DIALOG / Tereza Bartůňková & Jan Čtvrtník

An Audiovisual Meditation
performance length: 60 min
no language barrier
“Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find a thousand regions in your mind undiscovered. Travel them, and be expert in home-cosmography.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods

Dialog is a short journey through micro-landscapes of lines and sounds that are open to the audience’s imagination. All is subject to the simple principle of mutuality. Dialog creates a symbiotic relationship between two different means of communication: Sounds creating pictures, and pictures creating sounds. A musical-visual composition plays out before the audience’s eyes and ears in real time.

The performance was preceded by long-distance correspondence based not on words but on the exchange of sounds and images. With time, this correspondence gave rise to a series of intuitive illustrations and audio tracks that formed the foundation for a booklet called Dialog. Audiences can purchase this booklet of drawings, containing also a QR code link that bring you to the Dialog page on Soundcloud.

This entire process has been adapted for the stage, and during the performance the audience’s imagination plays a part, live and in real time, in creating an autonomous experience that adds another dimension to this dialog between sound and image.

Tereza Bartůňková and Jan Čtvrtník are classmates from the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theatre at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU). They have collaborated on several previous theatre projects, including Korvína (Corvinus, 2013), Vítězný houpací kůň (The Victorious Rocking Horse, 2014), and Nekonečný příběh (The Neverending Story, 2015). Tereza creates the visuals, and Jan does the sound. The duo was brought together by their similar artistic way of thinking.

Project webpage: soundcloud.com/dialogdialog

Premiere: 2. 6. 2016, Grid Prague
Support / Thanks to: MOTUS, producers of the Alfred ve dvoře Theatre, Nadace Život Umělce (Life of the Artist Foundation).