Dates
| 18.3. 2017 / 14:00 – 18:00 + 18:30 – 22:00 |
Information
The SATURDAY BAZAAR is the center of the 2017 Bazaar Festival. Over the course of the entire day, audiences can look forward to two blocks of works-in-progress by dance and theater artists from the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Israel, Serbia, Slovakia, and other countries. What does our physicality say about us, who are we in terms of evolution, how are our experiences and memories split between reality and virtual worlds, what utopias are possible today, and how does our identity change in relation to others?
Both blocks of performances will be followed by a public discussion from the RespondART* series, moderated by Alice Koubová. The Saturday Bazaar concludes with an after-party featuring DJ Johana.
Block 1: 2–6pm
HAZARD ZONE / Marta Bichisao (IT), Zdenka Brungot Svíteková (SK/NO/CZ) a Sylvain Sicaud (FR)
KEEP CALM / Ufftenživot (CZ)
STEREOPRESENCE / Cristina Maldonado (MEX)
+ RespondArt discussion with Alice Koubová
Block 2: 6:30–10pm
IN THE NAME OF KAR / Markéta Jandová a Jitka Tůmová (CZ)
THE ZIONIST-SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF UGANDA: THE STATE OF THINGS TO COME (PRAGUE EMBASSY) / friendly fire (DE)
A DANCE IS A DANCE IS A DANCE / Agata Siniarska & Xenia Taniko Dwertmann
+ RespondArt discussion with Alice Koubová
+ DJ Johana
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HAZARD ZONE / Marta Bichisao (IT), Zdenka Brungot Svíteková (SK/NO/CZ) and Sylvain Sicaud (FR)
Excerpt / 15 min. / no language barrier
The central theme of the work-in-progress HAZARD ZONE is vibration, looked at in its role as the primeval oscillation and origin of movement. Vibrations are a phenomenon closely tied to cycles in nature and rituals. In their performance, the artists are interested in integrating the artistic aspects of biology and anthropology.
The body is a medium for receiving, transmitting, and propagating waves through space and matter. Vibrations are created in relation to mass and gravity, and are then propagated through the language of choreography. They are transmitted in the form of information through the body itself, between bodies, and between the body and the surrounding environment. The performers explore states of activity and passivity, and the qualities of touch and of various physical tones.
The performance itself may thus turn into a vibrating cycle that comes and goes, full of constantly changing information that is immediately processed and re-transmitted into the surrounding structure, space, and the bodies of the dancers and the audience. Vibrations as a cycle of never-ending movement, a cycle that resembles an arc more than a straight line.
“Every structure, organic and nonorganic, has a special frequency at which it naturally vibrates when energized into motion [and thus] there are specific speeds at which every structure is predestined to vibrate. [Every object] has its own fundamental frequency [determined by its] mass and tension. In other words, the core physical truth of every structure determines the way it dances and shimmies off sound waves into the universe. An object’s fundamental frequency is a kind of naked snapshot of identity. By definition this snapshot also reveals the other structures that the object is most likely to mutually resonate with.”
George Prochnik, In Pursuit of Silence: Listening For Meaning in a World of Noise
Choreographer and dancer Marta Bichisao hails from Milan, Italy. She has been studying contemporary dance and somatic techniques since 1997, and also studied acting under C. Ronconi (2005) and clinical and experimental psychology (2006). She spent three years as a dancer and assistant choreographer at the ALTROEQUIPE Choreographic Laboratory in Rome under Lucie Latour, and later completed a two-year course in “Scriptures for Contemporary Dance” with Raffaella Giordano. In 2016, she completed Claude Coldy’s “Sensitive Dance” program. She also participated in the “Prototype III” program for choreographers organized by the Fondation Royaumont. Since 2005, she has been a choreographer and dancer with the OPERA dance and theater ensemble.
Zdenka Brungot Svíteková is a dancer, performer, educator and (since 2010) works also as an independent choreographer. After receiving her master’s degree in modern dance, she continued to study the performing arts and dance in Paris, Vienna, and the United States, and as part of various programs such as the Fondation Royaumont’s Prototypes III program. She works internationally as a freelance artist, having collaborated with artists from Slovakia, France, the Czech Republic, Norway, Germany, the USA, and South Korea. For the past six years, she has engaged in an intense creative dialogue with Barbora Látalová. She also explores multidisciplinary projects in which she works with visual artists, musicians, galleries, and museums, and regularly collaborates with Tanec Praha and the SE.S.TA Centre of Choreographic Development.
https://zdenkabrungotsvitekova.wordpress.com
Sylvain Sicaud is a choreographer and dancer who, after a short career as an engineer and translator, decided to dedicate himself to live art. In 2009, he co-founded the ensemble Quelque part. After starting out with the circus arts, he gradually made his way towards contemporary art and contact improvisation. He is the author of 100, chorégraphie à bicyclette and of a triptych of interactive performances entitled http://www. After visiting Bali to study the island’s traditional dances, he began to explore collective rituals, ethnology, and the social status of performances in various cultures. Sicaud collaborates with a diverse range of groups, with no limit in terms of genre or physicality. His interest in public art led him to study at FAIAR in Marseille (2013–2015) and to participate in the “Prototype III” program organized by the Fondation Royaumont. He is currently working on two performances, Déjà Vu and Lola est neige.
http://www.faiar.org/staff/sylvain-sicaud/
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Keep Calm / Ufftenživot (Prague)
Excerpt / 15 min. / in Czech and English
In KEEP CALM, two parallel stories will explore the origin of the species known as homo sapiens sapiens, its cultural evolution, and the ups and downs of its history, all of it seen through the lens of contemporary cultural reality. In trying to find their own place in the story of mankind as a species, the performers and their stories are at the center of the performance as subjects of study.
KEEP CALM is based on the proposition that people base their own (cultural) reality on repeated patterns, routines, fictions, and rules. These have been continually changing over the course of human history and are not stable or set in stone. As a result, what we consider reality here and now demands to be deconstructed.
Every day, we are part of a story in which we follow well-known or familiar plot lines. We live according to rules that are subject to cultural norms called “values.” We are surrounded by words, mottos, quotes, slogans, and formulations that are an articulation of these norms/values.
Created by: Sára Arnstein, Jiří Šimek, Marianna Slováková, Ivo Sedláček, Marta Ljubková, Marie Gourdain
Ufftenživot is a performance ensemble dedicated to the creation of original theatre. Its two core members, Sára Arnstein and Jiří Šimek, both graduated from the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theatre at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU), where they studied acting under Petra Tejnorová. To date, they have created three original performances: the puppet show The Rabbit (2013), GoG (2014), which combined slam poetry with multimedia and movement, most recently Loneliness & Stuff, a physical performance with words.
Ufftenživot sees theatre as an experience and a space for sharing, a place where we can find our way back to things that we forgot long ago – our natural spirituality, which is beaten down by today’s fast-paced, consumerist way of life. Ufftenživot aims to create experiences that encourage audiences to take a critical view of things, to expand their horizons, and to redefine the things around us. “Our inspiration is the absurdity and inconsistency of the world. We believe in the bigger picture, that theater is a good place for coming together, that simplification is a problem, that our era and the nature of the times are never black-and-white. We enjoy exploring the broad palette of reality by deconstructing it – this is where our ideas come from.”
Web: www.ufftenzivot.cz
Supported by: MOTUS (Alfred ve dvoře)
Co-produced by: Divadlo Na Cucky, Studio ALTA, Industra Stage, Kredance
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STEREOPRESENCE / Cristina Maldonado
Work-in-progress / 25 min. / in English
Stereopresence will be a visual essay exploring the ambiguous boundaries between the physical and the immaterial, the real and the imagined, the present and the absent. The performance, inspired by early video art experimentation, captures a “dual-channel” presence that is simultaneously real and virtual, exploring the symptoms of degenerative memory that accompany senility and dementia and delving into imagined worlds, both private and collective.
When I was 9 years old I was woken up by my grandmother after midnight. She was walking in the hall, speaking. I went to bring her back to bed, but when she saw me she started pointing at the empty wall, describing all the pots and kitchen utensils that were hanging there. “What pots, grandma? There’s nothing there.” “There, that one. That’s the one Mom uses for cooking beans.” I stood there, by her side, and decided not to pull her into my world, the real one. Oh, what a burden! I wanted to sleep, to go back to bed! But instead I remained in her world, the one she had pulled from the past and placed there in the exact proportions of the hall. I listened attentively to her descriptions, and for one moment I was tempted to believe that I could also see what she was seeing, as if her certainty was contagious… It was fantastic; somehow I felt so close to her, to what she had once been. I kept this intimate moment with grandma for myself, as if it had been a private journey into her land. This year, I found my 86-year-old father talking to microphotographs, addressing them as if they were people, not knowing he has five children.
Dementia and other degenerative symptoms related to senility are considered a disease in our society. There is no “cure” for them. Experts say with certainty that this world, our real world, is all there is. But let us imagine dementia as a supremely mysterious form of presence, the ability to inhabit multiple worlds; or perhaps it is nature’s way of helping us step away from the reality we all agree upon so that we may transit to the inner place from which we will depart, a place to which no one can accompany us.
Concept, video art: Cristina Maldonado
Performance: Cristina Maldonado, Sodja Zupanc Lotker
Dramaturgy: Sodja Zupanc Lotker
Lighting design and media: Vladimír Burian
Production: JEDEFRAU.ORG (& Erika Frančáková)
Supported by: Motus, producers of the Alfred ve dvoře theatre
Cristina Maldonado is a Mexican artist whose background in dance and body movement influences her unique approach to her visual and conceptual experiments in video, sound, collage and performance. Her work unites experimental theater, dance, participatory art, and new and old media. Since 2000 she has directed and created performances on her own and in collaboration with artists from different disciplines.
Sodja Zupanc Lotker works as a dramaturg for independent theatre, dance and site-specific projects (with Farm in the Cave, Lotte van den Berg, TAAT, and Kristýna Lhotáková). She is the course leader for the master’s program in “Directing Devised and Object Theatre” at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU), and was the artistic director of the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space from 2008 to 2015 (where she collaborated with such artists as Claudia Bosse, Arpad Schilling, Societas Rafaello Sanzio, and Brett Bailey).
Maldonado and Lotker first worked together in 2003, and since then have created various interactive performances that challenge the forms and media by which experiences are delivered to the audience, for instance through headphone installations, mobile phones in the public space, and more.
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Public discussion from the RespondART series, moderated by Alice Koubová
The RespondART project is supported by the Czech-German Future Fund as part of the Czech-German Cultural Spring project. The 2017 Czech-German Cultural Spring is a cross-border cultural initiative of the German Embassy in Prague, the Goethe-Institut in Prague, the Czech-German Future Fund, and the Czech Centers in Berlin and Munich, in collaboration with the Czech Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Alice Koubová is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences and a lecturer at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Her main focus is on the subjects of performative philosophy, post-phenomenology, the philosophy of physicality, and ethics. She is the author of Self-Identity and Powerlessness (Brill), and has written many other books and articles in the aforementioned fields. Besides traditional philosophy, she also teaches courses and organizes workshops mixing philosophy, art research, and original performance. She is the recipient of a Josef Hlávka Award, a Libellus Primus Award, and the Otto Wichterle Award.
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In the Name of Kar / Markéta Jandová a Jitka Tůmová
Excerpt /15 min. / no language barrier
In the Name of Kar explores the subject of death as a natural part of life. The main inspiration was Czech sociologist Jiřina Šiklová’s book Death Banished, which explores how death has become taboo in contemporary society. Instead of looking for the tragic dimension of death, however, the performance’s creators try to take a more natural viewpoint, focusing on the rituals associated with it: burial, funeral rites, bidding farewell.
A “kar“ is a funeral feast where people get together to remember the soul of the departed. As in any feast, food is one aspect of kar. This is both natural and absurd. By its very nature, a feast is full of symbolic meanings and can be understood as a perfect social metaphor.
The performance is currently a work-in-progress. The creative team, too, is gradually being expanded, most recently by the addition of accordionist Aliaksandr Yasinski, whose live performance adds an extra dimension. The authors’ aim is to create a final performance that will explore a subject that many of us try to ignore.
Idea: Markéta Jandová
Choreography and performing: Markéta Jandová and Jitka Tůmová
Music: Aliaksandr Yasinski
Markéta Jandová is a Ph.D. student in choreography and the theory of choreography at HAMU. Her current project, In the Name of Kar, which she is creating in collaboration with dancer Jitka Tůmová, was born out of a summer residency at Studio ALTA. She is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to art, with an emphasis on audiovisual media: her current medium of choice is film, which lets her explore new ways of looking at dance. She has appeared in the Spitfire Company’s performances of Animal Exitus and Sniper’s Lake.
Jitka Tůmová studied at the Dance Center Prague, from which she graduated in 2005. She subsequently attended the London Contemporary Dance School. She gained much experience in Great Britain, where she worked with the Phoenix Dance Theatre, Phil Sanger Dance Company, and Balbir Singh Dance Company. In the 2014/2015 season, she became a member of the Prague Chamber Ballet. She has worked with choreographers Markéta Jandová and Hana Polanská Turečková. She also gives lessons in contemporary dance.
With thanks to: Motus (producers of the Alfred ve dvoře theatre), Studio ALTA
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The Zionist-Socialist Republic of Uganda: The State of Things to Come (Prague Embassy Opening) / friendly fire (Leipzig)
Excerpt / 15 min. / in English, Hebrew and German
Now, exactly 100 years after the practically unknown founding of the ZIONIST-SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF UGANDA, it finally opens its Embassy in Prague as part of the 2017 BAZAAR festival, in order to present its history, arts and culture to a rapt audience: “The lions of history are still dreaming! Let us look to the moles instead!”
The ZIONIST-SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF UGANDA was founded in 1917 during the turmoil of the First World War – finally turning a small part of Uganda into a refuge for those who fled from that “dark continent” known as Europe. Among the lions and savannas, dotted with Bauhaus-inspired socialist Kibbuzim, there now exists a state which is as much a utopian laboratory as Theodor Herzl’s visionary “old new land”. Called “the state of things to come” by its Jewish and non-Jewish citizens the ZIONIST-SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF UGANDA is as much a spatial entity as an temporal one: existing on the edge of the night of history and nightmares, it comes from the future more than it comes from the past. As a place out of place, the republic also is a time out of time, re-collecting and re-locating lost and partially forgotten futures in the night of the present. Indeed it is a state of things to come.
friendly fire is a free theatre and performance group from Leipzig (Germany) founded by Melanie Albrecht, Michael Wehren and Helena Wölfl. friendly fire create time-spaces in which the ghosts, animals and monsters of the past, present and future are let loose. The question of the futures of the 20th and 21st centuries is a central motive of their work which they explore between fact and fiction, archive and hallucination. In their works friendly fire use formats like theatrical performances, installations, performance lectures, audiowalks and scenic interventions. They develop theatrical situations and experimental set-ups which are uncanny and funny, entertaining and disturbing, intimate and alien at the same time. Since fall 2015, friendly fire have been part of the LOFFT Arts Development Program. Their latest production was ZOOROPA (2016).
http://friendlyfire-friendlyfire.blogspot.de
With special thanks to: LOFFT Leipzig, Machol Shalem Dance House, Jerusalem
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a dance is a dance is a dance / Agata Siniarska & Xenia Taniko Dwertmann
work in progress / 30 min. / in English
- and X. have known each other for four years but have never worked alone together. Some say they look like each other but they aren’t so sure. They seem fascinated by some of the same things but each has a completely different approach. So, where to start? In which language? Should they speak, should they scream, should they whisper?
What does it mean to talk to one another on stage (without words)?
Let’s just say they’re doubles. Let’s say that together, they can make a difference. What kind of work did they always want to make? What kind of work can they make for (one) another? What does it mean to work together? Work with an other? Does one need to be the bigger sister? What if they’re twins? What if they’re both adopted? What does it mean if one has more money and the other more fame? Just imagine everything they could be doing together. If we were to marry our biggest inspirations to each other, our biggest fears, our biggest urgencies, our biggest problems, our biggest flaws, our biggest questions, what would the children look like?
Concept and performance: Xenia Taniko Dwertmann, Agata Siniarska
Agata Siniarska makes works within the formats of performance, events, practices, lectures, videos, and others. Having given a chance to different kinds of theatrical forms, having studied choreography, currently she devises feminist fun studies and cultivates her yearnings for language and writing, cinema and animation in the scope of her practices. She is a founding member of female trouble – a friendship based collective revolving around identity, body, feminisms, pleasure, affirmation and love. Addicted to fiction, she conducts her investigations, fashioning herself as a tool of rhetoric, through the cultural structures inscribed to her. Every action she makes, fueled by the energy of profound theoretical hesitancy, she approaches with passion and intense fascination, acting many times not alone but in the company of many exquisite adventures.
http://cargocollective.com/agatasiniarska
Xenia Taniko Dwertmann is a choreographer, performer, writer living in Berlin. She is a member of the friendship-based collective female trouble and co-founder of the public platform VULVA CLUB, an artistic platform amplifying feminist/queer perspectives in temporary communities. In her artistic work she draws from cultures of collaboration and approaches choreography as an experimental practice of relation. Most of her works engage in exhausting physical and intellectual states of paradox. Most recently her work researches and engages activities of care, hosting, maintenance and other forms of unproductive physical labor. She has studied philosophy and politics in Leipzig and Paris, and is a 2016 graduate of the program ‘Dance, Context, Choreography’ at HZT Berlin. Xenia Taniko Dwertmann has collaborated with and worked for international artists such as Ania Nowak, Agata Siniarska, Julia Gladstone, Hana Lee Erdman, Roni Katz, Miriam Kongstad, Julian Weber, deufert&pliscke among others.