Page - 34 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

34 siting futurity The purpose of the chapters that follow is to correct that impression and show how cultural practitioners in and around Vienna have drawn on the strength with which their cultural- historical knowledge of locality provides them in order to create rousing productions designed to get audiences to inform them- selves about useful aspects of history, engage their presents, and make possible more socially equitable futures. Chapter one’s subject is the revival of the Proletenpassion [Proletarian Passion] in 2015 by Werk X, a politically progressive theater company looking to put itself on Vienna’s cultural map after moving out to a converted cable factory in the gentrifying outer district of Meidling. The Proletenpassion, a two-and-a-half-hour, Marxist musical journey through the modern history of revolt — from the peasant wars in the wake of Luther’s Reformation through the French Revolution, the Paris Commune and the rise of fas- cism to the need to resist contemporary consumer culture — oc- cupies a venerable position in Viennese cultural history as it helped to spark one of the city’s largest and most influential oc- cupations: of an abandoned slaughterhouse in the city’s third district for 100 days in the late summer of 1976. The site of this occupation, the Arena, has gone on to become one of the city’s most recognized centers of alternative culture. By drawing at- tention to Werk X’s decision not only to mount a revival of the Proletenpassion as one of its signature pieces but also to perform it in the Arena as well as its new digs in the twelfth district, the chapter establishes the importance of location in supporting the company’s aim to provide a space for engaged artistic work beyond the repertoire of the state theatres that favors a critical view of the contemporary social order and works towards an understanding of art and theatre as a vital part of democratic society. In chapter two we turn our attention to Ottakring, one of Vienna’s rapidly gentrifying outer districts but the one with ar- guably the highest name recognition as the home of the city’s only brewery, not to mention the city’s longest street market and a legacy of revolt. Here we look at popular films made in the last several years in the district and contrast the culture-clash