Dance Reflection of 2011

The main autumn events of Czech dance were festivals Letní Letná, Dance Film Festival Prague, and 4+4 Days in Motion.

Letní Letná – the festival of contemporary circus took place for the eighth time and its rich program livened up a romantic park in Letná, Prague.  It introduced big foreign stars – e.g. Circus Malabar, Swedish Circus Cirkör, French Compagnie XY and many other Czech artists – e.g. Circus Mlejn, Decalages, Cakes and Puppets, Bilbo compagnie, Circus Sacra and others. By the way – contemporary circus is really booming in the Czech Republic! We can observe this fact in a rising number of artists and creative subjects, a number of performances as well as viewers’ interest. New circus is simply in!

A three-day conference CIRKFORUM 2011 took place this year, too and both foreign and Czech subjects presented their projects there. The organizer of the conference was Cirqueon – Centre for New Circus which is a member of the international network of new circus Circostrada Network. The main mission of the Cirqueon organization is information about Czech and European activities in the field of new circus, support of projects in the Czech Republic which deal with the new circus wave and development of professionals’ and general public’s skills. Together with the Centre for New Circus, it organizes practical educational projects and represents main professional subjects of this genre in the Czech Republic.

www.letniletna.cz, www.cirqueon.cz

Dance Film Festival Prague – Dance film is yet another new art discipline in the Czech Republic. In September 2011, the second biennale of dance films took place and showed a distribution premiere of Wim Wenders’s movie Pina 3D in the first evening. The program was a selection of short dance for camera by Czech and foreign authors and several documentaries. For example, dramaturgy selected Don Kent’s Babel de reves about Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui or an art documentary reportage about Platel’s Pitié in Congo Passion, Last Stop Kinshasa or Sasha Waltz’s Dialog09. The discipline dance for camera was represented by David Hinton’s film Strange Fish and movies from the collection of Dutch festival Cinedans – Cinedans on Topur and Point Taken.

Dance Film Festival invited the classic author of dance for camera, David Hinton, to Prague in October 2011. He was a supervisor of a one-week workshop at the Film Academy of Performing Arts.. 25 students from the departments of camera, directing, documentary production, editing, scriptwriting and FAMU International students as well as representatives of Czech dance scene, e.g. the Nanohach company, DekkaDancers, Kateřina Stupecká, choreographer Mirka Eliášová and others participated in the workshop.  Hinton himself commented on cooperation on this project: “I think it was a really very good workshop. Participation of interesting and talented people is the main point for me. It was especially beneficial there were so many film-experienced people – it is great to have this platform at FAMU. You can really start to create culture of dance films in Prague on this basis. If any film school starts to take dance movies seriously, it can have a quick impact on the whole world. FAMU may do this.”

Festival 4+4 Days is a big cultural event with a 16-year tradition. The international showcase of non-official theatre was defined more broadly this year – as a festival of contemporary art. It is a strict naming of a state that has existed from the beginning. The main features of non-official theatre-making in the last twenty years are cross-over – i.e. interdisciplinarity of art genres which merge into various forms and unexpected meetings in experimental works. The constant topic of the festival has always been site specific – and nothing has changed.

The premiere of the Vosto5 company’s performance Pérák. No matter what the name is. The deeds are crucial! was staged within the Czech program. An anonymous character born in Prague during the Second World War came to life directed by Jiří Havelka. War children remember stories of their parents who described a mysterious man in a hoodie who was able to jump up to the second floor thanks to sophisticated springs on his shoes. It was an ambivalent, unpredictable and completely mythical character. In Vosto5’s interpretation, Pérák became a member of anti-fascist fighters and he has a Batman stamp in his identity card.

A cabaret style enriched an elegant and intelligent scenic solution in Meetfactory. Dynamic and rhythmical style of Jiří Havelka’s direction, cartoon-like acting performances, physically convincing in violent scenes which do not avoid affects pointed at a simple viewer in us (resistant hero – general Eliáš play by good-looking Petr Prokop), however, always with a joker of spiteful alienation prepared in a sleeve. This is an origin of intelligent and ironic folk theatre where viewers cry with laughter. Vosto5 mixes non-dogmatic old cabaret-like charm with new seductiveness of circus arts and dancers’ sex appeal.

Authors were not happy with the fact that the character of Pérák would be only portrayed in a dull metaphor of a shadow effect but they introduced him in a black hoodie and springs on his feet. He is omnipresent, three-part and “supersonic”. The important thing is that they took real risk, real somersaults and real muscles from circus. It looks like Pérák might have enforced a surprising yet lucky change of space for his acrobatic actions. However, he definitely enforced participation of dancers and acrobats. Combat techniques, jumps, somersaults on springs, fencing, free-style kicks, muscles. And this is (physical) theatre! The acknowledgement belongs to Dan Fajmon in the main role – his discipline is jumping stilts; his stunts were dancers Pavel Mašek and Honza Novák who showed off in the above-mentioned manly disciplines and actor Petr Vaněk contributed with his art of fencing.

Jana Návratová