View From Vienna. - dance review

Dance Magazine, Nov, 2000 by George Jackson

Check off the Dance House on Vienna's list for the future. An idea for a long time, it is now actually being built in the Museumsquarter as part of a new arts complex that's mushrooming up from old stables and courtyards where the Hapsburg emperors' cavalries once made their home. The Dance House will at last give this city a place where performance dancing comes first. The search for a director, a municipal position, proceeded without incident, and Sigrid Gareis, a festival planner from Germany, is to be in charge of what will probably be called the Vienna Center for Contemporary Dance and Performance. Not without incident was the search for a national dance curator. Wolf Perez's antennae were up when the application period for this job was Suddenly curtailed, and she objected to the irregularity in an editorial. Curiously, it was the socialist government that took the action that would cut down on the number of potential applicants, particularly those traveling or residing outside Austria at the time. When the rightist government came in, it decided to abolish this federal position altogether.

That Vienna is looking both to the past and future is a healthy sign, as are the city's building boom, human diversity and alert press. New structures are rising all over town, and on sidewalks and in the subway there are head shawls and skin tones one wouldn't have seen in significant numbers just a while ago. These new facets can exist in harmony with the old houses and their painted plaster facades, with waitresses whose blond curls and white collars contrast pleasingly with their deep-colored smocks and, too, with traditional attitudes when these are humane. But a question: If all Vienna's dancers who are not pure Austrians were declared illegal by the Haiderites, how many containers would it take to export them?

Zanella has not (yet) been replaced as head of the Staatsopernballet; at season's end he was offered a three-year renewal, which he signed. Holender, though, terminated the appointment of the ballet school's well-regarded director, Michael Birkmeyer, former principal with the company and descended from a long line of Viennese dancers, appointing Zanella to this job as well, thus saving the Opera one top dance salary. Sanctions by ECU countries were lifted in September.