FLASHMOB

Who remembers flashmobs? Back in the 2000s, long before TikTok, Snapchat and the most recent eating-pudding-with-a-fork, predominantly young people would arrange spontaneous meetings to do unusual things in public spaces, turning into a community for a short moment. This would result in boisterous disruptions of daily routines with comedic or even political backgrounds, somewhere between hedonism and actionism. ‘A floating feeling of happiness due to collaborative success. A short flash of resistance, bringing our reality to a halt for a super-short time and conjuring something else,’ as Stefanie Sourial puts it. For the performer/stand-up comedian, flashmobs are an aging performance technique. Sourial is overcome with fascination, goosebumps, a sense of power and monumental, almost childlike euphoria whenever they watch flashmobs online. With their piece FLASHMOB, Stefanie Sourial wants to relive and remeasure the phenomenon for our present time. People who stand still for a moment at New York’s Grand Central Station, an unwitting couple who turn into protagonists of a staged date, a surprise performance in the windows of a shopping mall or collective snogging for world peace on Vienna’s Mariahilfer Straße: Stefanie Sourial traces the force, essence and methodology of the flashmob based on popular video examples from back in the day, flinging it into the theatrical space with classic Sourial power – partly with the audience’s help. While FLASHMOB might be announced as a solo performance, it takes more than one person to create a flashmob as a means of collective organising aiming at social change. How can we be together when all fragments of reality seem to tear us apart? FLASHMOB might just have the answer.

Stefanie Sourial realises their own pieces and stand-up shows, including PHARAO IN DRAG (2025), NEW ENDINGS (2023), CITY OF DIASPORA (2021), the COLONIAL COCKTAIL trilogy (2019–2020), FREAK – wo endet der Traum und wo beginnt das Trauma (2014–2015) and Difficulties You Might Get Being An Artist In Austria (2011). Since 2017, Stefanie Sourial has been part of the PCCC* – Politically Correct Comedy Club. From 2009 to 2015, they were in Katrina Daschner’s CLUB BURLESQUE BRUTAL. Since 2009, they have worked and performed with Vienna-based artists such as Malarina, Denice Bourbon, Katrina Daschner, Gin Müller, Veza Fernández, Nina Kusturica, Katharina Mückstein and Kurt Palm. In 2007, they graduated from the International School for Theatre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. Since 2016, they have taught performance art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Stefanie Sourial’s performances, which are anti-racist, queer and socio-critical, combine two types of narration: the historical and the personal – always with a focus on the political. www.stefaniesourial.com