Page - 52 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

52 siting futurity [I’ve known the Proletenpassion since my childhood […] as children we listened to it up and down while toy cars raced on the record player — one always had to lift them over the arm to prevent accidents. I encountered the songs again later, mostly at protests. At campfires late at night after demonstra- tions the Jalava song rang out, offered by emotional guitar players with husky voices […] For years I’ve wanted to put on a new interpretation of it from a contemporary perspective.] (Unger 2015, 7) Eder was finally able to fulfil her ambition thanks to WERK X, a troupe that dates back to 2004, when Grazer Harald Posch and Viennese Ali M. Abdullah founded an association called Drama X. Their political “pop-up” theater attracted both attention and awards, and, in November 2008 as part of a Vienna theater re- form, they received four years of funding to establish a theater that worked as a space for negotiating important social and po- litical questions. From 2009 to 2014 they ran Garage X in the basement of a Biedermeier building on the Petersplatz in the first district that had housed entertainment since 1873 and, most recently, Dieter Haspel’s Ensemble Theater; Haspel had directed the Proletenpassion at the Arena.23 Their inaugural production was called Auf Basis der aktuellen Eigenkapitalerfordernisse von nur vier Prozent stellt dies kein Problem dar [With the Current Bank Capital Requirements of only 4%, That’s Not a Problem], a quote by a banker at Lehman Brothers, just before it collapsed and was not bailed out. After their funding ran out, the X team had to find a new lo- cation.24 With the city’s support, they entered into an agreement 23 Their respect for Haspel can be seen in their staging of the tribute “HASPEL-THEATER 1967–2015 — Mehr als Erinnerungen” [“More than Memories”] on April 30, 2016 in the Petersplatz (http://werk-x.at/produk- tion/haspel-theater). 24 The funding situation for Viennese theater has not changed appreciably since Henriette Mandl noted in 1968 that “not even the big theaters can live on their takings. […] The state theaters exist by means of subsidies, and the private theaters (the medium and big ones) receive financial aid