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PRESS RELEASE: ARE WE STILL OURSELVES? EU project for the movement of artists and society in Prague

02.07. 2014

This Wednesday, July 23rd at 13:00, at the Alfred ve dvoře Theatre, provocative performing artists taking place in a groundbreaking EU Culture-funded project will share the results of their research to date. This free public event will tour audiences also to the Studio Alta, and Tanec Praha / Ponec theatres to meet all six artists.

Twenty-five years after the Revolution we have discovered that the model of coexistence that society has been calling for is not easily achieved. We identified with the idea of a functioning civil society, but for now we are mostly trying just to keep that idea alive. In neighbouring European countries we are currently witnessing creeping constraints being placed on civil society and even the outright violation of civil liberties. The contemporary arts are very responsive to this and often directly affected by it. An example is the recent cancellation of a production of ‘Golgota Picnic’ in Poland. Civil society is more fragile than we thought. How has our identity change in the past twenty-five years?

Since 1989 the dance arts and progressive theatre have gone through the same revolutionary changes as society as a whole. It is as natural for them to seek answers to questions of identity as it is for any other field of the arts. In a collaborative effort, several prominent European institutions have managed to bring together approximately fifty top dance artists, theorists and curators working in the field of contemporary performance and launch the IDENTITY.MOVE! project. The project is a platform for a broad network of independent body-based arts, extending from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean, united in artistic and theoretical research. The theme of the project is both simple and infinitely complex: identity.

‘The countries of central and eastern Europe are still trying to read their past without the residue of propaganda and manipulation. They are asking who they were, who they are and where they are going. They are exploring their own identity and creating their identity in a new context’, is how the idea behind the project is summed up by theatre critic Jana Bohutínská, who is one of the Czech-based curators of the IDENTITY.MOVE! project, along withEwan McLaren, artistic director of the Alfred ve dvoře Theatre.

During the month of July six top choreographers, theorists and artists from central, eastern and southern Europe have been meeting in Prague on artistic Laboratory residencies: Sonja Pregrad and Nives Sertić, Pavlos Kountouriotis and Ben J. Riepe, and Agnija Šeiko and Ingrid Gerbutavičiūtė. The artistic pairs are working until July 24th in the Alfred ve dvoře, Studio Alta, Ponec Theatres in Prague and at the SE.S.TA Centre for the Advancement of Choreography in Ždár nad Sázavou. Meanwhile, Halka Třešňáková and Petra Tejnorová are taking part in the project as representatives of the Czech Republic, on artistic residencies in Poznan, Poland.

These summer residencies are a key stage in the IDENTITY.MOVE! project, which will culminate in Prague in Marc, 2015, when all 50 project participants from fourteen European countries will come together for the Bazaar, a public festival/symposium event and the project’s final big public presentation.

‘Conceptions of identity in this part of Europe have oscillated since 1989 between self-confidence and a hankering after western ideals. We lost faith in the East, but with that perhaps we lost also faith in something that is an integral part of who we are. Identity is itself mutable, it is constantly in flux. Dance and physical theatre is one artistic platform that naturally reflects this. In IDENTITY.MOVE!, however, we want to focus on this essential theme directly and to work with characteristics specific to this part of Europe. That is one reason why I’m pleased that the workshops for artists in the Czech Republic are to be headed by coaches who have roots in this region’, says Ewan McLaren. Summer workshops as part of the summer Lab residencies in the Czech Republic are being led by Sodja Zupanc Lotker, Viliam Dočolomanský and Wojtek Ziemilski.

www.alfredvedvore.cz | www.identitymove.eu

Main organizer: Goethe Institute in Warsaw
Co-organizers: Motus, producers of Alfred ve dvoře Theatre; Centre for Culture and East European Performing Arts Platform in Lublin; National School of Dance in Athens
Local partners: Studio Alta, Tanec Praha/Ponec, SE.S.TA Centre for the Advancement of Choreography

The IDENTITY.MOVE! project is supported by the EU CULTURE program. It is also cofinanced by the City of Prague and the Ministry of Culture