NEWS

26 Flora brings together female artists who confront the issue of identity and otherness in their work in a diverse, non-conformist and often very critical way: Adrienn Hód, Boglárka Börcsök or Tereza Lenerová…

There Is a Sense of Being production (photo by Adam Vačkář)

What is our perception as viewers when the dancers' bodies are completely covered? Including their faces? How far do we grasp for the meaning of partial movements and gestures when the dancers' identities remain hidden from us? The well-known Hungarian choreographer Adrienn Hód, who is visiting Flora for the third time, asks this question in her experimental performance Soft Spot. Slovak dancers Soňa Ferienčíková and Martina Hajdyla participated in the creation of the project and were awarded for their fascinating performance by the jury of the Czech Dance Platform.

Boglárka Börcsök, on the other hand, completely abandons identity in her durational performance Figuring Age (13, 14 and 15 May). She uses her body as an instrument or as an archive – a living archive of the past. She demonstrates her talent for transformation by embodying three now slightly forgotten representatives of dance modernism, Irén Preisich, Éva E. Kovács and Ágnes Roboz, who were over 90 years old when they Boglárka. The Hungarian choreographer becomes the medium into which the ghosts of the three observed dancers „enter“.

The so-called durational performance deals with time and its passage, with time as both subject and medium. It is a work whose duration exceeds the standard perceived length of a performance. It encourages calm, concentration. Often, for the performer, it involves a form of hardship, e.g. loneliness, exhaustion, pain, etc. Representatives include Marina Abramović, Chris Burden and Petr Štembera, who in his performance " Štěpování” (1975) engrafted a branch of a bush onto his own arm, thus referring to the connection between man and nature.

And this motif is remarkably present in the choreography There is a Sense of Being. For choreographer Tereza Lenerová, the extension of the dancers' limbs with branches is here the starting point of a possible story of human existence. It allows one to delve into the darkest layers of one's own existence, to rediscover archetypes and one's own wild animality.

Programme of the 26 Flora (active links for tickets):

Fri 12 May at 4.30 pm| S-klub
Adrienn Hód & ME-SA SOFT SPOT

Sat 13 May at 10.30 am | Konvikt – festival tent
Discussion about the Soft Spot production (free entry)

Sat 13 May at 3 pm | Sun 14 May at 1 pm | Mon 15 May at 5 pm | Museum of Modern Art – Trojlodí (Triple Aisle)
Boglárka Börcsök & Andreas Bolm FIGURING AGE

Sun 14 May at 14.15 pm| Museum of Modern Art – Besední sál
Discussion about the Figuring Age production (free entry)

Fri 19 May at 8 pm | S-klub
Tereza Lenerová THERE IS A SENSE OF BEING + discussion after the production

 

photo Vojtěch Brtnický / Andreas Bolm / Adéla Vosičková