SE.S.TA Blog

What separates life from death – a gesture. French choreographer Camille Mutel follows gestures in daily life, in ritual, in the countryside – tracing each movement until it becomes more than itself… We bring an interview with her from the international KoresponDance Festival 2025 in Žďár nad Sázavou where Mutel talks about her work drawing from tea ceremonies and French country tradition, and ends up with her twisting approach to collaboration with non-artists.

A fabric dances in the air. Your body mimics. Your chest expands, your gaze lifts, your breath deepens, your spine straightens, you feel pulled toward something greater than yourself. It’s beautiful, yet a technology of persuasion that bypasses critical thought and plant political affects directly into our bodies. In their performance AeReA (2019), which recently unsettled audiences at the KoresponDance festival, Ginevra Panzetti and Enrico Ticconi (IT/DE) strips flags of their national insignia to reveal their “plastic essence”. However, this raises questions: if the performance reveals the mechanisms of political spectacle, does it simultaneously reproduce them?

V rozhovoru o projektu Vigil Custody se Zden Brungot Svíteková (SK/CZ) z Ostružiny a Napsugár Trömböczky (HU) z výzkumné skupiny SVUNG vydávají do mnohovrstevnatého terénu úvah o materiální inteligenci těl – kamenných i lidských, o jejich tajuplně důvěrném příbuzenství, o metodách, setkáních s vědci a jazyce umění a vědy, který nás zcitlivuje vůči prostředí.

Dance relies on the human body – for it may be the most anthropocentric of all art forms. Yet through the body, we are connected to our environment – people and the entire geosphere. How can we simply be with that? How can we transcend human self-centeredness in aesthetics and ethics? The project Vigil Custody explores the question of “how to be” – both physically and intellectually, through art, and the science of geology. In this conversation, Zden Brungot Svíteková (Ostružina, SK/CZ) and Napsugár Trömböczky (SVUNG, HU) traverse a multilayered landscape of reflections on the material intelligence of bodies – both stone and human – on their mysteriously intimate kinship, and on the methods and language of art and science that sensitises us to that.

Choreografické fórum, moderovaná mezioborová diskuse, v níž se setkávají odborníci, profesionálové a nadšenci z oblasti současného umění, které přesahuje rámec scénických umění, se odehrálo 5.–8. 10. 2024. Kromě skvělé dramaturgie tanečního a pohybového divadla, jež se letos doplňovala s nabídkou festivalu 4+4 dny v pohybu jsme měli možnost zúčastnit se hned tří workshopů: s Angelou Conquet, Samuli Nordbergem a Branislavou Kuburović.