….and on the eve of our next ”spiel”.
The interdisciplinary arts festival “spiel”, now in its third season, runs this year from the 10th to the 17th of July. Once more the arts and culture association M-Arts, and the organizers Simon, Peter, and Philipp Mayer, welcome internationally renowned artists, educators and journalists to the festival’s home: an organic farm in the north Austrian town of Andorf where the festival’s dancers, musicians and performance artists, will again take to the hay-bail stage.
We once again extend our gratitude to the M-Arts arts and culture association whose support, inspired by the successes of last year, is this year only more significant. Of course we must also thank our volunteers whose generous involvement truly nourishes the festival. Without such support ‘spiel’ would simply not have blossomed into what it is today.

Support and Community

The support and involvement of a community of emergent young artists is at the festival’s centre. Artists hold often up to month-long residencies in the area of the festival – a period of time sufficient for the development of interdisciplinary work to take place between artistic personalities, mediums and outlooks hitherto foreign or unknown to one another. The final festival program is then made up of a selection of projects that have reached, during this rehearsal period, a level of maturity and completion.

Exchange of Experimental & Contemporary Art

Once more we take on the challenge, for us of central ideological significance, of creating a forum of contemporary, experimental, and interdisciplinary art in a rural community. In the final week of ‘spiel’ the festival extends itself outwards into this host community as artists visit schools in the surrounding area in an effort to foster excitement and awareness about contemporary dance and music. To garner further interest amongst the elder community members of Andorf, workshop-performances and open-rehearsals will be publicly held in ‘high-traffic’ areas of the town. Potential also is the presence of ‘spiel’ inside the local shopping centres in the form of televised broadcasts of the rehearsal processes underway at that instant. The details of such community involvement will naturally be clarified closer to the festival date.
In order to engage with the festival-audience’s interest, understanding and reaction to contemporary and non-commercial art forms, discursive introductions to each performance will once again be a part of the festival program. Furthermore, after the third and final performance-period of each festival day, there is the opportunity for the audience to discuss the themes of the day’s works with the artists, and reflect upon interpretations, understandings, and ‘mis’understandings of the performance.

Information and Discourse

The information and awareness component of the 2011 festival will take the form of lectures and film screenings on topics of cultural studies, environmental sustainability, and critical theory. Our discussion forum opens the possibility to the public to voice their opinions on such themes, and to discuss them with the featured speaker. The Saturday of the festival is furthermore dedicated to such discussion (see pg. 62). Since the festival’s beginning, the subject of the division of information and discourse has been an on-going theme of such discussions – one that underpins and shapes the diversity of the spiel-festival.

Bio & Fair

At the proverbial roots of ‘spiel’ is the desire to bring into the body of the festival offers of delicious, locally and organically produced foods. Parallel to the performance and workshop schedule runs the organic-food project, ‘Koch am Biohof’: an initiative certain to keep the sense of taste intoxicated for the entirety of the festival.
The majority of the entirely affordable cuisine is proudly produced and prepared on-site, or on-farm as it were, with last year M-Arts itself taking on the responsibility of producing natural juices and fruit-wines

Media and Environment

Beginning in 2010 M-Arts has committed itself to a radical re-conception of media-based advertising. Garbage dumps veritably overflow with pamphlets and posters, forms of advertising we believe no longer taken seriously on account of their superfluity in the new age of media. This pragmatic fact, combined with our modest, albeit entirely serious wish to save the world, has led us away from paper based advertising and pointed us in the direction of internet, television and radio. Inspired by the unexpected success of our 2010 festival we have every intention of carrying on with this strategy.
As we take into account consideration of the environment while dealing with travel-logistics, artists and staff of the festival hailing from European lands will travel exclusively by train.

spiel-x-port

Throughout the entire year, under the heading of ‘spiel-x-port’, performances and concerts are organized both at the ‘spiel-hof’ Schlossergütl, and on stages further abroad around the world. These events serve not only as a means of advertising for the festival itself, but also provide a performance opportunity and needed stage for emergent artists.
In the weeks prior to the festival, the geographical reach of ‘spiel-x-port’ draws itself exclusively into Austria and in particular into the region surrounding Andorf.
‘Spiel-x-port’s’ history to date includes performances at such festivals and events as the Inntöne Jazz Festival (Diersbach), Oxymoron (Linz), Alles im Fluss (Passau), Eulenspiegel Festival (Passau), Piazza Museo (Passau), cellule 133a (Brüssel), Werk (Wien), Tanzatelier (Wien), Fox (Los Angeles), and Smaragd (Linz).

Collective as Structuring Organization-Team

The arts and culture association M-arts developed in 2008 out of the organizational core of the first ‘spiel’ festival. To further develop our collective strength, and our capacity to take on greater challenges, capable and talented co-workers of the 2009 festival were hired, based on particular individual strengths, as members of the organizational-team. We are now in the position to throughout the year support and develop smaller performances laying outside of the boundaries of the festival itself - performances which stand fully within the interest and focus of the collective.
The culture association is at this point made up 37 young, motivated people connected not only by a desire to organize an arts festival, but by the collective belief and desire to make real a unique ideal.

Accommodation

Since 2010, the festival has worked in association with the newly constructed hotel in Andorf: Bauböck – where multi-day festival-pass holders are this year entitled to reduced rates. In addition to this possibility, there are also the festival-camp-grounds which in the past have been used by large numbers of our guests. For reasons of finance, the festival’s artists and organizational-team live either in dormitories, or with local host-families.