Crisis is a wide sphere. The course of history, the way of the world as a whole could easily be described as a sequence of disasters, an ongoing chain of crises. Hardly any sphere of human existence is not threatened by a crisis at one point in time. Be that as it may, it all depends on how we handle it. Every end implies a new beginning, perspectives of something totally different. Times of crisis are always filled with productive potentials. A crisis can always be an opportunity, a chance, too.

Which is why there is no need to invoke the decline of the Occident when the content and programme of a festival are themed around crisis. The original meaning of the word has to do with separation and decision. Something is at a crossroads, a watershed, a turning point. It all depends on the right direction. In the words of a poem by Bertolt Brecht: ”I do not like where I have come from. I do not like where I am going. Why am I watching the wheel-change with impatience?”

Authentic artists have often sensed a profound awareness of crisis in their production. Art without crisis is inconceivable; indeed, crisis itself is an elementary and productive aesthetic category. Hence, as Friedrich Hölderlin didn’t put it, we might say: ”Where crisis is / salvation also grows”. The steirischer herbst festival will be setting up camp in this field of tension in 2004: with projects of a form of art characterised by progress and freedom – into the wide unknown.