Page - 115 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

115 Hardly Homemad(e) performative practice. It was the first time he staged a theater text by another author (Koerner 2010, 153), and not just any au- thor but the soon-to-be Nobel Prize winner, Elfriede Jelinek, who won the prize the following year. Having participated in Chance 2000 and Please Love Austria, Jelinek considered herself a Schlingensief fan, and as Morgan Koerner relates, she had dis- covered from Frank Castorf’s radical 1994 staging of her Rast- stätte oder Sie machens alle [Services or They All Do It] “a process of creative collaboration with directors in which she encourages (if not forces) them to respond to her associative texts with fur- ther associations” (ibid., 156). Her choice of Schlingensief to di- rect Bambiland at the country’s most prestigious stage and her enthusiastic response to the production confirmed the compat- ibility of their dissonant styles and approaches. She gushed, “I am thrilled. It was one of the most overwhelming reactions that my texts have ever received. Even though not much of the text appears, it corresponds to my method of writing. This text is an amalgam of media reports about Iraq, and Schlingensief amalg- amised it once more with this overwhelming visual level” (ibid., 154). He in turn “was moved to tears” when she was announced the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004: Ich war zu Tränen gerührt, als ich die Nachricht über die Zuerkennung des Nobelpreises an Elfriede Jelinek erhalten habe. Das ist eine der besten Entscheidungen des Nobel- preiskomitees. Jeder irrt sich, wenn er meint, das war die Frauenquote. Da ist eine wirkliche Dissidentin zum Main- stream gewählt worden. Ich würde sie als die Kassandra der zeitgenössischen Literatur und des deutschsprachigen The- aters bezeichnen, jene Kassandra, die das Schreckliche kom- men sieht, das Unheil, den Abgrund, den Tod, und niemand glaubt ihr. [I was moved to tears when I received the news about the awarding of the Nobel prize to Elfriede Jelinek. This is one of the Nobel Prize Committee’s best decisions. Everyone who thinks it was because of the female quota is mistaken. A real