4+4 Days in Motion 2019 – International theatre and dance program
5.10. ARCHA Theatre / 20:00
Jeremy WADE (USA): THE CLEARING
Jeremy Wade’s long-term focus are the themes of care, treatment, health and support. He exposes overt vulnerability and assumes a critical stance towards mechanisms which exert violence towards people or nature. Wade builds on queer and feminist strategies, the ethics of relationships and the subjectivity of zombies. His works disturb and provoke. His most recent project is a hallucinogenic disassembly of pieces of reality which calls for solidarity and an effort to deal with problems, to transform the social structures and phenomena which make us sick.
https://vimeo.com/334135899
https://vimeo.com/334136340
6.10. ARCHA Theatre / 20:00
SAMIRA ELAGOZ (FINLAND / THE NETHERLANDS): COCK, COCK…WHO’S THERE?
This young Finish artist with Egyptian roots focuses on men. She does it for a very good reason: she was raped and now she’s transposing this experience to a documentary plane. However personal her work might be, it touches on broader social and political issues such as loneliness in the digital world, the performative quality of real-world situations, and the Me Too campaign.
7.10. ARCHA Theatre / 20:00
Gérald Kurdian (France): Hot Bodies – Stand Up
Gérald Kurdian uses live electronic music, short performative sequences, singing, dance, video and documentaries to create synergies which revive the metamorphoses of the sexual revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries. The texts of his sensuous collage introduce feminist and queer activism, present interviews with people whose concept of sexuality and/or gender transcends the stereotypes.
8.10. PONEC Theatre / 20:00
Niv Sheinfeld & Oren Laor (Israel): THE THIRD DANCE
Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor, partners in art and life, are returning to Prague for the third time to broach extremely personal subjects. Their “Third Dance is willing to risk everything”, to quote a critic. Fifteen years of working and living together have led them to a reflection on love, immortality and the personal need of recognition. Romantic dance gestures, Mahler’s sentimental music and a basket of flowers are some of the cliches which comment on their shared artistic past, the “show” which binds them together. In a space as open as possible and a close proximity to the audience, the compassionate gestures of their mature bodies reveal their personal histories as well as the truth about time and love.
9.10. ARCHA Theatre / 20:00
Louis Vanhaverbeke (Belgium): MIKADO REMIX
One of the most frequently asked questions on Google is: “What do I do to be normal?” Usually, we are told what is abnormal but the limits of normality remain vague and nondesript. In his latest project, Louis Vanhaverbeke explores the frontier of normality in both its imaginary and literal sense.
10.10. ARCHA Theatre / 20:00
Silke Huysmans & Hannes Dereere (Brazil / Belgium): MINING STORIES
On November 5, 2015 in the mountains of the Brazilian region of Minas Gerais, a dam containing toxic mining waste broke. The devastating mud flood buried several villages before it poured into the 400-mile Rio Doce river. The catastrophe brought the region where at least three out of every four people worked in the mining industry into the state of a tabula rasa. Silke Huysmans grew up in Minas Gerais, a few miles from the site of the catastrophe. Twenty years later, she returned to Brazil with Hannes Dereere to talk to the people affected by the incident.
11.10. PONEC Theatre / 20:00
Trajal HarreLl (USA): JUDSON CHURCH IS RINGING IN HARLEM
In the early 1960s, two separate dance traditions or dance styles started evolving in New York. In the desecrated Judson Church in Greenwich Village, a group of artists surrounding composer Robert Dunn was exploring the principles of everyday life: they analyzed walking, sitting on a chair, the motions while sweeping with a broom, etc. It was their reaction to the spectacularity, narrativity and expressiveness of modern dance and a way to search for a more contemporary expression. Their experimental work became known as dance post-modernism.
12.10. DOX / 18:00
Sorour Darabi (iran / France): SAVUŠUN
In January, Shiites commemorate the legend of Siyâvosh, the noble Persian prince who voluntarily suffered torture and passed through fire to prove his innocence and clear his reputation of an evil slander. In his honor, people meet in the streets, in city squares and in shrines to share sadness and sorrow, express pain and fear in gestures and vent emotions which demand revenge and violence. Savušun literally means “mourning for Siyâvosh” and Iranian artist Sorour Darabi developed this historical and mythological subject into an ode to vulnerability.
12.10. ARCHA Theatre / 20:00
Ntando Cele (JAR / Switzerland): BLACK OFF
The author and protagonist of this live musical stand-up comedy was 10 years old when Nelson Mandela was released from prison. She was fourteen when the apartheid officially ended in South Africa, her home country. Even though the country where she was born has officially been a democracy for more than 20 years now, racism is still omnipresent there. And not only there. Ntando keeps encountering various forms of racism even in Switzerland where she currently works. Most often, racism manifests as ignorance. The Swiss claim they have no connection with colonialism which makes them less sensitive to racism. In their artistic world – on TV, in theaters – artists with non-European backgrounds are still often presented as “exotic”, “native”, “savage”, etc.