Rebelling against the ugliness of the world or enjoying beauty? The Philharmonic Ball in the traditional Wiener Musikverein
Image: Paul Bauer
If you travel to Vienna alone for the Philharmonic Ball, you don’t have to remain a wallflower: the city not only offers its guests rental clothes, dance lessons and make-up artists, but also taxi dancers. Self-experiment with a man who hasn’t been trained at all.
Con isn’t Billy Wilder. And not just because the young man in tails and carnation can certainly dance better than the Hollywood director, who hired himself out as a one-dancer in Berlin in the 1920s for five marks in the evening. Can’t have a film career ahead of him either. The polite young man of Turkish origin – “allow me, madam?” – is a doctoral lawyer and works in commercial law for an international law firm, the name of which is also known to his lady. Above all, Can is a passionate dancer, waltz, cha-cha-cha, rumba, and can be booked as such – of course only as such.
Today, however, that no longer means one-dancer, as it was in Billy Wilder’s time, but quite harmless taxi dancers. That doesn’t sound like wallflowers, but like she is a woman. And this one, long outgrown the age of the debutantes, doesn’t need a ride from here to there, but one that can last seven hours turning left and right – that’s how long a night of dancing usually takes. Around 450 balls take place in the Vienna season from November 11th. They traditionally start at ten o’clock, after supper, although one should exercise restraint there as the undertaking is strenuous and requires a light stomach.