Danube Festival 2026

Music, performance, art, film, and discourse. The Donaufestival, under the artistic direction of Thomas Edlinger, presents a vibrant parallel world full of adventurous aesthetics. Over two weekends (Friday to Sunday), around 60 program contributions will take place at various locations in Krems.

Mad Hope
Hope. A big word, loaded with religious and political connotations. Hopes often fail. Or they are misused as a facade. In an age of multiple crises, clinging to a "principle of hope" (Ernst Bloch) seems almost naive. Moreover, one would have to be downright crazy to believe in a better tomorrow amidst wars, authoritarian violence, lies and incitements, ecological emergencies, and cyber-fascist threats, if one were to surrender to the apocalyptic background noise of the present. And yet, perhaps it is precisely the madness that can shift perspectives. Anton Kats tells the story in his performance After Hope of the fate of the cargo ship Vishwa Asha (Universal Hope), built in 1974 in the Dnipro Delta, which was then part of the Soviet Union. This ghost ship is considered lost amidst today’s war turmoil. Anton Kats leaves us with a riddle: How many grains of sand at the bottom of the Dnipro River would be needed for hope to anchor there? Hope4Hope is a group exhibition thematically connected to the main motif, featuring master's students from the Department of Cross-Disciplinary Strategies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna at the Donaufestival 2026, which focuses on hope as a toxic lubricant of prevailing conditions, but also as a necessary antidote to despair. What could a non-reality-blind hope for hope look like today? Perhaps like the raised fist of Yann Marussich, reaching out from a bathtub full of glass shards, pointing to a battered body still full of potential.

Mad Hope: This is the concentrated trust of the disillusioned, the courage to speculate about untested forms of togetherness, a small-scale uprising against reality. Cultural scientist Terry Eagleton calls this insistence on the possibility of change "hope without optimism." Philosopher Gabriel Marcel puts it this way: "Even if everything is lost, we are not."

Artist and author Patricia Reed introduces a planetary hope in a lecture at the Donaufestival. Even Hell has its Heroes is a film by Clyde Petersen about the drone-doom band Earth: Even in hell, there is a place for heroes. Choreographer Ligia Lewis connects slapstick and Shakespeare in her video for the performance deader than dead, combining stilled mimicry with zombie-like remobilization. In cooperation with the Kunsthalle Krems, this cinematic reflection on (social) death can be seen there.

HOLD&RESIST_a springrite also deals with the forces of resistance, a first-time collaboration initiated by the Donaufestival between the performance group Liquid Loft and the metarock band Radian, staged in the impressive Dominican Church. It is about enduring extreme bodily tension, pushing a pose to its limits, holding a position – political as well. The unruly and vulnerable nature of youth in the face of teenage angst is at the center of the acrobatic show out of hands by fABULEUS & Michiel Vandevelde, sharpened with live metal and gothic sounds. Jéssica Teixeira also celebrates the rebellion of the real against the repressive madness of the times in her piece Monga, which is as enchanting as it is wild, with drastic comedy: "This is a freak show – but my life is not a f***ing freak show – motherf***eeee- eeeeeers!" Julian Warner questions the legitimacy of violence in racist societal orders in DER SOLDAT. A transition ritual inspired by the decolonization thinker Frantz Fanon, who passed away in 1961.

Electropunk icon Peaches represents her frenetic queer feminism with a new album in tow, while Oneohtrix Point Never, the electronic jack-of-all-trades between world domination and underground, lets the audience bathe in the alternating current of emotions together with Freeka Tet. Marie Davidson provides a cozy twitching to pitch-black machine music, while Blawan, DJ Haram, Barker, NikNak, Kirara, and Operant deliver further results from the conditionally to absolutely danceable realms of scraping, grinding, bouncing, and droning. Slumberland relies on self-built instruments and ghosts in the machines. Jazz drummer Makaya McCraven named a previous legendary album Universal Beings; a title that expresses the desire for community. He will perform with his trio. Music as a collective event of happiness is also celebrated by the folk-punk quartet The New Eves, the new Austrian improv-electronic collective Exit Void (including Anja Plaschg alias Soap&Skin), the freecore artists Selvhenter, the kraut-/psych rock band SANAM operating with Levantine influences, the energetic jazz-post-punk particle accelerators Maruja, the pain-triggering industrial inheritors Pain Magazine, and the combo caroline, which tends toward frenzied euphoria. Ak'chamel conjures up a longing for desert folk, while Joe Rainey combines indigenous pow-wow chants with techno sounds. Guitarist Nina Garcia is interested in bone-dry melodies. FRANKIE & Kelman Duran confront jagged beats with urgent vocal parts. Ex-Easter Island Head conducts shimmering, pulsating sound research with the help of prepared guitars.

Abdullah Miniawy, claire rousay, Olga Anna Markowska, feeo, the minimalist dream-folk-pop duo pmxper, and the deliberately proceeding band Quade search for potentially promising spaces for nuances and zones of transcendence. The British rapper Rainy Miller, marked by urban blues, operates with Northern Gothic influences, while Dälek uses grim, noise-infiltrated hip-hop tracks as the basis for their captivating live shows. Alan Sparhawk, on the other hand, finds exits from grief in sky-splitting songs after the death of Mimi Parker, his wife and bandmate in Low.

Finally, the title of the new, spiritually underpinned post-rap album by Chino Amobi is Eroica II: Christian Nihilism. Amobi recognizes in this confession the call to "embrace the chaos." This confession perhaps connects him with John Maus, who, after an existential crisis, wants to transform back into a "hysterical body" on stage at the closing day of the Donaufestival on May 10 and comfort all the wounded with his synth-pop liturgies: "Reconstruct Your Life!"

The extreme performer Yann Marussich might add, in the spirit of his mad hope: "Death would be the next extreme... now I have to fly."

Thomas Edlinger (Artistic Director of Donaufestival)

Day Pass 1
With Ak’chamel, Abdullah Miniawy, Exit Void, Selvhenter, fABULEUS & M. Vandevelde, Makaya McCraven, Ex-Easter Island Head, Marie Davidson (live) and many more

Day Pass 2
With claire rousay, Joe Rainey, SANAM, Quade, Peaches, Julian Warner, Ligia Lewis, Pain Magazine, DJ Haram and many more

Day Pass 3
With FRANKIE & Kelman Duran, pmxper, Alan Sparhawk, Yann Marussich, fABULEUS & M. Vandevelde and many more

Day Pass 4
With Nina Garcia, feeo, The New Eves, caroline, Blawan (live), Maruja, Operant, Anton Kats / ILYICH, Jéssica Teixeira and many more

Day Pass 5
With Chino Amobi, Rainy Miller, Dälek, Barker, Oneohtrix Point Never with Freeka Tet, NikNak, Kirara, Liquid Loft & Radian and many more

Day Pass 6
With Slumberland, Olga Anna Markowska, John Maus, Jéssica Teixeira, Anton Kats / ILYICH and many more