Strauss Year 2025: New Attraction in Vienna's Museum Quarter
Artist Deborah Sengl has designed her own escape room for the Strauss Year 2025. The puzzle rally is about finding a way out of self-doubt and the endless waltz cycle. It can be played from January 10th.
Strauss Year 2025 in Vienna: Out of the Waltz-Golden-Strauss Corner
Sengl - known for her reenactments of scenes from Karl Kraus' "The Last Days of Mankind" with prepared rats - had not had much to do with the composer star before this project, she admitted frankly in an APA interview on Friday before the official opening. "But I generally enjoy confronting myself in my art with topics that are not so familiar to me. The more foreign, the more exciting. And with Strauss, the challenge was quite big," the artist laughed. The goal was to get "out of the Waltz-Golden-Strauss-in-the-city-park corner" and ask the question of who and how Strauss might have been.
So Sengl leads directly into the thinking and emotions of the world-famous composer, who is consistently portrayed here as a human figure with a dog's head. "Shadow of Doubt - In the Mind of the Genius" is therefore the name of the escape room, dominated by a lot of black-and-white graphics and even more mirror elements, and which can be played by two to six people aged 14 and over per round. A series of dioramas with specially designed statuettes or illustrations that appear in the course of the game and around which some of the tricky tasks revolve, offer references to Strauss's biography - such as his childhood with the overpowering father, his political stance or an unhappy love. However, you don't have to be a Strauss expert to solve the puzzles.
The Artist in the Endless Loop
In addition, Sengl has also tried to imagine how Strauss might have fared with his artistry. "We know very little about it, but there are suspicions that he also had burn-out phases. And maybe after about 10,000 waltzes he also had the idea of doing something different?" Not for nothing do we see Strauss trapped in an endless loop in the first of the three rooms thanks to mirror effects. She herself knows this ambivalence as an artist: "Do I repeat myself because I feel safe there, or do I face the challenge of doing something different? I assume that Strauss asked himself these questions."
According to Sengl, the puzzle course takes about an hour. By the way, this is not the first one that the Viennese woman has realized in the Museumsquartier in cooperation with Time-Busters. In 2019 and 2022, she had already designed escape rooms on the topics of escape and child poverty. This time, Sengl has taken a less directly political approach and more of a psychological-reflective one. However, she does not want the Strauss project to be understood as apolitical, as it is mainly about asking oneself in the last room "how I can leave my shell and how to deal with things", especially when currently "not everything is so great".
Schani as a Skye Terrier
The question remains why Sengl shows Schani with a dog's head. "Animals in my art are always metaphors for humans. And in this case, I thought a dog is closest to humans." Specifically, she chose a Skye Terrier. "In his way of hair growth, he is quite similar to Strauss," she explained. "A pug or something would have been very un-Straussian."
(APA/Red)
This article has been automatically translated, read the original article here.