No Borders Orchestra
Conducted by Premil Petrović
Directed by Brett Bailey
In a world dominated by wars, the rise of right-wing populists, deepening social inequality,
human rights violations and human-caused climate change, we see a profound absence of love at the
very root of these crises. And even though it may sound naive at first glance, this is exactly what
more and more artists and thinkers have rightly been thematizing lately.
Wiener Festwochen, as one of the leading European festivals, gave itself the title this year
“Republic of Love”, calling to oppose the destructive forces in the world and fight with love.
Emphasizing the need to become loving, many feminist, queer and left-wing authors and thinkers have
recently advocated terms such as radical tenderness, radical love or revolutionary love. Theater
director Milo Rau says: “When the famous sentence ‘beauty will save the world’ is spoken in
Dostoevsky’s novel ‘The Idiot’, someone comments – you say that because you’re in love… It’s
wonderful, because everything we do should be done out of love for another. The answer lies in
creating art with other people, for other people.”
The Lovers Tour thematize both the freedom of the individual act of love and love as a political
force in the world.
