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| We went to a Heuringer to celebrate Renee's arrival |
Her first project at the festival revolved around a very interesting development project going on in the 22nd district of Vienna (about 30 min. with the U-bahn and the same district where our friends Agnes and Martin Bredl live with their 4 children). They are building a new "city" there--it will be roughly the size of three districts of Vienna--but they are building it before there are even people who know about it, interested in living there, or living there already. If you think of the development of cities--the people are usually there first, usually brought there due to some resource, job source, etc, and then build a city up around themselves--simply settlers. But here--the idea is to build the city, and then get the people to move there with the attraction that it was built to fulfill the ideal life--to grant all that a person could want or need in the best art and form. To be a paradise city. A small group of dancers from the festival could sign up to be involved in a two-week cultural initiative in the development process, Renee being one of them, which then gives a behind the scenes experience of many aspects of the city planning and building committees. These behind the scenes looks which she then shared with us, an enthralled, sometimes skeptical, sometimes amazed, sometimes flabergasted audience, over dinner. Through what she experienced, she in turn opened our eyes to another aspect of Vienna--the city, a portion of the people here--that we didn't really know of or experience before and that, in some specific areas, needs alot of prayers. Based on the direction they are going thus far, the project is based on building a "perfect life", but a perfect life that is a revolt against tradition and history--a paradise that seeks to be completely cut off from the "old-fashioned and outdated" Vienna. Especially highlighted by the building committee was the fact that the center of the city will be a community green space where the positive energy is measured to be most strongly channeled--it will absolutely have nothing to do with a CHURCH (pretty much every major "platz" or square in Vienna and every major district or highlight in Vienna involves a Church). There will be no churches, synagogues, mosques, or places designated as sacred places of worship. There is one lot that will be built as a communal space for all religions as a center where each can in turn practice their ritual and offer prayer. Oh Lord. But, its not all bad...I don't mean to focus on the negative. There are a lot of positive aspects of the project and there are some good background elements of the project that really try to appeal to the person to bring man back to nature, to sustainability, and to community. They just have a long way to go still.
The dancer's involvement in the development culminated in an evening dance performance at the site, which we attended with some friends. There we got to see Renee dance down the side of a pebble mountain (and by that I don't mean to be demeaning...it was really a fantastic thing to witness, and unfortunately due to technical malfunctions with cameras, the video I have does not show you the coolest part of what she did!), among other really moving and provoking pieces. You could see that through the experience they had had with the development in the earlier two weeks, the dancer's reaction was channeled into more of a challenge to what they had seen, heard, and experienced of what the developers were trying to create.
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| Caitlin and Liz--two of our friends from Vienna--doing a little dancing of their own at the project site |
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| the beginning one of the dances they did at the presentation |
After the first two weeks of the festival, Renee took two more workshops (one week each) and we enjoyed having more time with her. There were many beautiful moments and just having another in the house was a treat! I think the relative chaos of our lives here was a little overwhelming at first. There is an order and schedule here that exists without order and a fixed schedule and thus is harder to see, understand, get used to, and most of the time follow--even for us, but I would assume it would especially be hard for someone who has lived 2 years in a Heart's Home that is 15 years old, with histories of friendships already well instated, with a way of life, a daily movement that takes adjusting to something well situated rather than starting from a clean slate and adjusting while creating. This little baby is only 8 months old--as long as it seems like we have been here...we're still learning how to crawl, as are we! I wasn't in Renee's shoes, but if I had to assume, I guess it would be something like being an adult and being forced back into childhood...not being able to walk and do things more efficiently, but crawl and live according to what is given you in every moment. I think we have just gotten used to finding order in otherwise foolish openness and flexibility. But seeing at times the stress it caused Renee and thus desiring to give her a little more of a fixed schedule, helped us to focus and be more organized, communicative, and prepared, or at least try not to change the mass time and location three times within a single hour (it happened several times).
Like I said this home is like a baby still growing, a lot of which we did when Renee was here and which I am so happy we got to share with her! For example--we officially started an apostolate in a nursing home (I'll write a separate post to tell you all about it), we started having our daily adoration hours in Karmeliterkirche as well as private community mass together in the Church rather than having to go to Stephansdom for adoration and celebrating the mass everyday at our kitchen table, friendships with old friends deepened while new ones were given, new art was discovered and appreciated, the kitchen continued its makeover, hand washing clothes was replaced by a washing machine!!! etc. etc. etc.
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| Renee doing her laundry before we received a washing machine from an amazing sponsor in America :) |
One special grace of Renee's visit was the presence of a 5th community member during the last week of the dance festival--Petra. Petra and Renee had worked together at the development project, and they were also taking the 4th week workshop together, during which Petra had no place to stay in Vienna--so we welcomed her into our room! She is a dancer from the Czech Republic and she entered our lives with such openness and passion--it was a beautiful thing to witness and live. While we invited her, and yet by no means pressured her or required her to, she chose to wake up and pray Laudes with us every morning and then ate breakfast with us and then we didn't see her very much, but sometimes, if she wasn't too dead from her classes, she would spend time with us when she got home at night, to talk about the happenings of the day and the stories of our lives. She told us of her life in the Czech Republic and the work she does there--she teaches dance to earn her bread, but on the side, and a project much closer to her heart, she volunteers in a youth home where normally the mix of races and family backgrounds and ages among the youth there only results in extreme violence and other such problems. But she has found that when she comes to dance with them, she gives the youth an outlet other than violence through which to express themselves and relieve the tension. It is the only way to get the youth to stop fighting one another and be at peace, and sometimes even work together, to enjoy something together. She has been training seriously as a dancer since she was young (having attended conservatory as a young girl and teenager which left her with some beautiful but many difficult memories and experiences to carry), and instilled in her is a burning passion to use her talent to help people, to give people something through what she herself has been given. She surely gave us a lot during her visit. Her curiosity and arisen passion for Heart's Home and the life of Heart's Home in Vienna was a gift for us and for our spirits. Renee said that in the first two weeks, Petra was staying and camping at the development sites of the dance project at Aspern (the new city), and that Renee could see a difference between the Petra at Aspern and the Petra who was staying with us in Heart's Home. She said that since Petra was here she was calmer, more settled, more happy, and more at peace. Renee explained that mostly dancers are always on the move, especially as free-lance artists they are always traveling and it is rare that they have somewhere to really rest, relax, unload, and feel at peace enough to truly be present anywhere other than their dancing. Thus, their dancing is their home and the rest is unrest. Renee said that she could see how God used Heart's Home to give that "somewhere" to Petra while otherwise being homeless in Vienna, and it was also something Renee felt as well! What a beautiful testimony for the ways in which the Lord instills and gives His peace and how Heart's Home is but a humble servant of this peace.
I am so thankful for this time to have gotten to know Renee and it was her, rather than us, who gave so much and taught us so much during her stay here. She even let us host a Cultural Evening--our FIRST "open-door" night and cultural event in Vienna--with a few dance pieces of hers and a video presentation she created of her experience in India. On the last Saturday of her stay with us, between 20 and 30 friends of ours came to spend the evening with us--both young and old parishoners from our parish, families from Pakistan and families from Austria, talented Austrian painters, a Japanese violinist and her daughter, business men, students from Poland, Austria, France, and even Magdalena from Romania whom we greet everyday when we walk past Billa where she sells magazines to feed her 7 children. Renee preformed a dance to Arvo Pärt's "Für Alina", then showed her mission video, and then danced two back-to-back Indian dances. Then we invited our guests to Indian food which Alina and Fr. Jacques had slaved away the entire day to prepare. It was delicious and even the woman and children from Pakistan were very impressed! It was a beautiful evening spent with friends--to look into the space and to see all the different lives that were intersecting, touching, coming together in this little space--it was unbelievable to get to see how the Lord works through Heart's Home to plant friendships in the unlikeliest of places. It was a gift to be able to share another view of Heart's Home with our friends as well.
Do you remember the Japanese violinist Tomoko from a couple posts previously? Well, as a little donation and thank-you to us for offering the event, she wanted to offer a little Nachspeise (desert) of playing a few Bach pieces for us.
It was a beautiful spontaneous gift, which then turned into a duet. Tomoko arrived late to the evening and actually didn't get to see Renee dance, so Renee offered to play to Tomoko's playing. The two preformed together as if they had been preparing together previously for the beauty and synthesis you would assume required hours of practice. Indeed it was spontaneous and improvised, but here you can see what I mean. An absolutely delicious dessert!
A word about Tomoko:
Tomoko performs like I have never seen a violinist in my life. There is such an intimacy in her playing, and yet such a freedom to share it with you-not as if you were strangers standing before her and watching her, but as if you were together with her in her playing, as if she let you so close to this intimate moment in which she played her life out in each trill and stroke that it was as if it was your won, it was as if you could feel her passion burning in your own chest, her joy, her sorrow, her thanksgiving. She has such a simple humility that left me breathless--for it is utmost genuine humility which doesn't shy away from one's gifts and presenting one's gifts before the other, but rather has a freedom and peace which gives one's own gifts with joy and passion, wishing to share with another what she herself sees as not simply her own success in learning to play, but a gift she has been given as well. There is no pomp or circumstance, just joy and simplicity--as if this yet unbaptized woman was smiling and whispering through each note, "Come! I want to share something with you! Listen! Do you hear what He gave me!? Isn't it beautiful! Would you like me to play it again?"
Every stroke of her bow paired with Renee's exquisite movement was an unforeseen gift to cap the evening and to give us a foretaste of what we hope will be more to come through what God gives us here in Vienna.
The second to last Saturday Renee was here, we took a day of rest and made a little "Kunst Ausflug" (art fieldtrip) with Monika to discover some unconventional Austrian art outside the city limits of Vienna. It was quite an ecclectic day involving:
+ One man's house, courtyard, old stables, and garden which all together should be considered the Yard Art Capitol of the World, Garden Gnome Heaven, or at least ranked the 8th Wonder of the World
(note to anyone in my smith/hillenbrand family that reads this: i couldn't stop thinking of Walhill the entire time I was touring this man's sculpted and painted cement heaven. From some of the figures, to the ecclectic collection of things hanging on the walls, to the mirror in old horse harnesses, even to one of his bathrooms which I could have sworn was the bathroom off the main/more formal living room....I started to think maybe Opa Hillenbrand was Austrian, not German)
+A small village museum of no extraordinary means followed by an unbelievable local called "Eat Art" where we didn't stay for lunch but thoroughly enjoyed this artists ecclectic vision of tableware, dirty dishes, recipes, and menu drawings. He and his local was even written up in the travel section of the NY Times, excerpts from which are quoted below
In 1964, the artist Daniel Spoerri mounted an exhibition in New York called '31 Variations on a Meal.' He served meals to 31 art-world figures that included Andy Worhol and Roy Lichtenstein, then created collages from their dirty plates and other detritus, to be hung vertically on a wall.
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| this picture is situated the right way, its just that the table top is hanging on the wall...dirty dishes, crusty food and everything |
Decades later, the everyday diner can enjoy creations by the peripatetic 79-year-old in rural Austria, 35 miles northwest of Vienna. On an idyllic square in the village of Hadersdorf am Kamp, the Romanian-born, Swiss-bred Mr. Spoerri paired a minimuseum displaying his work with a restaurant called Eat Art Esslokal.
The kitchen serves seasonal menus that rotate weekly and feature just one or two starters, two entrees and one dessert. In keeping with the New Realism manifesto that Mr. Spoerri signed in 1960 in Paris, Eat Art aims to integrate life and art; Ibo Altun, the chef, sticks to dishes prepared slowly with largely local ingredients. Service is friendly and informal, and upstairs is a spacious room in which Mr. Spoerri's team organizes readings and concerts. And then there's the art: Mr. Spoerri's trademark table collages, made just for the restaurant, decorate interior walls.
Opening a restaurant in a tiny village at 79? For Mr. Spoerri, it’s nothing new — food has always been important to his work. “A restaurant is like an atelier,” he said. “I wanted to have a territory in which objects are manipulated unconsciously. You don’t think about where you put down a spoon. I also do it because it keeps me alive.” The words of a true new realist.
+ We stopped where the forest meets the Danube winding through Niederösterreich at which point a landing has been created with boats to rent, swimming to be done, rock islands to be climbed, eroding castles to be admired from the other side, refreshing water to be drunken on a 96 degree day, and a little pause in our outing to be made.
+ And our last stop (and what we, at the beginning of the day, set out to see) was a fountain designed and erected by Friedensreich Hundertwasser, an amazing Austrian artist (some of whose work you have already seen pictures of from when Fr. Thierry was visiting) who I will be sure to write more in-depth about in the future.
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