The South Korean choreographer the Burgtheater has been waiting decades to book
Late July in Vienna, and the city is moving at that particular mid-summer pace — slow, unhurried, the heat arriving early and the afternoons stretching out. Tonight the Burgtheater is doing something it has not done before: hosting Eun-Me Ahn, the choreographer who has been reshaping what contemporary dance looks like in Asia for thirty years, making her first Vienna appearance.
By Claire Nakamura
Eun-Me Ahn is described, often, as the Pina Bausch of Asia. It's a comparison that does her a small disservice — she is not Bausch, she is herself, with her own distinct logic and visual language — but it does locate the scale of what she does. She has choreographed more than ninety productions. She has worked with dancers from Korea, from Europe, from everywhere. She has made work that sits at the intersection of ritual, K-pop aesthetics, futuristic club culture, and a very precise interrogation of what Orientalism looks like when it comes from inside rather than being imposed from outside.
Post-Orientalist Express is the piece she is bringing to Vienna, and it premiered in May 2025 to the kind of reception that makes a work travel. The title is doing real work: this is not a piece about Orientalism as a Western gaze. It is a piece about what happens when the people who have been Orientalised turn the lens back around — what imagery they choose, what they keep, what they discard, what they transform. The result is visually overwhelming in the best sense. Ahn has designed over ninety costumes for her ensemble. The stage moves between ceremonial space, nightclub, and something that doesn't have a name yet. The energy is K-pop-adjacent but not K-pop — it borrows the spectacle without the commercial smoothness.
ImPulsTanz has positioned this year as a South Korea spotlight, with support from Korea Kulturzentrum Wien. That context matters: this is not a single booking but a sustained commitment to bringing Korean contemporary performance to Vienna in a way that goes beyond a one-night curiosity. Ahn is the centrepiece of that commitment, and Post-Orientalist Express is exactly the right work to carry it — internationally celebrated, formally rigorous, and made by someone who has been doing this long enough that every choice is intentional.
The Burgtheater is the right room for this. It is one of the great European theatre buildings — the stage is enormous, the acoustics are serious, the architecture carries its own weight. For a piece built around visual and kinetic spectacle, the scale matters. You need a room that can hold it.
Tonight's performance is at 21:00. There is a second performance on August 1 at 19:00. Tickets are via impulstanz.com — if you have not booked, check now.
Also tonight: the last Thursday at the Markterei
The Markterei Stadtheuriger runs its penultimate evening tonight — Thursday is the second-to-last of the series, which closes on Friday July 31. If you read yesterday's story and thought about going, tonight is the night. The format is the same: a different winemaker pouring directly at producer prices in the converted market hall on Severingasse in the 9th, from 16:00 to 22:00, free entry. Tomorrow is the final Friday of the season. After that, the format closes until next summer.
One to book now: Nation of Language at Flex, August 15
Nation of Language — the Brooklyn synth-pop band whose fourth album Dance Called Memory is one of the quieter, more devastating records of the past year — plays Flex on August 15. Flex at Augartenbrücke is the right room for this: low ceiling, the canal just outside, around five hundred people if it fills. Ian Devaney writes about depression and connection in the vocabulary of vintage synthesizers and post-punk grooves. The kind of music that benefits from a room where you can hear the detail. Tickets via oeticket. Two weeks is not as much time as it sounds.
Yesterday I was pointing you toward the Markterei Stadtheuriger and the second day of mit alles at Brick-15 in the 15th — the natural wine and food festival that runs twice a year and has the good sense to stay small. If you made it to either, you know. If you didn't, the Markterei has one more evening left tomorrow. The 15th doesn't get enough of this kind of attention, and mit alles is one of the arguments for why it should.