Vienna Mystery Circles

Theater Spectacle: Mystery Plays…

ABANDON ALL HOPE! ️

Mystery Plays Ringelsdorf / Vienna

Theater Spectacle: Mystery Plays

ABANDON ALL HOPE!

The world is ending – but the Vienna Museum of Folk Life becomes the Ark. Who and what can board on July 5th and 6th, 2025, depends on your donation.

The director Katharina Kummer is staging a mystery play that invites nothing less than the salvation of creation. Kummer’s theater spectacle unites a mix of established art professionals and raw amateurs. Already in the collaboration – and even more so during the spectacle itself – people from different backgrounds come together: from city and countryside, from various social layers, and with life perspectives that couldn’t be more different.

… pushing the boundaries of what theater can be!

The wandering spectacle «Mystery Plays Ringelsdorf» aims to bring together a diverse mix of amateurs (people from the immediate surroundings of the respective event location) and professional artists from various fields (text, theater, visual art, music, etc.) to find new spaces and forms of collaborative artistic work that are democratic and simultaneously have a high aesthetic and professional standard. «Mystery Plays» can be understood as an umbrella term for a theatrical method or a theater form developed by the theater maker Katharina Kummer during the lockdowns in a border village. They are designed as a traveling spectacle that asserts a mystical-narrative core but can be recreated in different forms at different locations.

Central to the working practice of the Mystery Plays is always the combination of professional artists, amateurs, and extras from the most diverse social and cultural contexts. The «Mystery Plays» have the main objective of promoting an exchange of maximally diverging life perspectives (city/country, old/young, wealthy or not, culturally and intellectually and politically highly different) and creating common artistic working practices in this mix. The boundary between cultural reception and production is essentially more permeable here – also due to the theatrical basic structure of staging, ceremonial, and free movement of the audience – than it is within existing institutions.

The reference to border areas is essential to the Mystery Plays: the development of encounter spaces outside stable norm areas. The Mystery Plays evoke such spaces by locating the event both institutionally (theater?/museum?/garden?) and in terms of working practice (professionals/amateurs) and through maximum social heterogeneity outside all fixed zones of respective genres or life contexts. Ringelsdorf – a place on the Austrian-Slovak border – is the starting point of the Mystery Plays. By permanently retaining the name «RINGELSDORF» of the border village that was the origin of this unprecedented theater practice, the event creates a mythical exaggeration of the place as a metaphor for the liminal space itself.

Abrakadabra Schakalakaboom

The actual venue of the current edition of the Mystery Plays is the Vienna Museum of Folk Life. The framework is the festival «THROUGH THE DARK, Living in Authoritarian Times» taking place there. The poetic setting of this special edition of the Mystery Plays is the design of a shimmering end-time scenario. A reference to past civilizational total damages: The Vienna Museum of Folk Life becomes Noah’s Ark for us. And poetic time? It has stood still! Over the assertion of an apocalyptic case within a chronological order. As a theatrical project that haunts the museum, these Mystery Plays draw on means of the circus as well as the exhibition space. The participants themselves become nature events inserted into the art space, the exhibited, the spectacle.

To pay the participating professionals, to provide food on the Ark, to design costumes for the amateurs, to transport animals from the countryside to the museum and back, and to transform the museum so that we really believe we are on a ship – for all this, we need money. Thank you and Ahoy!