Presenting virtuosities that challenge norms and offering space for the rootless to grow; this year’s Tanec Praha festival presents established choreographers, offers space for the new, and perhaps most importantly, injects hope for Ukrainian contemporary dance to develop against all odds.
When I arrived in Prague for the festival, in a rush to get to the performance in time, I had to turn my head a few times before spotting the theatre: Ponec, organically camouflaged in the city landscape, with its deep green vines blending into the wall-covering mural, marks the border between the districts of Karlín and Žižkov. Here you can find a luscious arts oasis, huddled between two railway lines.
Experiencing the vivid atmosphere in and around the theatre, it’s difficult to imagine that the building was completely abandoned for 33 years. In 1968 it was basically left to rot, until 2001, when director Yvona Kreuzmannová won the city’s bid for revival, and turned it into a charming yet innovative theatre. Inside, the metal staircase pays homage to the venue’s industrial past as an 1888 iron factory. Upstairs, in the bar, is another humble relic, an original cinema price list from when the building housed Bio Ponec – referring to Ponec’s Royal Bioscope from 1910. Every corner of the theatre is meticulously and thoughtfully planned to make use of the space.
A few years ago, the theatre expanded its presence in the neighbourhood and settled in above the cosy music venue Čitárna Unijazz, with a large, bright dance studio, as well as an office for the production team.
The Tanec Praha festival, with its 37-year uninterrupted run, is a testament to high ambitions and strong survival instincts, having evolved from neo-classical to contemporary over the years and achieved a strong international profile. It ran for nearly a month this year, and was present in no less than 25 cities, making stage productions as well as smaller site-specific productions visible to people all over Czechia.
From the massive programme, I had the chance to catch a handful of performances, starting on a high note with Silvia Gribaudi’s R.OSA – 10 exercises for new virtuosities.
What is virtuosity?
Watching Gribaudi’s Grand Jeté during last year’s CODA Festival in Oslo, I was met with joyous energy on the stage. However, the more I thought about it afterwards, the more the near glorification of ballet’s dedication and discipline bothered me, as these are the other side of the coin of the ballet world’s unhealthy body ideals and destructive hierarchies – even though Gribaudi seems to hold a very different perspective, allowing her able to play with ballet-material in a humorous way.
But what, then, is virtuosity? Well, inside the ballet world, it is excruciatingly particular. Perhaps that’s why, for me, R.OSA – 10 exercises for new virtuosities, offered a closer, more pertinent peek into the choreographer’s ideas. Here is a work that contains as much joy as Grand Jeté, if not more, but which totally crumbles ballet’s rigid, normative frames, creating new space for dance itself to stride forward and be reclaimed.
The work challenges the type of body usually allowed to enter that stage and take space; to flaunt, to flirt, to be powerful as well as gentle, and finally, to perform a contemporary dance piece. With her fierce and unapologetic performativity, Claudia Marsicano shows that a dancer with a voluptuous body can do so – and also completely own it.
A powerful performer with a radiant presence, infectious humour and vital energy, Marsicano has the audience mesmerised from beginning to end. In a turquoise bathing suit on the floor awash in pink light, she starts off with gentle movements, hands on her hips, while singing an a cappella version of Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’. Her voice carries all the way through the theatre without her forcing it. No microphone needed here.
Audience participation is not my favourite thing in general, but during a series of communal ports de bras [balletic arm-sequences], I sneak a peek around the audience, only to see a small girl a few seats away with a beaming smile to accompany her energetic arm movements. Marsicano offers encouraging words – ‘Bella! Bellissima!’ An old man in front of me, in his 70s, follows the sequence as well, and I can see the stiffness of his back softening with each breath.
Marsicano manages to draw the public into the performance itself, and then seamlessly moves on to another sequence. Time passes quickly, the dramaturgy is tight, and before we know it, she wraps up the show with an incredible facial gymnastic dance to Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’, in which she puts famous rubber faces like Jim Carrey’s to shame.
In a relaxed after-talk with Kreuzmannová in the theatre bar, Marsicano explained with a radiant smile that after this piece she dared to call herself not merely an actress with many strange talents, but a dancer as well. The title is well deserved. The solo, created 8 years ago, has since been performed more than 200 times, all over Europe, as well as in Canada and Brazil and elsewhere.
The movement material for the performance – the 10 so-called ‘exercises’ – was carefully chosen through the artistic process, in which Gribaudi and Marsicano together searched for new virtuosities. They covered a broad range of tasks based on Marsicano’s talents and interests, and ended up with a range of material, from simple, ballet-inspired movements through gymnastics and singing to extreme rhythmic facial choreography.
One thing is for sure: as ideals of beauty are continuously warped in our contemporary world, this work reaches way beyond its own artistic power and may very well be more relevant than ever.
Naïve drawings and skilful dancing in the city landscape
Experiencing Luminous Daisies two evenings in a row – Friday evening in Brno, in a largely empty athletics stadium, and Saturday night in Prague’s lively Žižkov-area – showed how differences in backdrop can create dramatic differences in effect.
The work is created by Adriana Štefaňáková and Sten Heijster, and the concept is simple: Heijster’s hand-drawn animations are projected onto different walls, while Štefaňáková dances, in conversation with the light-creatures and flowers appearing on the walls around her.
The narrative is clear from the beginning: the work, as the title suggests, circles around the classic ‘prediction game’ or superstition of removing petals from a daisy one by one, to discover if someone has feelings for you or not.
The spoken introduction, where Heijster explains the theme came across as more than a little redundant, as the projections spell out everything later. With his computer, projector and loudspeaker strapped to a bicycle, Heijster leads the audience to different locations. Each time he stops, his drawings are projected across walls, the music plays and Štefaňáková dances. The bell of his bicycle signals the audience to move to the next location, while the music, turned on and off for each location, creates an impression of short sketches rather than a continuous journey.
Štefaňáková, a talented young dancer with an exquisite combination of power and agility, adapts to all the obstacles of a city landscape, from dancing on the hard pavement and climbing tall staircases, to elegantly navigating between audience members and passers-by, who simply by being there become characters in the story.
Some funny coincidences added imagined layers to the piece: a little girl in a window, an old man on a scooter, a pair of hilariously groomed poodles walking by, looking as cartoonish as Heijster’s drawings, if not more. These additional stories, appearing in my mind as the performance met the real world, are chance dramaturgies, a natural consequence of working site-specifically, in the midst of people going about, living their lives. They are also more likely to happen in a lively city.
In Brno, the empty athletics stadium felt a lot more like a closed-off, intimate theatre setting, with the result that the performance’s own conceptual framework came across as a little underdeveloped. Certain locations on our route were so dark it was difficult to fully enjoy Štefaňáková’s dancing compared with the luminous animations, although several small children in the audience reacted to the performance with big eyes, stretching their fingers out and uttering spontaneous, engaged comments: ‘Look! Oh no, she’s sad now…’
In Prague, where most audience members were adults, the contrast between the naïve drawings, the beautiful dancing and the harsh city landscape created a different vibe. Young adults focusing on daisies and innocent love might be an unusual city activity – even more on a bustling Saturday night in Prague – yet the contrasts between the childlike story and the city’s graffiti-adorned walls added a welcome melancholic touch to the simple, fairytale approach. A raw, punk backdrop seems to be key for any wished-for urban poetry to pop.
Moving Borders
The EU-funded Moving Borders project, initiated by Aerowaves Europe, Tanec Praha, Arte Sella (Italy) and La Briqueterie (France), was launched after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, with the aim of supporting Ukrainian dancers and choreographers across Europe, and informing approaches to welcoming displaced artists and civilians.
The main artist for the project in Prague is Yana Reutova, who, together with her Brazilian colleague Clara da Costa, gave a site-specific performance called What a Woman Hold in a park in Karlín. Here, the audience followed the two performers as their characters unravelled – da Costa in multiple colourful layers of clothing, carrying bags and grimacing, Reutova in a princessy dress, head in the clouds, serene-looking. Slowly, the discrepancies between them disintegrate, and both become strong women, silently screaming, carrying each other, bringing the audience closer.
The performance was presented as a site-specific version of what the two had created together during their residency, and while the costumes and body language seemed to suggest something specific, the movement concept remained unclear until the end, when any previous dramaturgies were finally abandoned and the performance spilled into an audience-participation ending, with dancing in the park while enjoying sparkling wine and grapes.
Two other Ukrainian dance artists, Anastasiia Pavlovska and Olena Korotkova, were giving movement workshops for children during the festival, at the Žižkov Highline. The day I was going to watch was too hot for the workshop to take place. I did, though, catch a videoed performance of three works by Ukrainian dance artists that had just been presented at Ponec as part of the residency programme Unity in Motion.
Searching for roots while exploring the present
Swind, created by Daria Koval and Alina Tskhovryebova and performed by the choreographers and Yana Reutova – all strong performers – had its world premiere. The piece is an abstract, spatial composition, echoing the post-modern dance of the 1960s, with unpretentious costumes in faded complementary colours paired with simple lighting. The first half offers no music, except for the gradually intensifying sound of their dancing: the clap of a hand on a thigh, the stamp of a foot hitting the ground… Yet the dancers’ bodies are not merely instruments. Sure, there’s an Yvonne Rainer-esque quality to the simplistic lack of narrative, but there are plenty of playful smiles exchanged between the three, revealing their shared joy of movement. During the second half, playfulness gives way for patterned walking, which at times verges on marching, yet never leaves the stylistic gaunt of pedestrian contemporary dance, while a subtle droning sound enters. From this point, the dancers’ gazes shift to always face the front, while shadows on the wall behind them multiply, only to slowly disappear, until a surprise blackout ends the performance.
There is no conclusion, no tying together of threads or sense of looping back, and perhaps this is the point dramaturgically: in life there is no circle, there’s only putting one foot in front of the other, experiencing it all moment to moment. Whichever way one might interpret it, dance for dance’s own sake stays in the front seat here, and it’s executed with simplicity and precision.
Womanhood by Yana Reutova and Clara da Costa – the full version of the site-specific performance I had seen in the park – still had a sense of being a work in progress: the concept, other than what the title spells out, is unclear also in the stage version. The two performers are individually powerful and complement each other well, but the lack of development in the piece leaves promising scenes unexplored, making it a little un-dynamic, despite some powerful moments and ambitious attempts.
The highlight of this evening was placed in the middle of the programme. The solo Quiet Waters from 2023, created and performed by Daria Koval, is a work which indeed contains the depth the title suggests. From the dense blackout, as if she was born from darkness and stillness, Koval is suddenly there, carrying an intense presence. Her soaked dress clings to her body, water dripping from her hair onto the stage. Slow undulations transform into mechanic twitches, while the music by Viktor Rekalo (cello) and Igor Sayenko (accordion) creates a looming landscape. I sense a reference to Pina Bausch’s version of The Rite of Spring, although here the enemy is invisible, while the body of the dancer fights alone, surrounded by darkness, slowly devoured by the music. Suddenly it’s as though the sound comes from within Koval herself and she becomes a moving sculpture bathed in light as she slaps her own body with an impressive rhythmic control. What hits me is that her movement seems genuinely to come from within, and that the technique seems rooted in Koval’s own body, rather than being an iteration of any other choreographer’s influence.
There are moments in film photography, most often in close-ups, that skilled actors manage to convey emotion with the use of their eyes. It’s rare to experience this on stage, but I feel that through Koval’s eyes, I can see both outlines and details, and most of all flashes of pain.
Despite its vibrating calm, this solo is far from quiet; it’s a whirlwind of emotion, a well-crafted and beautifully performed solo which manages to fit a whole spectrum of associations into 10 minutes. Quiet Waters is a small pearl of a piece, and it’s no surprise that it keeps on being performed 2 years after its creation.
Ponec also hosted a public presentation of the Moving Borders project which, as Kreuzmannová said in her introduction, showed the different paths Ukrainian artists have taken. Some use art to overcome trauma. Some do both community work and art – including Reutova, who focuses on working with children with trauma when she is not working on her own dance projects, having discovered the power of movement to help others through a movement therapy course. Interestingly, Reutova added that for her, movement is not therapy: the stress of trying to keep a dance career going as a refugee casts a shadow on its potentially calming power. For her own sense of healing, she has turned more to visual arts therapy – which together with somatic practice and film therapy have also been offered by Tanec Praha and their partners.
Several Ukrainian dance artists I have spoken to lately express a frustration of a lack of roots, of not knowing their own traditional dances. Still, they go on: they explore the different aspects of dance available to them, including such somatic, spatial and emotional approaches. The defiant Ukrainian dancers and choreographers who right now struggle to stay creative while their country is in crisis may very well be the starting point of a new wave unfolding.
Who knows what the future holds. If American postmodern dance in the 60s and 70s marked a departure from conventions, and German Tanztheater picked up the thread from the Ausdruckstanz of the 20s in elevating expression over form, each did so within particular social and historical contexts. For now, Ukrainian contemporary dance is budding, and there is no doubt that, if given the space and time to do so, it can continue to search for its roots while developing new branches, its very own future traditional contemporary dances. ●
01–26.06.2025, Prague, Czechia