JETZT! – Inclusive Stage Practice as Artistic Research

JETZT! is a joint professionalization program of the MUK – Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna, Faculty of Performing Arts, and the Burgtheater GmbH.

It is aimed at people with diverse physical, cognitive, and aesthetic conditions – including participants with disabilities, students of the performing arts, and educators. At its center lies a research-oriented, practice-based approach to learning that does not merely teach inclusion, artistic education, and aesthetic practice, but examines, expands, and methodologically develops them through collective artistic work.

The program is based on the conviction that artistic research becomes most productive when difference and multiplicity are not levelled out but used as a driving force for insight. Every rehearsal, every teaching situation, and every shared reflection generates friction, resonance, and movement.

Moments of over- or under-challenge are understood as integral to the research process; they open spaces in which perception, communication, and artistic practice can be renegotiated. Within this collaborative field, a multilayered space of experience emerges – one in which common ideas of body, voice, presence, professionalism, and artistic authorship are continuously questioned and transformed.

Research here does not appear as detached analysis, but as a living, situational practice, unfolding through an interplay of experimentation, irritation, reflection, and redefinition. The questions and aesthetic impulses that arise in this work are not predetermined but emerge from the group’s dynamics – from coincidence, resistance, and resonance.

On stage, therefore, what is presented is not a finished product, but a moment of concentrated collective research, one that becomes directly perceptible to both audience and participants. The annual production at the Kasino am Schwarzenbergplatz forms the public resonance space of this process.

It makes visible how the specific gathering of bodies, voices, and perspectives gives rise to new aesthetic forms and questions – and reveals the artistic potential inherent in working with difference.

JETZT! understands itself as a processual and documented exploration of the conditions of inclusive stage practice. It asks how inclusion itself can become a method of artistic research, and how encounters with diversity can generate new aesthetic and social insights.

In doing so, the program contributes to the further development of the performing arts in the context of diversity, education, and participation. JETZT! understands difference not as an obstacle, but as a starting point for artistic insight – and as an impetus for the transformation of aesthetic and institutional practice.