Dates

8.10. 2016 / 19:30

Information

Choreographic Exercises I

Music: Jan Bubák
Concept and choreography: Hana Polanská Turečková

Dramaturgical cooperation and visual essay: Jiří Havlíček
Texts: Heinrich von Kleist v českém překladu E.A. Saudka
Set and costume design: Vladimír Houdek
Light design: Pavel Kotlík
Performing: Jitka Tůmová a Sabina Bočková (soloists of Prague Chamber Ballet)
Graphic design: Anymade studio
Premiere: 19.7.2016, Studio ALTA Prague

Duration: 40 minutes

The performance titled “Choreographic Exercises I” is an outcome of a four-year long cooperation between the choreographer Hana Polanská Turečková and the painter Vladimír Houdek. During their cooperation, these artists create film or stage collages – combinations of paintings and dance which strive to define the relationship between the language of visual artistic rendering and movements of body. In this work, Hana Polanská Turečková, in connection with the geometrically abstract but strongly symbolic paintings of Vladimír Houdek, attempts to analyse (in a purely intellectual way) the choreographic work in relation to the abstract form of movement which reveals the content. In the historical context, she follows the concept of body as a puppet that is strongly inspired by the mechanically mystical essay of Heinrich von Kleist titled On the Marionette Theatre (1810) which influenced the choreographic works of Michail Fokin, Oskar Schlemmer or Samuel Beckett – just to name a few. The movement structure attempts to express the Kleist’s text, which has the form of a dialogue. It does so by movement patterns and rules based on balance, centre of gravity, pendulum-like movements or geometric relations of bodies to one another, to their surroundings and to the costumes worn. A brochure with translations of Kleist’s essay into English and Czech was published to accompany the performance; it also includes a visual essay by the curator and artist Jiří Havlíček.

pause 20 minutes

Black Mirror

Music: Vladimír Sommer (String Quartet in d-moll)

Choreography: Hana Polanská Turečková

Set and costume design: Vladimír Houdek

Light design: Jakub Sloup

Czech premiere: 5.10.2014 The Estates Theatre in Prague

Performing: Jitka Tůmová, Alena Krivileva, Lenka Bílková, Patrik Čermák

Duration: 30 minutes

The existential abstract ballet as a metaphor of never experienced secret of life and world. The choreography is inspired by the painting of Vladimír Houdek “Black mirror” and is structured into three dance parts: Law path – Coalescence – Transcendence. The cooperation of Hana Polanská Turečková and Vladimír Houdek could be described as “stage or film collage of dance and paintwork seeking a definition of a relationship between the body language and the visual portrayal” and is strongly inspired by modernism.