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2017 BAZAAR Festival: MORE THAN NATION

19.01. 2017

From March 17th to 19th, the third edition of the Bazaar theatre and dance festival will take place at Prague’s Alfred ve dvoře (whose production company Motus is main festival organizer), Studio Alta, and Studio Hrdinů.

The Bazaar presents performances and works-in-progress by artists primarily from Central and Eastern Europe.The motto of this year’s festival is “More Than Nation,” and invited artists will address topics at the forefront of social consciousness in this region of Europe and beyond.Why are new nationalisms on the rise under the banner of populism? How has the role of women changed in post-socialist societies? To what extent is memory of the real dissipating in our new virtual worlds? The festival will open with the Slovenian Mladinsko Theatre’s controversial yet internationally acclaimed performance Damned Be the Traitor of His Homeland! by radical Balkan director Oliver Frljić (Ljubljana), and this will be the first ever presentation of one of the acclaimed works of this director in the Czech Republic.

As in the past, the festival’s climax is the Saturday Bazaar, a survey of excerpts from upcoming dance and theater projects from Poland, Germany, Israel, Serbia, Slovakia, and other countries. Participants in this year’s sampler include Agata Siniarska (Berlin/Warsaw) and Xenia Taniko Dwertmann (Berlin), the Friendly Fire collective (Leipzig) and their guests from Israel. From the Czech works-in-progress, audiences will be able to see excerpts by Zdenka Brungot Svíteková (Prague), Cristina Maldonado with Sodja Lotker (Prague), the Ufftenživot ensemble (Prague) and by Markéta Jandová (Prague).

This year’s festival brings back artists who have appeared here in the past. Sonja Pregrad (Zagreb) joins Iva Shveshtarova and Willy Prager (Sofia/Berlin) to present their production of Transformability; Agata Siniarska and Mādālina Dan (Bucharest/Berlin) will show their new performance Mothers of Steel; and straight from Lithuania comes Dior in Moscow by Ingrida Gerbutavičiūtė (Berlin/Klaipeda) and Agnija Šeiko (Klaipeda)with Albena Baeva (Sofia). Last but not least, outstanding dance creator Silke Grabinger (Linz) will make a presentation about a planned project by her SILK Fluegge ensemble based on the collaborative efforts of children and adult dancers from the Czech Republic and Austria.

Over the course of three jam-packed festival days, audiences can access a broad range of progressive and thematically controversial works, accompanied by presentations, workshops, and public discussions.Come and see the many different ways in which theater artists and dancers explore the question of what was, what is, and what will be more than nation(alism).

A festival pass costs CZK 700/400 (students, seniors, disabled) if purchased before March 1st, 2017. Pass after this dates cost CZK 800/500. Admission to individual performances is CZK 200/100, admission to the performance by Oliver Frljić is CZK 300/200.

Further information and details will be regularly updated online at www.alfredvedvore.cz.