It´s Sunday evening, 6 p.m. – freak out time: Hanna Steinmair´s RAGE – A Tennis Western celebrates its premiere on the platform Digitaler Mousonturm. The trailer already promises unfiltered and immediate destruction that awakens secret desires for expressions of rage – but: Who actually still watches Western in 2021? After "1001 Sorrys" and "How to Excuse", the dramaturge and performer once again dedicates herself to a topic that needs to be discussed much more widely in society: rage.

It´s only crazy until you do it But what does "unlimited rage" mean? The play, which was already planned for 2020 at Mousonturm, begins as a matter of course with one of the best-known Western scores so that one inevitably sees the dry bushes rolling through the steppe before the inner eye. The first performer enters the playing area all cowboy-like. The following interlude, on the other hand, contrasts with sporty slogans and an optimization-dogma-advertising aestheticized effort, sweat and expenditure, but including real and, above all, no standard-beautiful bodies. Back to the setting, which consists, among other things, of a white tennis court and two high seats, and may at first seem very minimalist, almost sterile, until the second performer breaks the tranquility. The tension of a typical Western moment is now gone: the confrontation, the silence, the waiting; she destroys her tennis racket at length, screaming and groaning (and this wo´t be the last one).

Don´t you also sometimes wish to be really angry without limits? When and where was the last time you could give space to this rising torrent of rage and when did you destroy something out of anger? Rage is an aspect on which we usually prefer to put the lid of silence in everyday life. Yet this sphere has many facets of expression: there is a rage that seethes in silence and never comes out on the surface. Then there is the rage which is peacefully embodied and yet punished. And there is the kind of anger that is paving its way to the inside of the Capitol and is allowed to express itself freely. There is even anger that is socially accepted (but it is mostly male). One question arises immediately: who is actually allowed to be rageful and who is not? This is where Hanna Steinmair's performative negotiation begins, which takes on this fact amidst the spheres of tennis, country, wrestling poses, screaming and moaning: Not all rage is the same. "I wanna be an angry white man – because I wanna be fucking angry"; is the uncomfortable truth and a problem at the same time. Uncontrollability, emotional immoderateness – if you are John McEnroe, with your lowered voice, this is possibly an expression of masculinity. If you are Serena Williams, the whole thing looks different again: "Point deduction", because hysteria has no place on the tennis court. In reference to Serena William´ freak-out at the 2018 US Open, former tennis player Billie Jean King tweeted, "When a woman is emotional, she´s "hysterical" and she´s penalized for it. When a man does the same, he´s "outspoken" and there are no repercussions. Thank you, [Serena Williams], for calling out this double standard. More voices are needed to do the same."

The performance dissects this filtering mode and socially embedded reading with a wide assortment of political and pop culture references that follow one another at breakneck speed - a constantly self-overthrowing study of emotional borderline states that breaks down our stereotyped binary understanding. How much emotionality can you take at once - and how much of it, especially, do you intuitively attribute to male characters when the performer is cowering on the floor sobbing?

After a short flip to a kind of self-help group atmosphere with an emotional breakdown on the high seat, both performers find themselves in their initial "coolness" again now as cowboy commentators on the edge of the court. The transitions are fluid and so the tennis racket turns from an object of boundless destruction into a country banjo. Hanna Steinmair knows how to question the ambivalences of emotionality humorously by quickly switching between sports and pop culture - what does it mean to be wrong and to deal openly with vulnerability? Like in a tennis match, Maria Sendlhofer and Joana Tischkau play the standards of the tennis and country world to each other in constant change and re-appropriate them, so in the end you don´t really know who actually "owns" which anger-based emotion. What a ride.

RAGE – A Tennis Western by Hanna Steinmair will be shown until January 21, 2021, daily at 8 pm on the platform Digitaler Mousonturm.

Hanna Steinmair works as a dramaturge and performer on the possibilities of an empowering and feminist concretization of performative settings. At the moment she is dealing with rage, tennis, soft masculinity, and utopian reconciliations.

Sarah Reva Mohr is an artist and writes commentaries, essays, and reviews for various online formats on (pop)culture, society and art.