The SE.S.TA Centre for Choreographic Development has invited French choreographer Alban Richard, who will engage in a dialogue with NGP curator Andrea Steckerová, three Czech choreographers, and inspiring people of Prague’s local community to create a choreographic activation-performance in the form of a Baroque futuristic guided tour.
“I always work in museums with these questions in mind:
How can we practise, how can we inhabit an exhibition?
How are our bodies haunted by the bodies of artworks, even unconsciously?
What about the emotions evoked by discovering a place or a work of art?
How do old souls inhabit our own?
How are our emotions always connected to the same universal ground?
Why is there a strange ghostly mood that haunts our present?
Why are spectral figures so vivid in our imagination?”
A Fancy (Richard & Steckerová)
A Fancy is a journey between the Schwarzenberg and the Sternberg Palaces throughout the Old Masters I and II collections of the National Gallery Prague, and the architectures of the two palaces. It begins like a quite usual guided tour in one of the grand rooms of the Schwarzenberg Palace, then turns into a protest parade calling for “more art in our lives!” and lands lightly in the empty spaces of the Sternberg Palace haunted by frescoes and ghostly bodies emerging from abandoned corners.
Throughout the performance, the notion of Baroque is approached through the prism of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical research on the Fold and the Baroque: “Baroque does not refer to an essence, but rather to an operational function, to a trait. It keeps making folds. Baroque doesn’t invent the thing: there are all the folds from the East, the Greek, the Roman, Roman, Gothic, Classical folds… But Baroque bends and recurves the folds, pushes them to infinity, fold on fold, fold according to fold. The Baroque feature is the fold that goes to infinity.”
A Fancy is a piece of instrumental music that musicians invent while performing it.
During the performance, the audience will be accompanied by Timon of Athens: A Curtain Tune on a Ground (Z. 632), composed by Henry Purcell.
The SE.S.TA Centre for Choreographic Development organises the project in co-production with the National Choreographic Center in Caen-Normandy and the National Gallery Prague, and with the support of the Fortna Convent of Discalced Carmelites at Hradčany.
