Österreich 1 invited cultural journalists to select what they considered to be the "most artistically sophisticated and appealing" original radio drama of the year. The Ö1 Radio Drama Award for the Best Original Radio Drama was presented on air on February 25, 2022, as part of the Ö1 Radio Drama Gala.

The award winner is " Manifest 58 - Irgendwoher" by FALKNER. Selected from 14 ORF productions of the year 2021 by an expert jury consisting of cultural journalists Margarete Affenzeller (Der Standard), Daniel Hadler (Kleine Zeitung), Hedwig Kainberger (Salzburger Nachrichten), Norbert Mayer (Die Presse) and Stefanie Panzenböck (FALTER).

Manifest 58 – Irgendwoher by FALKNER

Gedankenstrom Falkner 2021 compiled from an interview with Hans Groiss

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The scenery nightmarishly dense, fantastic, audacious. Hyperrealistic. Windy. An archaic tone. The principle of setting. Language, tempo and rhythm as procedure.

IVAN, a young man, wanders, cannot grasp, asks us questions: an accusation in many stanzas. Violent, sorrowful and illusionary. Ivan killed his father and mother, wants to know who told him to kill. A wanting to find out what it was that made him kill, and to be who one becomes as a result.

Ivan describes from a threshold. What it's like to stand in that exposed place, that endlessness of the not-yet and the endlessness of the no-more. Ivan's burden of being alone. One who can no longer find his place, and that what he seeks may not have a "where" at all, despite the "call" that invites him to seek. Who is Ivan really talking to, addressing in "Manifest 58 / IRGENDWOHER"? Simply us listeners? Or rather his daimon? Does he hold a dialogue with his daimon? The flight of the lonely to the lonely? Is it a gestalt that helps him to master his own extreme situation?

This accusation, this search, is interwoven with scenes that tell of the encounter of the childlike persona of Ivan with Father. These scenes at the bedside of the sleeping father are appeals to love, to attention, characterized by great longing for being touched by this father. These contact fantasies get out of hand. Body parts get out of place. Bite wounds. A falling apart and falling into each other in the embrace. IVAN, THE CHILD tips now and then in some sounds into just very slightly wolfish, leaves the border of human behavior abruptly, almost imperceptibly. The child, wonderful, disturbing, deeply desperate. Innocent. And: insisting on the wolf as ancestor!

"Yearning Creatures" as the basic constitution of Ivan, Ivan, the child and the SAXOPHONE, the third level. The saxophone as a longing, calling instrument, "as a trace and reverberation of the interior" (Michael Lentz). The sound of the saxophone here incarnates another person, a being, a body, a hand, the breath. The saxophone as an ally! Michael Lentz plays and embodies this saxophone.
Ivan, Ivan, the child, the saxophone. A simultaneity. Phantasmagorically shifted into each other. A shift also of the listener's realities. Big, off-beat, massive scenes. FALKNER's manifestos always work with reception. Rhythmic. Naked. Making audible the barrenness of the system. Not enchanted, but radical. (FALKNER)

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