Austria with the Beastie

14 Oct 2010: There should be more festivals like Steirischer Herbst, a month of new work in Graz, Austria. The city is small and quite conservative (the right-wing party took over the district in elections the day of our arrival), yet the public identify with the arts festival like no other place I’ve been to.  The Edinburgh Festival is major, and takes over the city, but leave the royal mile and you can run into people who ignore, disdain or decry it.  I didn't feel any of that in Graz: the Steirischer logo is everywhere - artfully etched into windows of trams, restaurants, shops. Their headquarters move to a different venue each year, with an existing building taken over and temporarily modified like the summer Serpentine pavilion. And when mentioning the festival, everyone we spoke to had a positive, gracious reaction: smiles on the street, waves from old folks, free entry into museums. The Beastie looked wonderfully out of place in this strange environment. In a similar way to how it set off the Barbican Centre so well when performing there, Beastie seemed to highlight the beauty of Graz.

There were loads of interesting things to do, too: watch debating chatbots, sleep under pianos, see 3D Italian murder films, walk in misty Hansel & Gretel forests, eat pumpkin soup, climb through mountain tunnels, play in trickster casinos.  A lovely festival.