# 1 demonstration

demonstration to the statue of Maria Theresia to ask her spirit to come in our new statue. After this we brought the new embodied statue back to the brut theatre.

# 2 gala

Evening performance/showcase in the Brut theatre as openingsevent of the season

20 september 2008

Twenty september 2008, we went in a demonstration to the statue of maria theresia in the centre of vienna and asked her to leave the old statue and dive into a new one, which Roland Seidel especially made for her. After she did so, we brought her and the new statue to Brut, where we danced, sang, had some texts, did performance acts in front of her, in this way we informed her about the latest developments of contemporary art. Too long she looked onto the Hofburg, the centre of the Austrilian government and had her back to the museumquartier, where all the contemporary art was shown.

We asked her to leave all the historical shit about the austrain hungarian empire behind and become the empress as in the tarot, a mother figure as the source of all creativity. For us to work on this event, was also an attempt to mingle our art with our family life. It was very nice. We were more than twenty people, and we had a great time preparing and doing it.

the core team of the event were: united sorry, anne juren, roland seidel, pieter ampe, nina braun, theater am bahnhof. but we worked with a lot more artists from vienna ( and brussels), dancers, musicians, performance artists etc.

the old statue with our kids at the demonstration

roland finishes the new statue before we ask maria theresia to change monuments.

participants at the beginning of the demonstration

a group of men show their pregnancy to Maria Theresia, in her new statue in the Brut theatre.

The future: Marie Theresia will meet het lieverdje/ Vienna comes to Amsterdam

Because we have such good memories of this day in Vienna with Maria Theresia, we will continue, and bring her to Amsterdam, to meet another statue, called het lieverdje. It is a small statue in the middle of Amsterdam, given as a present by a tobacco factory. In the sixties it became the centre for the events of the anti smoke magician Robert Jasper Grootveld. He was fighting against tabacco addiction, and comsumptionaddiction, the statue became the icon for the dutch beatnik generation called Provo.

we will celebrate the peter pan energy in this statue, adolescents who don’t accept the society, and try to find their own ones. So the mother energy of Maria Theresia will meet the adolescent energy of het lieverdje.

we are looking for atists in amsterdam to join and we will bring some artists from vienna who participated.