a pillar of innovative performance art, supporting emerging artists in Vienna. Each year, the mentoring programme provides three or four individuals or collectives with comprehensive support in areas from production to administration, equipment and dramaturgy. In a series of different presentation formats as well as regular feedback sessions within the group, the young artists’ projects develop into very special pieces. At the end of the nine-month programme, the mentees get to present their performance projects for the first time on a big stage in Vienna. This year, the Huggy Bears Days will be held as a co-operation between brut Wien and WUK performing arts.
The programme is operated by the initiative Bears in the Park and run by Philippe Riéra and Charlotte Bastam. The initiative is dedicated to supporting the Vienna performance scene and helping it grow. To foster this goal, the Huggy Bears are offered not only reliable advisors but also rehearsal spaces. Each autumn, Bears in the Park releases an open call for artists to submit their project proposals for the following year.
Credits
Credits Ale Bachlechner – Crying and Lying
Performance, concept Ale Bachlechner Video, light, sound Jonathan Kastl
Credits Helena Araújo – and it gets better
Maker and performance Helena Araújo Sound designer Zeynab Kirikou Gueye
Links & Social
Dates & Tickets
March 2024
Pay as you can on site / Please register via ticket button
Pay as you can on site / Please register via ticket button
brut nordwest – rehearsal space
Nordwestbahnstraße 8-10, 1200 Vienna
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Abendprogramm Handle with care featuring HUGGY BEARS Teil 1 & 2 mit Beiträgen von Ale Bachlechner und Helena Araújo
brut all over Vienna
brut nordwest
accessible
Nordwestbahnstraße 8-10, 1200 Vienna
Subway: U1, U2 (Praterstern), U4 (Friedensbrücke), U6 (Dresdnerstraße) Tram: 5 (Nordwestbahnstraße) Bus: 5A (Wasnergasse)
studio brut
not accessible
Zieglergasse 25, 1070 Wien
Subway: U3 (Zieglergasse), Tram: 49 (Westbahnstraße / Zieglergasse)
brut at Exhibit Eschenbachgasse
Eschenbachgasse 11 / Ecke Getreidemarkt, 1010 Vienna
U-Bahn: U4, U1 (Karlsplatz), Tram: 1, 2, D, 71 (Burgring), Bus: 57A (Getreidemarkt)