SE.S.TA Blog

Kathy Casey – dramaturge and director of Montreal Danse in Canada – was one of this year’s coaches who, together with Alice Chauchat – dance maker and artist based in Berlin and also a coach of this year’s Coaching Residencies – presented a conversation about their work during the round table entitled Beside the Black Box: Re-inventing Aesthetics of Coming Together on Sunday, 23 August 2020, at the National Gallery in Prague.

The artists Aneta Fodorová, Martina Dobiášová, Michal Kindernay, Žofie Blechová and Vojtěch Bárta came to the Estate in Žďár nad Sázavou with the multimedia project nov, which is being created in cooperation with the platform Third Space and Chemické divadlo. After the film experiment, nov expands into a performative installation. During the residency, the artists therefore focused on finding tools that will allow them to translate the content of the project into a completely different, performative language. How is the position of the viewer changing today? Why is it crucial to create a safe space? And is it even necessary to define your genre?

Roberta Legros Štěpánková, one of the artists who attended this summer’s ART KLASTRY Residency at the Estate in Žďár nad Sázavou, was keen to talk about her research and working process together with her partner Matthieu Legros. While talking about their work, core materials, points of departure and their collaboration, we were meandering around the question of how to orient and navigate the body and mind in the labyrinth of emptiness.

The second edition of the Dance Reading Club series When the Dancers Know the Answers took place on 17 June, again in the Living Room of Studio ALTA in Invalidovna – but this time in a more Decameron-like chiaroscuro mood. Under the name Good Night Readers, the ladies from the platform Bjornsonova hosted a two-hour-long live and online reading of excerpts from texts by feminist authors such as Alice Munro, Linda Stupart, Octavia Butler, Ariana Reines, Justin Frank, or singer Eartheater – meandering from detective and sci-fi narratives to erotica and poetry. Good Night Readers started as an initiative by the Bjornsonova platform during quarantine, as a sequel to Boccaccio’s Decameron – following the plague pandemic in the 14th century into today’s viral times.

The first edition of the Dance Reading Club series When the Dancers Know the Answers took place in the Living Room of Studio ALTA on Thursday 21 May 2020, and it hosted a two-hour-long discussion which started with the question: When the dance fails as a gesture? Observing how the piece Assemblage by Martina Hajdyla Lacová found its audience in the park due to the pandemic restrictions – sandwiched later with the video excerpts of performances mentioned in the discussed text Writing Laughter – Violent Desire by Jenn Joy – brought the discussion back to the core of what is the artistic gesture and why it requires gaps, stumbling and failures.