Little Annie

To balance on the avant-garde cliff of life for 45 years, you need an alert mind and no fear of the abyss. This was already the rule for Annie Bandez as a 16-year-old in New York, where she perplexed Frank Zappa with her atonal punk band Annie and the Asexuals before first moving to an anarchist commune in England and then to the garden house of legendary dub producer Adrian Sherwood, with whom she recorded several albums as Annie Anxiety. Back in New York City, she started a career as a painter, married a former police chief, wrote several autobiographical books and continued making music as Little Annie. Collaborating with musicians such as Anohni and intensively with Paul Wallfisch (with whom she recorded four albums), Little Annie – whiskey glass in hand – lifted the chanson to new heights. Her unconventional life, marked by love, loss and art, informs this collaborative theatre piece by and with Little Annie, style-defining no-wave film director Beth B, sideshow artist and performer of Florentina Holzinger Evilyn Frantic, multi-instrumentalist Jim Coleman (Cop Shoot Cop, Foetus), as well as Paul Wallfisch, currently music director at the Vienna Volkstheater.