Pražské quadriennale 2015

People reading out loud, together, on the street.

Such a simple form of collective demonstration. Perhaps the purest way of expressing common will and the most basic strategy for claiming the space. Being together, acting together and wanting together – naivety to the extent of being suspicious, if not embarrassing. And rare.

It did happen, in Poznań. People stood together and they read. Nothing more. It was a public reading of the text of Rodrigo Garcia’s performance of Golgotha Picnic and a protest against censorship. But these readings were also a claiming of space, and a performative gesture of speaking-to-possess. At the same time, the taking over was executed as a theatrical performance with the use of the most ephemeral tool – voice.

The disturbance in the public sphere caused by an act so modest seems symptomatic. It reveals the background of the questionof who owns the public space. How does space become owned, even possessed and fixed with content? What are the strategies for spreading the message and reaching others? And who are these others? How efficient - performative, if you like – can people be with their voices? Can they achieve universality? Can voice strategies become universal?


Voice-over, a city tour and a live presentation will form a two-chapter performative tale on owning, possessing and appropriating space. Wojtek Ziemilski and Michał Libera's performance will use reenactment, impersonation and playback techniques and different forms of electrical and acoustical amplification to highlight the importance and ambiguity of the voice in claiming space. Playing with the idea of voice as the ultimate human property, a signature and a proof of reality, they will explore the agency of the speakers (in both meanings of the term). With reference to the neutrality and transparency of the air – voice's medium – we will deal with the politics and proxemics of open spaces.
, a city tour and a live presentation will form a two-chapter performative tale on owning, possessing and appropriating space. Wojtek Ziemilski and Michał Libera's performance will use reenactment, impersonation and playback techniques and different forms of electrical and acoustical amplification to highlight the importance and ambiguity of the voice in claiming space. Playing with the idea of voice as the ultimate human property, a signature and a proof of reality, they will explore the agency of the speakers (in both meanings of the term). With reference to the neutrality and transparency of the air – voice's medium – we will deal with the politics and proxemics of open spaces.

The walk through the city will relate to owning and possessing and take as its stage one of the most crowded spots in Prague - the square in front of the Church of St. Salvador. Can we take any of the Golgotha Picnic Poznań voice strategies and use them in this particular environment? Once in the conference space, this question will become a more private and intimate one.

 

In international maritime language the sound signal of five short blasts means “I am not sure of your intentions and am concerned we are going to collide”. Vessels use the audible signal of five short blasts to communicate this alarm, using a horn, a whistle, or whatever is to hand. 5 Short Blasts is inspired and deeply informed by this maritime expression of uncertainty, drawing attention to the shared act of navigating the unknown.

This city tour is a critical incursion onto the Moldau, a river laden with historical and cultural meaning and existing today as a playground for tourist boats. These boats are the architectural obtrusion, navigating and / or confined by lochs representing past functions and meanings. It is an experimental in situ work focusing on contested narratives of place, realised in composed sound that intersects with ambient sonic atmosphere.

A journey in small boats and in four stages: across the swiftly / slowly running river across to the lock; drifting down past the Shooting island; across the top of the cascade; and, lingering under the bridge arch. Our small fleet quietly turns our ears toward the incidental and inter-dependent orchestration of weather, water, people and boats. The work literally navigates through a series of overlapping spheres of activity, signalled with a composed radio broadcast that inexplicably and ambiguously blends with the ambient soundscape. It is a choreography of overlapping activities and an orchestration of all kinds of sound signals and voices associated with the water, with its intersection of industry, community and recreation. Each stage orchestrates and contextualizes collected sounds and speech, from the Czech Republic, framed by original texts by Pavel Brycz.

Originally created in the Port of Melbourne and the lower Yarra River, Melbourne Australia with the local water communities. 5 Short Blasts continues our aim to present experimental in situ works that focus on contested narratives of place, realised in composed sound works. 5 Short Blasts will traverse an urban space of accreted transformation that is on the apparently unchanging architectures of old Prague.

Five Short Blasts was first presented in Melbourne and produced by the City of Melbourne’s Arts Participation Program with support from Port of Melbourne Corporation. This adaptation has been supported by IETM-Australia Council for the Arts Collaboration Project.

Historically, theatres roamed the city and acted as pioneers of urban development, bringing culture to the areas in which they set up. In the case of Barcelona, from Las Ramblas to Passeig de Gr?cia, and from there to Paral·lel, theatres have played a crucial role in shaping the city. But once the urban fabric is established, the same dynamics that had attracted the theatres then cast them out to more peripheral, and even deprived, areas.

The first part of this lecture aims to map the theatres in the city of Barcelona during various periods of history, summarising the main episodes in the urban spread of theatres from the 15th to the 20th century. The second part of the presentation will focus on theatres from the late 20th century through to the present day, when they have found their place in the city in what we have called ‘other spaces’. Through various strategies, such spaces have found a place in the city by seeking out areas under transformation, unique spaces with affordable rents in the city’s hidden folds, in receptive social and cultural contexts, where they have forged bonds with the surrounding environment. Interestingly, these ‘other spaces’ for theatres can often be found in the shadow of major cultural venues.

This lecture will look at some Barcelona buildings that have been renovated, recycled, transformed and adapted for the stage. From associations and cooperatives that gave refuge to avant-garde proposals in the 1970s to the micro-spaces that host small companies in recycled spaces: these historical spaces adapt and open up to the public to put on live art as the city’s peripheral and marginalised areas are conquered by the theatre, either ephemerally or permanently. The city’s relationship with all these spaces is the reflex (both product and promoter) of cyclical dynamics that, depending on the circumstances, may fit with what Sanchis Sinisterra defined as the “Argentinization of the theatre”.

The ideas and strategies used by Peter Brook, Jean-Guy Lecat and Antoine Vitez in existing spaces have also made their presence felt, either explicitly or implicitly, in these ‘other spaces’, including the Saló Diana, the first Teatre Lliure at the headquarters of the Cooperativa La Lleialtat de la Vila de Gr?cia, the Antic Teatre in the premises of an old Catholic Workers’ Association, La Poderosa in a house-factory in the Raval, La Caldera in an old belt factory in Gr?cia, and the installation of La Perla 29 in one of the buildings at the old Hospital de la Santa Creu de Barcelona. This network of spaces showcases Barcelona’s most creative, and least-known, side, far away from the bright lights and billboards.


The City and its Tremor

Can we observe without a specific viewpoint?
Can we observe without a specific viewpoint?

Can we look at a city afresh?

Can we have new experiences in familiar surroundings?

The main thoroughfare linking Karlův most and Staroměstské náměstí folds the surrounding urban network in on itself, offering a haven to social concerns and initiatives that the main road has no room for.

Our promenade performance through Prague reveals one of the folds in its urban network. In this performance we sketch out one of the city’s main folds, which hosts a series of cultural activities that breathe and live outside the heartbeat of the main thoroughfare.

We are heirs to a world that has established ideas of progress based on the under-development of human capacity, with areas of control that go beyond what is public and enter into the private sphere, confirming the fears of turn-of-the-century science fiction, so that human beings no longer feel that they are themselves; they have studied their frailties and built a world on the scale of their weaknesses. Their minds have lost track in the face of so many claims on their attention and placebos that inhibit physical experience.

Individuals and urban space are the main tools used in our installation. This sculptural unit displays the forgotten architectural nakedness of human beings, the combination of their desires and needs, liberation from who they are and a reminder that what human beings show themselves to be is a finite manifestation subject to a real body and time scale. It is a warning to let go of what is confusing us, holding us back and tormenting us.


De Profundis is an invitation to let go of our cultural, emotional and spiritual prejudices. It proposes a brief parenthesis by way of abstraction, momentarily taking us away from the macro-organism of the PQ'15 and reducing it to the micro-organism constituted by us as individuals.
is an invitation to let go of our cultural, emotional and spiritual prejudices. It proposes a brief parenthesis by way of abstraction, momentarily taking us away from the macro-organism of the PQ'15 and reducing it to the micro-organism constituted by us as individuals.

Viewers are not mere bystanders: their presence provides sound, their bodies generate intermittence in the propagation of light and their perception substantially changes the way in which the work is defined.

The location of the installation is not accidental. A religi-ous building is formed by a community of individuals in connection with forces that go beyond their understanding. Ever since human beings have had consciousness, faith and the spaces conceived to contain it have been linked to their identity. There is a set of values that point to the Church of Saint Thomas as the ideal location for the event, complementing and enhancing the installation.


De profundis is a voyage of initiation from the physical, sensory and social points of view, where the experiences that the group of individuals participating in the activity go through focus on unconsciously entering into contact with the ideas that lie behind the concept of the sculptural object: trapping the moment, the light, the reflections and the darkness.
is a voyage of initiation from the physical, sensory and social points of view, where the experiences that the group of individuals participating in the activity go through focus on unconsciously entering into contact with the ideas that lie behind the concept of the sculptural object: trapping the moment, the light, the reflections and the darkness.

The group will sit on the ground and perform relaxation and meditation exercises. Each participant will have a pinhole camera made from a simple aluminium container (to trap the instant, the light). The aim is not to reveal the image and exhibit it, but to consider the idea that part of the moment shared has been trapped inside the containers, as a metaphor for our bodily existence.

“All the world is a stage” is no longer a metaphor but has become a reality in itself. Staging and theatricalisation are crucial features of our contemporary, mediatized society. Not only do we use today’s stages (in both physical and virtual space) to carefully construct our identity and present it to others, we are also very much aware of the fact that we are being watched. Another aspect of the theatricalisation of everyday life is the growing desire to be immersed in different worlds and to have new experiences. Public space is increasingly staged and designed to produce these experiences. Sometimes it manifests itself in guaranteed adventures, providing us with an illusion of the new. At other times these worlds and the experiences they have to offer surprise or even unsettle us.

Within the context of the theatricalisation of everyday life, public space can be observed and studied as scenography. The multiplication of staged and imagined realities can be felt most intensely in urban public spaces where layers of tourism, entertainment, consumption, art, work, leisure, history, policies, and politics come together. It is precisely in these spaces that we can see how people live between realities and how they cope with its complexity.

We distinguish between five different coping strategies: to shelter, flee, fight, negotiate and surrender. Each of these strategies/practices entails a particular attitude towards reality. Either a movement away from reality (hide or shelter), an engagement with reality (fight or negotiate) or a plunge into reality (surrender).

With the Dutch contribution to the Section of Countries and Regions we aim to collaboratively map these strategies in the public space of Prague. What examples of fleeing, sheltering, fighting, negotiating or surrendering do we encounter? And how does the scenography of public space either enable or disable these practices?

Collective mapping practices with digital means allows us to engage with public space while negotiating with it. This means of mapping is performative and participatory. Collective mapping is furthermore not a process of getting any supposed reality right, it is a way of constructing forms of knowledge that can cope with multiple perspectives on reality.

Visitors to PQ are invited to participate in a series of collaborative mapping sessions. We aim to visualise the imaginative coping strategies available at certain locations. Through mapping we want to introduce participants to a novel way of studying/ engaging with public space and its potentialities. A different strategy will be mapped every day. After each tour there will be time to share experiences and observations.

The digital tool designed for this can help scenographers and designers map the qualities of public space, while paying special attention to its spatial design and the kind of practices that this design enables/disables. They map their observations while visitors of the Dutch exhibition space can witness the formation of the archive in real time and have a look at a map that will visualize what strategies are to be found where.

KOKIMO is preparing a site-specific performative piece (a walk) for the Performing Space exhibition at the 2015 Prague Quadrennial. The piece will be inspired by the space in which it will be performed – the architectural space and the multi-layered city space surrounding it. The group is interested in exploring the intersection of architecture and staging: spatiality, theatricality and experientiality.

The performance will explore how architecture and space are experienced in various contexts. For example, how does the history of a built environment or foreign auditory stimulation influence our experience of a place? What does it feel like to act unexpectedly within a certain urban context? The performance attempts to show how different layers of time, space, experience and imagination are present in a place, and aims to bring some of these layers to the surface, making them more intensively perceptible using a performative structure.

In all of KOKIMO’s performances, the group’s members work as technicians, performers and co-participants, enabling a shared and lived experience.

The performance lasts one hour and is for approximately 10 participants at a time.

 

This project is a part of the Portuguese curatorial project that has proposed identity as a construction linked to its revelation and vice versa. Similarly, the categories of live events that we have proposed seem to result from a compromise between the event and its built environment. It is created at the same instance that is revealed, it is interdependent and always local, sharing with identity a sense of place that is not transferred onto another site, that is not rewritten. Spatial/temporal actions can be disputed forms of using space to create meaning or identity.

The project consists of a presentation entitled By the Book or By the Space: a “conferenceless” meeting in a classic space (a lecture room) that, like a guided tour, invites the audience to think about that space while developing a series of physical manifestations. Using objects, images, actions and other teasers to break down the language typical for that kind of space: how can we stretch this model to include a hybrid format, that can be like a guided tour in the sense that the materiality being presented is transformed by speech? What changes when we change the things we are looking for even if we are listening to the same discourse? Could scenography be a way of producing identity? A kind of performative conference connected more strongly with the visual experience than with the auditory process with which it is usually associated.

The other event is a guided tour entitled By the Book or By the Space: a “guideless” tour, an experience more similar to a real talk, like a presentation of ideas, an experience where the route is not the ultimate purpose but the development of blocks of thoughts planted in different aspects of the same space. It is an interior guide tour at the Clam-Gallas Palace, inside the particularities of one interior space and the meeting of an interior person. It is not about that space in particular but about how we can use it to create an experience of words, a form of identity involving all the senses, and an invitation to discover minor architectural features in dialogue with concepts. A performative guided tour that does not guide the visitors but offers an experience of possible reality recreation.

 

Our focus in the field of performative architecture lies in our interest in the in-between spaces of a social construction. Instead of improving general understanding of the physical materiality of architecture, we have chosen the broader aspect of network space. We observe the functioning of great man-made systems that arrange space in a comprehensible, universal way. Focusing on the small parts that confirm the established structure allows us to comprehend its function in the overall picture.

In December 2013, at Homlungen lighthouse in Norway, we decided to translate the location of a single lighthouse, far out in the ocean, into sound as it responded to the lonesome atmosphere of the lighthouse architecture that we were experiencing ourselves. In order to do this, we created improvised vocal sounds, with our bodies reacting to the visual appearance of the surrounding lighthouses, forming a system of nautical signals.



Description of walk:


Our proposal for a tour of the city is the creation of a multimedia platform. Participants' current locations and a map of the city center of Prague are the key elements for creating the required interaction. Using a variety of pre-recorded Bell Rings uploaded to the common platform, we provide a base for the symphony. Each individual has an opportunity to have a walk through the city of Prague, following their own intuition. As the visitor moves, the symphony is continuously built, depending on the chosen route. Eventually, every Composition of Bells is just as different as a single boat's perception of various blinking lighthouses in the ocean, describing the time and space through which the individual has been moving.



Description of talk:

In our presentation we refer to the potential of performative spatial possibilities that this subject represents. Of greater interest in our project is the individual and their own space, and how much he can perceive from this. We live and move in a system of references, and it is our ability to read these references that can broaden the information we receive. The next step is what we do with that information and how we translate it into our personal lives. The use of sound to describe space is an option that we are interested in exploring further.
In our presentation we refer to the potential of performative spatial possibilities that this subject represents. Of greater interest in our project is the individual and their own space, and how much he can perceive from this. We live and move in a system of references, and it is our ability to read these references that can broaden the information we receive. The next step is what we do with that information and how we translate it into our personal lives. The use of sound to describe space is an option that we are interested in exploring further.

During the presentation we will project the naval chart

of the Homlungen area in Norway and zoom in on the spots where lighthouses are marked. As we show the spots of the lighthouses on the map we create a choir, translating naval signs into sound. We will transfer the complex naval signalling system from a two-dimensional map into physical space. Further on, we will open the background of the first phase of the project development at Homlungen and also present different types of network-based systems in the context of Prague, focusing on one particular example. The sounds we produce at the Homlungen Lighthouse create a sort of song, describing our specific location. In relating to Prague - how can a performed sound describe a space? We therefore came up with the sound of Bells. We consider it to be more than just an atmospheric soundscape: but bells as a time-lapsed performance and containing a message. We will therefore describe our concept in relation to 100 spirals from all over the city of Prague.

1. Film: Resonant City: Elusive Paths

The potential of the New Zealand landscape to drama-tically rupture and shake is subtly infused into NZ architecture; our buildings and cities are actors in an ominous, potential performance.


A short film will explore the notion of a radically altered city, drawing on the transformations brought about by the Christchurch city earthquakes of 2011. It will explore transient conditions in the city in an evocative visual medium, enabling the viewer to encounter a shifting, performative architectural condition, where Landscape, Architecture and the Body are in a complex relationship. The intention is for seismicity to become a spatial material in its own right, with a fluid potentiality. This will be structured by a traverse through the city that reveals shifts in materiality; encountering concrete, dust and the adventitious plants that colonise abandoned sites.

This is not a vivid disaster movie, but an elegiac, abstracted meditation on occupation, inhabitation and the beauty of collective movement. Multiple material and vegetative conditions speak of underlying ground conditions; plants spring up where former water courses across the land were previously concealed by urban development, buildings tilt and fragment over liquefied, previously secure, earth; dramatic accelerations of the ground transform buildings to clouds of dust.

The film is a traverse through constellations of material from Christchurch city. Miniature pieces of landscape: stone, dust, liquefied sand – and architecture: concrete, steel and dust – float within the temporality of the visual narrative. These point to moments of change and resonance in a performance of architecture, landscape and humans.


2. Prague City tour: Resonant City: The Line Of Least And Greatest Resistance

A city tour will lead participants in a traverse of Prague’s fluvial potential. Tour-goers will become part of an active drawing of flood dynamics that is both revealed and newly created by their collective movement through its spaces. They will experience an alternative dimension of the city through walking and by collectively gesturing at critical moments through the walk, in ways that relate to or evoke the transformations of the city through the dramatic and resisted influx of water. Participants will themselves encounter the city as a form of flood, and line of least resistance, and their collective and individual movements will be recorded as an evocation of this dynamic event.

This is an experimental theater. This is a new drama dream. The Caolu Theatre is a unique form of a Caolu-shaped building. It is not in the bustling city center. It is located in the mountains away from the city.

The Caolu Theatre is a tailor-made theater for China’s first large-scale live-action drama, Caolu Zhuge Liang. It is the only large-scale bamboo and grass theater in the world. The theater as a whole is in a perfect ring shape, an open amphitheater. Naturally, this means that any performance must use a sound amplification system. The Caolu Theatre is surrounded by 15 bamboo-grass ladders. The play area consists of 10 Caolu buildings that can be formed into a 180-degree arc. The beautiful natural mountain backdrop has become an integral part of the theater; the scenography and performance have been extended onto the hill. The central play area is 28 meters in diameter and includes a large pool and a lifting platform.

The circular pool is surrounded by two waterways and an outside lake. The 128 independent electric projection screens can be changed at any time according to the projection needs.

The audience area (including the control room) is a four-floor Caolu-style building seating 1,500 people. The third and fourth floor of auditorium feature a tearoom and a sightseeing space for visitors. The auditorium and stage area keep exactly the same Caolu style. The building has an important tourist value.

The Caolu Theatre is 23 meters high, the building perimeter is 70 meters in diameter. The theater exterior uses bamboo, wood and grass. The theater‘s double curved dome structure offers simple elegance and style (large-scale Oriental classical architectural style). Besides showing the play Caolu Zhuge Liang, perhaps one day its elegant and unique charm can host a small world theater festival.

The lecture is based on how a temporary exhibition held in 2012 presented the special artistic heritage of the Romanian theatre: one of the first important works of the young artist Gustav Klimt, which was related to performance. The Romanian King Carol I asked Klimt to design the frescoes of the theatre at his summer residence at Peles Castle. This event included the first full-scale presentations of the work entitled Muses, Masks, Allegories and Emblems, by the artist who would go on to become the most exponent of the Vienna Secession movement. Thalia, Melpomene, Terpsichore and Calliope alternated with the symbols of Apollo, Dionysus and the Seasons. Musical instruments and weather symbols were painted on theatre walls, dictated by the esthetics and new political conditions of the time. The works were accomplished between 1883 and 1886, within the Kunstlercompanie, and herald the Secession movement and Klimt's later work, 16 years later. The works of Caragiale, the most important Romanian playwright, were produced here.

We are looking at the 2012 event as a means of showing what was unknown due to the political situation during the Communist era. There is always something “contemporary” about the Peles Castle, as information about the art inside it was hidden for a long time during that time. It has taken time to bring these works to the attention of the public, so we now have an opportunity to identify different political issues involved in the making, hiding and revealing of this theatrical space.

The Klimt exhibition shows details of a forgotten theatrical space within a castle that was technologically advanced for its time: the first fully electrified castle in Europe (with its own electric power generator on the Peles River), an elevator, central heating and water-filter vacuum cleaner, running water and ventilation systems. It was the creation of Johannes Schultz, Carol Benesch and Czech architect Karel Liman, who was appointed the Romanian Royal Family's court architect. Queen Mary talked about how Liman “never neglected details and soulfully designs everything”. We try to connect to the specificity of a Czech palace with a castle space designed in Romania by a Czech architect and Klimt's works for the castle's theatre.

The Pneuma project is freely inspired by the work of contemporary Slovak artist Stano Filko, who for several years has been addressing the interaction between and overlap of transcendence and material reality. Filko creates an original synthetic work exploring the overlap between his own life and world / art history, thus linking meta-history with his own life story. Based on his own experiences (two clinical deaths) and the study of different philosophical and religious systems, he came to distinctively grasp the world through art. He creates, continuously augments and composes his own language – a value system that can be experienced by the audience through his various environmental installations. Filko sees fine art as an opportunity to communicate his own architecture of information (Pierre Restany). Despite its somewhat closed nature, his work offers influential artistic material for contemporary artists as well.

We took the PQ’s propositions defining each specific space by size, weight, material (aluminium construction), and the sketched spatial dimension of a mirror as an opportunity to speak in a simple philosophical form – breathing – to create a life-giving atmosphere. Our aim is to place the hylozoistic form into the viewer’s field of vision through live movement.

The work draws on the six major chakras. Each side is given a colour: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and black. The colours of the block, when inflated, fill the assigned aluminium construction – the framework. The object’s breathing causes it to change shape; when exhaled, the shape of the block shows a sphere hidden within that can be touched and seen. At the same time, the lower part of the installation shows a spermatozoid message in a mirror.

The textile object is a single item made of several pieces of fabric. A firmly anchored epoxide sphere is placed within the object. The size of the sphere does not exceed the aluminium frame. The upper part contains technical equipment (compressor, time relay, fan).

Frozen Cities to Survive the End of the World' is a project consisting of a lecture and scenic tour of the city based on preserving the memory of the most violent cities in Mexico. These cities are frozen through the theatre as a means of survival.
' is a project consisting of a lecture and scenic tour of the city based on preserving the memory of the most violent cities in Mexico. These cities are frozen through the theatre as a means of survival.

The project came into being in the context of violence generated by crime, challenging the city's relationships as a body of architecture that has arisen over time and to which all the societies that have inhabited it have contributed.

Thus arises the need to preserve in refrigeration the memory of the city, transgressed by violence, orienting one's thoughts towards the process of gradual extinction that is being experienced by some cities of the world. Among the legacies of their civilizations is a striving to resist and survive the end of times.

Scenic tour: This is an urban route marked by four scenic seasons. Four refrigerators will be installed at these stations, within which visitors will find the essence of one of the most violent cities in Mexico and the societies that have inhabited them. The purpose will be to operate a device within each refrigerator to trigger an immediate sensory experience based on the following significant essences of the aforementioned cities.

The critical theatricality presented as an urban identity plays a double role, reshaping the past as a vision of the future and, at the same time, reforming the contemporary cosmopolis as an antique cosmology. The genius loci inhabiting this vernacular mirror was revealed by the convocation as a key for the contemporaneous scenography and, as a time-lapse image, questioned the shared space concept. How the local identities are able to communicate with the global context is, nowadays, a primordial inquiry that we all should be making after the self-named Occupy events spread around the world. From the Arab Spring in 2010 to the “Je Suis Charlie” march in 2015, through the Brazilian manifestations in 2013 or Hong Kong’s “Umbrella Revolution” in 2014, public space is being taken up. Our layered urbanity is deeply investigated by an opposing narrative that is grounded by the collective in ordinary places whose imaginary function was the property of the state or the capital. Such cohabitation strategies are solely possible due to the advent of the space extended by media, whose augmented reality through locative devices turned sensitive cities into reality, articulating presences and experiences. Our intention is to merge the reading of historic discourses and the lecturing of our senses in a multidimensional urbanistic narrative that is invisible in its complexity, yet, nevertheless, manifests in our fruition. Based on the description of an inspirational tour, we invited the actual spectators to present the inaudible thoughts that each person has as a result of the experimentation of a place in your personal presence. We aimed to confront the reading of the historic discourses and the lecturing of our own senses in a multidimensional urbanistic narrative that is invisible in its complexity, yet nevertheless manifests in our fruition. This mapping occurred by means of the recording of ambient sonorities by capturing applications common to the personal devices, like smartphones, tablets or other similar technologies. We generate a digital repository to which it will be possible to upload the sounds captured by each individual, who is also able to geo-reference the archive, building a virtual place for occupation. These charts configure an intricate map of the human presence and experience from architectural and urbanistic places that, athwart a critical theatricality, reveal themselves as performance spaces. Music Weather Politics, that is our SharedSpace: the world that we all occupy and which is composed of our confluence of views per dialogues of silent poetry that our sensibility can collect from the spaciality.

Project realized as individual participation.

Before heading to Prague, Ghaith&Jad will be roaming the streets of Beirut, taking pictures of spatial moments that convey a feeling that is representative of their experience. They will then associate to every picture with an architecture material that captures the quality of the moment with regard to materiality, scale, context, sound, climate, light, political representation, etc.

Once in Prague, the Studio will give a talk on their city tour approach and showcase the assemblage of material fragments representing a singular spatial moment in Lebanon. This composition becomes a reference for participants, who then embark on a city tour of Prague in search of similar moments, photograph them and associate them with materials. Pictures of streets, angles, buildings, sculptures, feelings from Beirut, as well as multimedia material (sound recordings, audio guidelines, music, songs) will guide the city tour participants in their search, which will be about simulating the senses and discovering hidden gems in the city.

The tour is an interactive experience, a sort of workshop/performance with the participant as key element, forging a bond of spatial experiences in both countries.


Studio Ghaith&Jad

Studio Ghaith&Jad is an architecture and design studio that gives particular importance to the design process and allows experimentation and the free moulding of its projects, while remaining true to material and responsive to context.
Studio Ghaith&Jad is an architecture and design studio that gives particular importance to the design process and allows experimentation and the free moulding of its projects, while remaining true to material and responsive to context.

Gustav Meyrink, Ivo Kristián Kubák, František Týmal, Ivana Kanhäuserová et al. GOLEM Cube Come explore the mystical mood of the Prague Jewish ghetto before it undergoes urban redevelopment! Length: 15 minutes Venue: VILA Štvanice, č. p. 858, Ostrov Štvanice, Prague 7 GOLEM Cube is a unique multimedia interactive video installation utilizing four screens. It is inextricably linked to the GOLEM Štvanice theatre production, held on the eponymous island in Prague. The successful, highly-rated project, which took place in an originally abandoned villa, house number 858 on Štvanice island, was the first in the Czech Republic to use the immersive theatre staging method, which entirely surrounds the spectator. The twenty-strong creative team transformed three floors of the Classicist villa and its surroundings into the venue of the mystical detective novel 'Der Golem' by Prague-German writer Gustav Meyrink. The entire area came to life during the three-hour play - an alternative reality in which parallel stories evolved and a complex net of relationships was spun. The spectator had to take on the role of a detective and a voyeur in order to figure out situations on their own and put together their own, unique story. The theatre production was launched in September 2013 and 30 actors returned to the venue in April 2014, when the event was transformed into its own exhibition. The interconnection of audiovisual recording, theatre and film direction, dramatic art, scenography, design, and the polyekran installation conveys the original theatre experience via an all-encompassing projection. Thanks to GOLEM Cube it is possible to holistically observe complete dramatic situations, as well as the most subtle dramatic gestures and scenographic details, as well as the incomparable atmosphere, space and creative form of the original theatre production. The installation is being exhibited in the newly opened cultural venue VILA Štvanice, which was discovered, acquired and reconstructed thanks to the GOLEM Štvanice theatre production. “…it is a strange, provocatively untidy and difficult to watch theatre-non-theatre, and this is its precise charm.” (Vladimír Mikulka, 7.9.2013). EVENTS: 19th June - 19:00 – OFFICIAL VERNISSAGE 20th June - 10:00 - 18:00 Workshop: Immersive Theatre and Film: Dostoyevsky 27th June 16:00 DERNISSAGE AND DISCUSSION WITH THE CREATIVE TEAM Information about the Golem Cube installation: www.golemcu.be Information about the Golem Štvanice theatre production: www.golemstvanice.cz Information about the VILA Štvanice venue: www.vilastvanice.cz

This is a story about dreams and responsibility.

My dream is to become a theatre director, but my occupation is a stage designer. I am a husband, so on 5 November 2009, I prepared a gift for my baby, that is, 'Requiem 2009', which I had directed myself. Nineteen days after the premiere, my son was born. But my wife did not understand my behavior. Now, five years later, I still have the chair in 'Rrequiem 2009', my son is five years old and sometimes asks me about the difference between it and our other chairs. I tell him that he'll know when he grows up. After finishing 'Requiem 2009' I have decided to stop directing, but still work on stage design.

TITLE: Requiem 2009

PERFORMED BY: MG Theater Studio

DATE OF PREMIERE: 5 November, 2009

DESIGNING ARTIST?Liao Shifu

STORYSTELLER: Liao Shifu

The flying pig belonged to my friend and colleague Rodger Henderson, a choreographer and director who fought cancer for many years. Rodger believed that if pigs fly; he could beat cancer.

Chile/USA

This individual table can easily be transformed into a podium, such as a pedestal to elevate a person. In my case, it was to create a performance: a line of one hundred people along the border between the USA and Mexico. Time passed and I was not able to put on the performance, but the table was at my studio...

Ten masks were created for the October 2012 production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, directed by Marianne Kubik at the University of Virginia’s Helms Theater. Designed and built by Jason Randolph. The story of the object is a chemical reaction that happens between heated acrylic paint and polypropelene plastic. The paint not only bonds chemically to the plastic but during the process is stretched to give an organic texture and pattern.

The current object was made by a dental technician in Athens and consists of plaster.

It is an exact copy of the artist's mouth and was first presented in the production 'The Dentures' It is the main prop of the play.

The title of the performance is ‘The Dentures’ and it is a personal narrative about the use of dentures. The current performance was a monolog for one performer and took place at both the Athens School of Fine Arts and in a public park in Porto, Portugal. The premiere in Athens took place on 19 February 2011. The designer and storyteller is Elina Niarchou and the assistant artist is Christina Karotseri.

Brocchetta is an iron nail that has been accidentally painted while being used in the laboratories of Teatro dell’Opera di Roma to fix backdrops for the main productions to the ground to let painters work on them. Susanna Clemente, the storyteller, tells of this special witness of traditional Italian scenic painting techniques.

'Mexico' presents two iconic pieces from different times and contexts. On the one hand, the ancestral stone grinder, known as 'metate' in the Nahuatl language and used as a musical instrument, which evokes lost memories, and on the other, a symbolic bottle of 'Soldado de Chocolate', a local soft drink in Mérida, Yucatán that recently disappeared following an unsuccessful strike by the workers of the Sidra Pino Company. Both elements are brought from their remoteness and connected by their own representations of memory, recalling the background of what dominated local consumption during the twentieth century.

The object is a certified umbilical cord from an unknown episode of The X-Files purchased by collaborators Katie Williams and Emma Hicks. This object, by its very 'propness', lacks a fixed identity. It is a placeholder, but it is also what keeps us tethered, a material bond that never quite withers away, a forgotten and elusive object. For us, loss is part of our DNA, I am a descendent of The “Stolen Generation” and Katie is a child of the era of forced adoption. These losses leave gaps, in both a definitive genetic history, as well as the construction of a fixed identity.

A Scenographic Confession. When 'The Seagull & Other Birds' was rehearsing for its Chinese premiere, Pan Pan needed two identical stuffed cats. The prop-making company enquired about colour preference before catching and killing the felines. Pan Pan refused to accept these on ethical grounds and asked if the company could, alternatively, provide cats that were already dead. How did they die? We don’t know, but here they are.

In simple terms a dilly bag is a woven string bag. This particular bag, woven by Frances Djulbing, is in the tradition of her people and comes from North Eastern Armhem Land. The techniques used in the weaving of the bag have been passed to Frances, who in turn is teaching these to others, in the continuous lineage of the oldest culture on the planet.

In the Malthouse Theatre’s presentation of The Shadow King (a radically altered version of King Lear, adapted by Michael Kantor and Tommy E Lewis and spoken in five indigenous Australian languages as well as English), this Dilly Bag was carried by Frances' character of Edmund’s mother (the character replaced Shakespeare’s Kent and cleverly emphasized the importance of female elders in the community). A repository of sacred knowledge and objects, the bag was symbolically torn in two and discarded during production when Edmund with Goneril and Regan capture Lear and the mother.

The Dilly Bag, its place within this telling of King Lear, and its relationship to both a truth and a misrepresentation of Australian Indigenous culture, forms a suite of fascinating and deeply complicated stories. There is a story in the joy of a production that examines a traditional white cultural emblem (Lear) and its western understanding of fighting for, owning and selling land as antithetical to the traditional inhabitation of land by indigenous peoples. There is the story of the creative exchange between the city-based creative team and the artisans of Beswick, Katherine and Ramingining and the challenge of making a version of a dilly bag that, despite its great cultural significance, could be torn in two each performance.

And there is the greater story of the dilly bag. A story that has different meanings to different tribal groups throughout Australia. The bag from The Shadow King is from Frances Djulibing’s country, and its story is truest when told by her and from her land and the place of her culture. Intertwined in this are the ways that stories from the Aboriginals of Australia have been told as those of yesterday, told by white faces and told without the context of a continually evolving and living culture.

And finally there is the story of the Dilly Bag that Frances began to weave at the beginning of the rehearsal period in Melbourne and completed during the fourth season of the production in Perth on the other side of this vast country.

The Rainbow (Tęcza) is an artistic installation designed by Polish artist Julita Wójcik and is made of more than 16 thousand artificial flowers. It was prepared as the Adam Mickiewicz Institute project for the Polish presidency in the EU in 2011. After its presentation in Brussels it was placed in Warsaw on Zbawiciela Square, one of the most lively squares in the city.

Part of Warsaw residents and tourists welcomed the rainbow with open arms, however, there have been some instances of vandalism or accidental damage. Until the end of 2013 the installation had been burnt several times. After the last act of vandalism against The Rainbow in November 2013, during the march on Polish Independent Day, it was reconstructed with the support of the Council of Warsaw.

According to the artist herself, “The Rainbow” had to be apolitical but became the centerpiece of a nation-wide discussion. Controversy around the project is linked to the LGBT movement and its rights in Poland. The paradox of the rainbow lies in the fact that the builders put up another rainbow, and another was destroyed by its opponents.

The partly burned construction, revealing black, reflects the socio-political situation in Poland, the tensions associated with the rainbow as a symbol.

Polish photojournalist, Marcin Wziontek, photographed National Independence Day, a nationalist demonstration on 11th November 2013.

"Suddenly I said, "You know what? The Rainbow [installation] will be burned in a minute. Come on!" and we headed towards Zbawiciela Square. "Hey! It has already started burning!", one of the photographers shouted. I spotted flames and I started to run. Carrying all the heavy equipment, barely breathing and sweating, I reached the Square before the others managed to get there..."

Every year during three weeks from November till December 5, Holland is completely immersed in 'Sinterklaas', a world in itself. A big theatrical feast wherein everybody plays together to make the children believe in Sinterklaas. The songs of Sinterklaas are everywhere in the shops, the classrooms and the houses as are images of Sinterklaas and his servant Black Pete. Sinterklaas is a merry feast and if you have been sweet, you will get presents.

Sinterklaas and his Petes always arrive by boat from Spain during the days that are short, grey and gloomy. After he arrives, Sinterklaas, an old man with a white beard in a red cloak, parades on his white horse through the city, dozens of Petes jumping around him or playing music or throwing sweets around. In the weeks after his arrival he rides by night over rooftops and the Petes climb into the chimneys to put small presents in children's shoes. For weeks they are excited.

Believing is a piece of cake; everyone in the Netherlands cooperates, all adults act like Sinterklaas really exists, telling the same story and explaining the odd facts. Including the mayor, who welcomes Sinterklaas in the harbor. During Sinterklaas no one is allowed to give away the big secret to a child. One day, a child will start doubting all on his/her own. Slowly becoming aware of costumes and play-acting. From then on they themselves have to cooperate in the Netherlands' biggest theatre performance. A task they often take very seriously.

Black Pete is loved and admired by the children for his jolly capers, elastically moving like an acrobat, able to jump over rooftops and climb into the chimneys. He is the only person allowed to make fun of Sinterklaas. Originally Black Pete was a Moorish prince in a beautiful velours suit with golden broidery. In those days he and Sinterklaas were not only exciting but also a bit scary.

Sinterklaas always knew it when children had behaved badly, as this was all written down in his Big Book. Sinterklaas’ bag, always carried by Pete, was a Dangerous Bag. If you had been naughty, you were given a slap with the rod, taken away and put into the bag. All the adult people warned children about this, throughout the year. Once put into the bag, you would be taken along to Spain.

But Black Pete has changed over the years. He has stopped being a Moorish prince for a while already. He stopped putting children in the bag. Thanks to a special Sinterklaas Journal that reports during three weeks daily on national TV about Sinterklaas' and Petes' travel and adventures, Black Pete has now also acquired new adjectives, allowing for more character development: Panic Pete, Quick Pete, Decorate Pete etc. The dark black paint on his face has been replaced by professional make-up, put on till behind his ears, turning him more brownish.

In our current multicultural society Black Pete also has become recognized as post-colonial residue. Not everybody considers Sinterklaas to be a happy and merry feast; a growing number of critics remind us every year of our colonial past that has hardly ever been critically investigated. We did not acknowledge the pain nor did we apologize for our deeds. For them the acrobatic servant Black Pete is a humiliating racist trope. At the same time Black Pete is about to become an icon for both nationalists defending this traditional feast and for locals trying to get this feast with Sinterklaas, Black Pete and the bag on the Unesco list of Cultural Heritage.

In 2014 the Sinterklaas Journal tried to save the best parts of the tradition. Old Pete, the most experienced Pete, got his own horse and now wears the same clothes as Sinterklaas. Together they went back to Spain. http://sinterklaasjournaal.ntr.nl/#/home

Play: Mar Monstrum. Company: Naranja Azul. Designer and storyteller: Aarón Govea.

The old sea mask works on two levels, the visual image and the quality of movement, all at a slow tempo in order to create the right atmosphere and illusion. This slowness is the crucial element that conveys the idea of an old sailor.

The director asked me for a lapdog for the opera Julius Caesar. I made one but he didn't like it.

He asked me to make something else, more 'something', more white, more stupid...So I made this poodle.

It's an invention of the guy Gabba Torgeir Gabrielsen, who works at the National theatre in Oslo. He found the briefcase in his attic and it is from the year 1842, and he remastered it in 2011. Torgeir Gabrielsen did not get his name in the exhibition catalog at the Macro Testaccio, the National Museum of Rome during the performance. And that's why we wish to give his name back by bringing a briefcase of his work.

The production was IPHIGENIA, designed and directed by Theodora Skipitares. It was produced by the Ten Thousand Things Theater company in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2005.

In 2005, I created a production based on Euripides’ Iphigenia for a Minneapolis company that brings plays to underserved communities. One show was at a women’s jail. It went well, but an alarm sounded as we were packing up. One of the keys to the jail was missing. Every woman inmate was searched and locked down, and our departure was delayed by a half-hour. I had a problem with my kitchen faucet a month later in New York. At the plumbing store, I reached into my bag for the faucet but pulled out a huge brass key with a cutout A on it. An online search identified it as a Folger Adam-brand prison key. An inmate probably stole the key during the performance. Maybe she became scared and slipped it into my bag. I tried contacting the jail, without success. In the end, I decided to “let sleeping dogs lie.”

The story of a baby carriage created to play music, which premiered at the Bolshoi theatre on December 21, 2012. A few weeks before the premiere, the artist attended a theatre workshop where he saw the not yet complete stroller made by the outstanding master of theatrical Affairs Maria Eskina. He liked the stroller but not the action of the play. There was not time to walk with the actress around the stage. Then the artist persuaded the Director and composer to add music so the actress could work the scene with a stroller. They agreed on a case told in a TV story about the play. In the end a fake thing influenced the whole play.

Austria/Germany

The unicorn was first used in the production 'Heathers', a performance piece developed by Veronika Burger, Nora Jacobs and Nicole Sabella during their three-week Turbo residency at the ImPulsTanz Festival Vienna in 2013, and which premiered on 5 August 2013. The unicorn, made in China, was found by Nora Jacobs. It was given a haircut by Veronika Burger and then brought to life by Nicole Sabella.

Creamer was a prop for The Sandbox, based on Edward Albee’s play, The Sandbox. Originally, a wedding gift to Mary Parent, who cherished the object until she became ill with dementia and entered a nursing home. Its second life was as a prop in a series of still photographs, in which it served as a symbol of the Grandmother character and was used to scoop sand from the beach onto her corpse. These photos were strung together into a short film. Mary Parent died in July of last year.

Rainbrella, an object of separation and reunion, is from the premiere of 1,000 Faceless Eyes Staring Back. A video performance installation presented at the Performance Arcade as part of the NZ Festival in Wellington, New Zealand from February 18-22 2014. Installation designed and object selected by Pegi Marshall.

Canada/USA

Inspired by the Patria Series by R. Murray Schafer, this object’s ontological state is theatre. The materiál is characterized by a confluence of stories, brought together through motion to express its narrative past. It rolls along or sits static in performance. It has no end. Designed and built by me, it premiered in April 2011 as part of Montreal’s Reality.

warren-crow+warren-crow’s object was featured in their creation “Polaris: Porsgrunn” at the Porsgrunn International Theater Festival (Norway, June 2014 This is an ancient flashlight found underneath the seat of a truck in Norway. It was lent to us by the father of a curator who organized the festival, and was used by an audience member for a play illuminated by viewers. When we look at it, it reminds us that technologies of vision can turn making (and living) into a zero sum game. We are ashamed to be the ugly Americans who forgot to return it.

'Xochicuicatl cuecuechtli' ('The Ribald Flower Song')

Opera in the Nahuatl language by Gabriel Pareyon

Premiered in September 2014 at the Theatre of the Arts, CENART, Mexico City. This is the first opera written in the Nahuatl language and exclusively using original Mexican instruments. A Cuecuechcuicatl (erotic song), collected around 1540 by Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagun, forms an integral part of the text. Composed by Gabriel Pareyón, design by Enid Negrete, conducted by José Navarro, lighting design by Braulio Amadis.

This hug dispenser entered the life of the Artist at age 3. The origin of its name remains obscure, but may come from the French for 'Yes' due to the tendency its head has to rock back and forth. Multinational Ouitou starred in 'Three, Two, One Story: Cuéntame que te cuento!' by The Giardino Segreto Association, alongside a sweater with split personality and a vanishing ring. Letizia Binda-Partensky recounted its story under the direction of Giovanni Covelli Meek. The performance took place in Piacenza, Italy, in November 2013.

Two colored plastic glasses attached by a waxed cotton cord become a communication tool. Just stretch the thread and talk into one of the glasses, while the other glass is placed on the ear of another person who listens.

“Telephaty Project” a site-specific by escena en acción

First sited / performed in the streets of Altea. 04.07.2013

Created and designed by: Joan-Sabas Pardo & Patricia Escario

Storyteller: Joan-Sabas Pardo

Danced by: Laura Ferrer

Built by: The Scenographic Projects Workshop of the Miguel Hernández University Fine Arts Faculty (UMH)

Produced by: Ajuntament d’Altea and the Miguel Hernández University

The Patu Paraoa was initially carved for a production in 1996 and has been subsequently used in 3 more productions. This Patu is based on a type of traditional Maori short club which was used in close quarter hand to hand combat. These weapons were varied in size and were carved from a range of material including whale bone hard woods and in some cases stone, including Pounamu a type of jade found in NZ. Some patu were eventually named and recounted the exploits of the user.

When used in productions, this Patu is treated as if it were an actual traditional weapon. Certain protocols are attached to the use of Maori weaponry and these are carried through to the contemporary setting. In some way this weapon and others have become more than just a prop and have to be treated by the performers as if it were an actual artifact. As the designer I keep all the traditional weapons that I make to ensure that they are treated with the dignity that the actual weapons they are based on deserve.

The Icelandic flag was given to Thorunn's (the scenographer/director) grandmother when Iceland declared its independence in 1944. She kept it correctly folded in a drawer as she did not own a flagpole. Every year her son would borrow the flag to decorate the window of his store Iceland's National Day, 17 June, until 1971, when Thorunn inherited it.

In 1995 the flag was worn as an apron by Gudrun in the performance. There was a suspicion that the flag was being improperly used and she was filmed by two policemen on the opening night. Her husband, one of the authors of the play, was then called to the Prime Minister's Office to discuss the use of the flag with the Prime Minister, as the 'Law of the National Flag of Iceland' states that no-one is allowed to disrespect the flag in word or deed, subject to a fine or imprisonment of up to one year. As a result of their discussion the flag's use in the performance was not prohibited and, although it has become slightly worn, it may still be displayed on Thorunn's flagpole on special occasions.

The actual sword used in the 18th century by Prague's last executioner to cut off thieves' hands. It has been used in many historical productions put on by the National Theatre Prague.

On Thursday 4 April 2002, at the very end of the 57th performance of 'Maria Stuart' at the Estates Theatre (premiere on 30 March 2000), part of the side scenery collapsed, injuring actress Iva Janžurová, who was playing Queen Elizabeth. She was saved from serious injury by the crown she was wearing at that moment.

Original stage prop: larger-than-life mask for a male dancer. Production: Wonderful Circus. Premiere 15. 4. 1977. Company: Laterna magika. Directed by: Evald Schorm, Jan Švankmajer, Jiří Srnec; scenography: Josef Svoboda; masks designed by: Jan Švankmajer. Narrator: current member of the Laterna magika company, dancer Štěpán Pechar.

A blind man at the core of the action. He is condemned to waiting for a stimulus to save him from his vulnerable situation. The experience invites you to imagine another reality and reflect on our way of existence in the world. Based on 'The Blind' by Maurice Maeterlinck, a key work of symbolist theatre, premiered in 1891 in the Théatre d'art with Lungné-Poe as stage director.

Lucía Acu?a and the INVERSO company

The originators of two gastro-theatre performances, Woyzeck (Madison, Wisconsin, 2013) and Miss Julie (Chicago, Illinois, 2014), transform and unite the original six-course menus for each production. A transformation of peas traces Woyzeck’s growing insanity through surprising variations on the ubiquitous vegetable. Miss Julie’s menu of aphrodisiac candies explores connections between desire and consumption.

Theatre is of particular importance in Poland. Since King Stanislaus Augustus appointed the His Majesty’s National Actors group 250 years ago, Poles have regarded theatre as a public institution that influences social and national awareness. As Americans await the Great Novel that will describe their fate, so the Poles look out for the Great Dramas - and they have had some. Amongst them there is 'The Wedding' by Stanislaw Wyspiański, which was written in 1901 and describes the marriage between a Galician peasant and a representative of the Krakow intelligentsia. The peasantry and the intelligentsia, two social groups unable to unite, meet at the wedding and confront their prejudices and superstitions. This is one of the most important and most frequently performed plays in the Polish repertoire, starkly describing Polish weaknesses and complexes. The paradox is that the author, while describing the wedding reception, does not mention, even once, what the wedding table looks like and what is served during the reception. Yet in culinary terms rustic weddings are, even up to the present day, a great theatrum culinae, a show of social aspirations, the hope for a better life. Professor Anna Królikiewicz from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk takes up the challenge of reconstructing this gastronomic universe. Based on local Galician products, and after studying period sources, Królikiewicz will present the sensual, flavored vision of a Polish wedding a hundred years ago, which the viewer will join when it is already in full swing. The band is still playing the tunes, but the party is winding down. Remainders of the feast are still on the tables, and the wedding guests are still tipsy, even intoxicated. The smell of alcohol fills the whole room. “Were Chopin still alive, I think, he would drink”, says the hero of Wyspiański’s play, who is called Nose and whose character was inspired by Stanisław Przybyszewski, a modernist Polish writer who was famous throughout Europe. National discussions unfold in an atmosphere of decadence, drunken hallucinations and escape from political realism.

Canada, UK, Greece

Food resonates as a stable property when all else is unhinged. Right? This project addresses this hypothesis, as well as feminism, sexuality, and shifts in social norms, by looking at the food represented in Strindberg’s iconic play, 'Miss Julie'. Here, a few mad chefs cook up a batch of Midsummer Soup, with music, live video feed and social media. Canada, UK, Greece

Flesh System (Korina Kordova, Przemek Kamiński, Mateusz Szymanówka) + Jadłonomia (Marta Dymek)

The #abyss.foodposession culinary extravaganza is a new incarnation of the #abyss.witchroulette performance created by the Flesh System (Korina

Kordova/Przemek Kamiński/Mateusz Szymanówka) in 2013. This time round, the collective is collaborating with Polish vegan food blogger Marta Dymek (jadlonomia.com).

Come and visit us if you want to see what the devil eats in Prague.

France & Cyprus

A performative act that invites us to feast on existence through an apparatus in which everyone has a role to play. The piece is inspired by Sartre’s 'No Exit'.

Designed by Alexandros Lernis & Mahana Delacour in collaboration with Vesna Krebs on video/sound.

“Otherness” is a rather relevant theme for Thailand, as being such a multi-cultural base, everyone at some point feels like “the other”. Using ingredients that relate to the play; a Thai sardine, a symbol of a labor, will play as the main ingredient to produce the lavish dish.

Titotio Creative Art and Idea Consultancy and Cat in the hat; Full service catering.

Inspired by 'Rosas Danst Rosas' by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Music: Thierry De Mey, premiered by Rosas company; Théâtre de la Balsamine, Brussels; May 1983. The piece explores the physical relationship between kitchen work and work in a dance studio. Referring to the original choreography, applying tools to various body parts, designed to cook while dancing. Creating a feminine, strong, sensual event.

The Cherry Orchard De(con)structed is performed for the first time during PQ 2015. This performance has a unique participatory character, where each ingredient takes the role of one of Chekhov’s heroes. The audience is then asked to critically ‘cook’ the play, perhaps even deciding to change the outcome. Design/concept development by Ekavi Whitlock Blundell.

Original production: 'Troilus and Cressida' by W. Shakespeare, performed by students (including Anastasia Puppis) of the Nico Pepe Academy of Dramatic Art (Udine, 11-8-2012).

For PQ Makers: Food design and text adaptation: Roberta Situlin, Anastasia Puppis; Performers: Anastasia Puppis, Lorenza Lombardi

Inspired by Sarah Kane's ‘Cleansed’, 'Caressed ????' is a new food design performance that visualizes and auralizes the uncontrollable love affair. By introducing the Taiwanese traditional food ‘Mochi’ as the main character, ‘Canteen 50A Lab’ members I-Shun Lee, Dadiow Lin, Chien-Han Hung and Ponah Ou bring the sensation-provoking cross-cultural experience to the audience.

The Paravan theatre company's performance is inspired by their site-specific production of 'The heart of a dog' by Mikhail Bulgakov, which was presented in an abandoned clinic in Cyprus in April 2014. The show was designed by Harris Kafkarides and Melita Couta and directed by Paris Erotokritou, with Marios Kakoulli, Irene Andronikou as the co-producers and music by A. Antoniou.

'For the Love of an Orange' explores male relationships with two performers engaged in a complex struggle for love and fulfillment that irreprably transforms their world and themselves. Collaborators Beth McMahon, Michael Bevitt, and Gabriel Partington have created multiple iterations since 2013, including a large-scale work for This is Not Art 2014.

The atmospheric black box-specific performance of 'Trumpets in the Sky' by T.I.T.S. premiered at the Norwegian Theatre Academy on March 14. 2013. It explored the anticipation of a potential apocalypse and the emotion of fear. Artists: Juli Apponen, Ann Sofie God?, Björn Hansson and Nela H. Kornetová. CZ/NOR/SWE

A Change of Harp (ACH) presents 'Tasting Notes', an exploration of Berio's '14 Sequenze'. Four dishes and their preparation capture the essence of these pieces' evolution from strict serialism to a broad range of influences - from clowns to native drumming. Inspired by '14 Sequenze', which was premiered September 2014 by ACH and Bowerbird in Philadelphia.

'Una merienda' (Madrid, August 2014) is a production by Caín Teatro and El Hijo Tonto in which tomato soup is made. 'Royal Gazpacho' incorporates Shakespeare’s 'King Lear' as an underlying influence on the cooking process, turning it into a slow, deliberate orchestration of a tragedy. Hanging pouches of red. A dancing mass of tempestuous liquid.

An edible installation incorporating history and nourishment through a visual-poetic synthesis of literature from the Spanish conquest of Mexico; extracting symbology about gold and amaranth (two goods that suffered from colonization). Premiered in 2012 as a co-production by Stroom Den Haag (Holland) and the Rivas Mercado Foundation (Mexico).

We are determined to become actors in the tragedy of preparing soups. The broth as a catalyst for the viewer imagining the tragic act. The ingredients will be: carrots, celery, hammer, knife, fists, Euripides' Iphigénie en Aulide, spices and a mixer. The observer will be drawn directly into the story - will you eat it and take on responsibility for the tragedy unfolding on the stage? KODEX, gallery KIV, Karlin Studios, 2015.

Women prepare to cook lamb with vegetables. Although it is difficult to get the right lamb meat, they memorize lines, stories and poems about lambs and lamb soup from a previous theatre project in 1995, in which an actress talked about her heritage and her understanding of life to a silent man sittng at her table, while he would listen to his radio and play the viola.

Now, twenty years later, some women try to find out about what sheep farming in Iceland is like and map where and whether their foremothers had kept sheep.

Afer arranging the bones of lambs that have already been eaten, they will meet the audience and invite them to help cut vegetables, then hand out a recipe for preparing and cutting sheep's heads in the traditonal Icelandic way. Food will be served with the day's research conclusions.

Geng Beng's performance 'Leavening' references Vannesa Beecroft's (VB16) 1996, Deitch Project, New York.

In her performances, Beecroft repeatedly has models stand motionless for several hours. Girls have the same dress code and the same make-up in order to completely suppress their individuality. In the performance 'Leavening', Geng Beng touches on this topic while also treating it with humor and exaggeration. The viewer can see the contrast between slim models and plump bakers, where the model serves bread leavened on their own body.

Sisters Hope (DK) will work from the score of their original work 'Sisters Academy' at the Makers space at PQ'15 when they perform their work 'Sisters Academy * Sisters eat'. 'Sisters Academy' is a current, on-going project exploring and unfolding new sensuous modes of learning and knowledge creation in education and beyond. The work is rooted in contemporary strategies for immersive and interventionist performance art and the activist intention to democratize the esthetic dimension, which they define as a movement towards a more sensuous society (see also: www.sensuoussociety.org).

In 'Sisters Academy * Sisters eat', Sisters Hope will translate their artistic ambitions of evoking the sensuous into a lush manifestation of food. The uterus, the womb of a woman, plays a central role in their work and will be the makers' starting-point for translating their vision into the materialized sensuousness of what we eat.

'Fatt' is a kitchen performance based on the Fattush, a Levantine salad made from an assortment of greens and vegetables, mixed with pieces of pita bread.

It draws its inspiration from the breaking of bread and takes root in the contrast between entity and fragment, a duality reflected in the Greek word 'pita', which means solid or resistant, and the Arabic-derived word 'Fatt', which that means 'concasse' (crushed). The shared, communal Fattush is served as a mezze in a clay receptacle and is one third bread and two-thirds greens, a ratio that drives the whole performance.

ZMOK – black as an expression of death, downfall, sadness, destruction, and luxury too. Black - a color or non-color that provides us with a link to our past, as well as to stories that form part of our present. Like the Zmok. A creature that we had seemingly forgotten, but is still present in our tales. The hobgoblin as a motif of folk superstitions, present in songs, theatre and old folk's tales. It is said that this wet black chicken brings luck. But how to catch a Zmok? Simple: just carry an egg laid by a black hen under your arm for nine days. For this it will fulfil any wish you may have. The hobgoblin, however, takes its toll, and aksk you to sign away your soul in return. The Zmok is to be used then got rid of - as you can see in our installation, during which we are planning to raise our own Zmok, keeping it on the boundary between the past and the present, good and evil. Decadent black food enclosed in a white egg that you can take away with you in a small black box. Have you got your Zmok?

This HAPPENING is inspired by Slovakian superstitions, myths and folk magic, which has been present in the very essence of folklore since pre-Christian times. We find both helpful and harmful beings in traditional songs, theatre and oral narratives, and this is why it appears in the sources of both our oldest and most contemporary literature. For this reason, too, the happening is not based solely on a specific theatre production or dramatic work, but is based on a myth that has been present in the regions of Slovakia for centuries and which caught our interest because we wee, too, form part of the culture of our forbears. We have transformed the superstition about the Zmok into a form that corresponds to the project task - it is both historical, and contemporary, it stimulates and innovates. the idea of staging ZMOK came about specially for the Makers project.

Developed from writings by Jerre Dye, ‘Deep River: 4 Character-scapes from the American South’ celebrates four American Southern characters through food and music from the American South.

The aim of this project is to experiment with the portrayal of the heroic character of Superman by a large important number of old-aged performers in a public space. One of the characteristics and aims of this project is for those who portray the hero to be ordinary individuals with nothing heroic about them. This performance focuses on over-costumed performers appearing in the urban space and vanishing into the landscape, thereby exploring the limits between the visible and the invisible.The project is simultaneously extremely burlesque and profoundly humane.

CHANGING CHANGES UNVEIL. A group of Filipino students and colleagues will join together in a collaborative street performance. They will bring materials (found objects, taka paper, cloth, and indigenous materials, including paints) as ritual progressive work collaborative preparation for a street dance drama performance. This demonstrates the connection of the costume to the transitions of the body and emotions of the physical composition including the fluidity of movements. All these senses manifest as influential sympathy to the message of the performance towards public audiences. The head of the Tribe is the overall director (Basilidas V. Pilapil, Jr is Festival master and educator from the Mindanao, Director of Sining Kambauoka Outreach program) who will motivate his group to test their creative abilities and theatrical technique to arouse the general message of the scenographic discipline.

Size adjustment is an essential evolutionary strategy: many animals, including birds, do it.

“It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” (Darwin)

The things that matter least to our survival are what make us human.

Through street and physical theatre, masks, movement and dance [Insert Reality Here] experiments with the boundaries between audience and performers. Inspired by people and tribes relevant to today, we have created stock characters as seen on the streets of any city. These characters will have two sides to their personality which will be evident during the performance.

The rituality of the Selk’nam is used to discuss the destruction of their culture. Complejo Conejo has designed costumes made entirely of burlap. Costumes form silhouettes representing the Selk’nam spirits. But with movement, the figures break to reveal the broken culture and shed blood of the Selk’nam people.

Sixty Dutch Scenography students will slowly move as a mass group on a trail through Prague, a city new to each and every one of them.

Imagine a school of dolphins or a flock of starlings, organically moving at differing paces, though always together as one mass body, visually related.

Over a period of weeks prior to the PQ, these students researched what bound them to the subject “tribes” and what they want to share with their audience, the people of Prague. When this text was written the research had yet to commence.

The result of the research can thus be varied in its form: Physical, vocal, musical, instrumental, perhaps individuals are handicapped by personal baggage, these might be exchanged and transported, spread like a banner a chain, carried, transformed into sound constructions.

An image could possibly be created with humor from whispered words forming a new word, written on each other, cut up and transformed into new words which can be physically sculptured.

These types of images can be like a flock of starlings changing course speed and direction, splitting up and then coming back together.

One thing we know; the tribe will move in between and will be bound by the trip.

A tribe of human/animal hybrids that are visually intriguing and beautifully grotesque to represent the intermingling of different cultures in our society. Each creature, individual to the next, just as each Australian citizen is unique, visually unified through colors and textures that embrace our true identity and represent the ideal patriot.

Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts: Werner, Albracht and Hodgkinson are third-year costume students at WAAPA. Interested in making theatrical costumes and garments, they enjoy pushing the psychological boundaries of the mind, an idea that is elicited in themselves and their audience.

Inspiration sparked from current researching towards Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Following the theme of this year’s PQ, we were inspired to imagine a chorus of devils, who are viciously looking for fragile souls to trap and drag to an eternal hell but who are also narrating their own story of metamorphosis from angels to demons.

This tribe is a reinterpretation of a character in the play Woyzeck by Georg Büchner and directed by Moritz Riesewieck within the framework of the XXI edition of the International Festival of University Theater at UNAM.

Extraction and multiplication of the character stem from the seriousness of this global health problem. The accelerated way of life in big cities, globalization, physical inactivity and excessive consumerism of junk food or fast food provided by the large multinational food chains are some of the reasons that have pushed humanity to malnutrition, affecting without discrimination all social strata.

The collection of costumes is made with wrappers that falls apart as the characters get fat. The gradual evolution of this costume transforms the actor into a thoughtful, ridiculous and grotesque allegory of the disease, which shows quite literally the worldwide problem of malnutrition caused by poor diet, deformation and degeneration of the body and self-esteem.

If you notice five soldiers with upside down brains holding hands and skipping blindly through the streets of Prague, you are most likely witnessing Brainy – a political mask and uniform stumble. The image is inspired by the painting 'Blind Leading the Blind' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and current, unsettling events in world politics.

Bevo Goes To Prague is an exploration of collegiate tribal rituals that demonstrate that while the concept of a “Tribe” has changed, the idea still remains relevant in the modern world. Longhorn Mask Rendering (Andie Day), Photo of Mask in Production (Jaqueline Landsman), Skull Mask (Jim Glavan/Jaqueline Landsman).

USA/UK

These costumes make up one section of a larger Gas Masqueraid show, Goat in the Coal Mine. The piece draws on historical similarities of unrestrained wealth coagulation among the ultra rich, and their ownership and influence on mass media outlets. This piece combines song, puppetry, monologue and image to expose the porous line between art and media.

This outfit is intended to help people who are not allowed to go outside due to toxic fumes and unbreathable air. Cables transform unbreathable air into fresh air. The disks on your feet let you recharge your energy and also give you access to any computer. The glasses made of SLR camera lenses even let you zoom in on very distant objects.

The world is developing with constructions and technology, but everything that belongs to nature is dying. Human beings are losing all moral values and becoming a machine. Now with our costumes, we show who is responsible, we again, but as businesspersons and politicians!

Members of the team: Tuna Bulat, Sumeyye Mert, Bade Yavuz, Fat?ma Dogan, Anna Maria Karayorgi. We are students from the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, Turkey, We study the Stage and Costume Design Program. There are 5 of us, who met by chance and became a part of this project as a team. We’ve also worked as stage and costume designers at various theatres.

Joel Ebarb - Purdue University: PASSAGE is an exploration of female community, rites, and rituals, where women are nurturer, warrior, provider, and shaman. Cohesion is achieved through shared movement, non-verbal voicing, the hues and textures of indigo fabrics, body art, and stylized veiling. The tribe strives to echo the movement and patterns of matriarch-dominated animal families.

The Netherlands/United Kingdom

5 rubberband creatures are typewriting their days away while their boss wastes his time on megalomanic power tripping and lonesome despair. Linking to traditional folk art using everyday objects for costumes, this performance questions office culture in a playfull manner. It's been shown at Robert Wilson's Watermill Center (NY).

Last summer [2014] we were at the beach. Each night the light of the lighthouse swerved around our house in its monotone mode. If a ship were to crash, the light would keep moving around in the same mode, negligent of the immediate emergency. Eva Schippers will produce four objects for the body to wear to literally embody an (object of) EMERGENCY.

The Vivi Carp tribe consists of four blue and white porcelain carps. The carp is a symbol of luck in China. Masks and costumes, representing running water, are embedded with LED lights. Actors simulate how the carp swim when they parade on the road. When they walk across the final stage, they perform tai chi and Chinese traditional opera in a circular formation.

Druid-like, hooded and faceless figures drawn from the cracked and dehydrated

earth make their way through the streets of Prague.

The figures tower above the crowd, at once awesome and nomadic in search of

replenishing lands.

A somber statement referencing the environmental consequences of unchecked

resource mining.

Charlotte Gee, Madeleine Watt and Isabel O’Neill are current students at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), Design. During their time at WAAPA, Gee, Watt and O’Neill have collaborated on set and costume designs with renowned directors including Jason Langley, Stuart Maunder and Andrew Lewis.

It was the inspiration and enchantment of the unlimited possibilities of design that have made the students enthusiastically decide to take part in a project included in the section Tribes, which is a part of PQ 2015.

Our designs blend of inspiration taken from Australian nature and celebrations where people can come together under one roof and experience beautiful encounters and transformations. With costumes that will transform and grow when the members of the tribe come together, we hope to show Prague a beautiful image of unity in the form of costumes personifying nature.

The Big Head Brigade is an artist collective whose mission is to create big heads and perform in them. Stealing big head imagery and personas from history, myth, popular culture and our imagination, we plan to march on the city of Prague as The Artist, The Devil and The Heavenly Host of Angels. While making our way through the streets of Prague, the threesome will battle for possession of The Artist’s soul.

The Big Head Brigade is an artist collective whose mission is to create big heads and perform in them. Stealing big head imagery and personas from history, myth, popular culture and our imagination, The Big Head Brigade plans to march on the city of Prague as Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II with her two beloved Corgi dogs, Holly and Willow. Occasionally they will pause to sniff each other’s butts.

Industrialization and rapid consumption disregards the natural environment and that sends human nature and life changes in a negative direction. A reduction of oxygen supply in parallel with emerging technologies force people to wear a variety of items of clothing to keep out the dirt of its own making. The people are so isolated from society by a sterile life to adapt to this new era of fashion. Mimar Sinan Fine Art University.

The Big Head Brigade is an artist collective whose mission is to create big heads and perform in them. Stealing big head imagery and personas from history, myth, popular culture and our imagination, we plan to march on the city of Prague as a Three Headed, Cargo Pocket Creature. The Creature will walk three-abreast in one dress of many pockets and then participate in a yoga class.

“The Official Finnish Tourism Association (with one pair of Lapikkaat and a Pulla purse) kindly welcomes you on a guided tour through Prague. Please refrain from petting the reindeer, they bite.”

An experimental costume design project that combines Finnish folk costume, African tribal wear and Japanese street fashion.

Tunkou is a folk cultural phenomenon associated with Taoism in Yunnan province in south-west China. Actors perform tai chi in Buddhist clothing and Tunkou masks.

The actors of the tribe put their palms together devoutly and will greet passers-by when they parade on the road. Once the team reaches the final stage, the actors will perform tai chi boxing.

The focus of the performance is on the contrasting worlds of sanity and insanity. This comes from the Japanese economic crisis, known as the 'bubble explosion'. Polka dots stand for madness and bruises: a physical manifestation of societal malaise. The crisis was a real-world example of the sudden changes a society can experience. The costume covered the whole of the actor’s body. In such a way, the costume became a mask. It is a challenge for the costume to tell a narrative.

This is a tribe of citizens. Urban personas going about their business, connected by geographic proximity. Working in the liminal space between the everyday and a constructed hyper-reality, Tiptoe on Roller Skates looks at notions of the uncanny valley to explore the limits of personal and cultural affiliation. Are they so different to you?

“A metaphor of time” describes how deep time captures our every fibre. The black “tentacles” that burst from the inner self. After they burst, or they are released, in a gentle way, almost melancholic, they can make contact with other people. Because life is just a circle and that means we are bound to think the same about what we can’t reach.

Life is like ice cream, enjoy it before it melts.

“The ice cream costs a tenner; buy it and get poisoned, leave it and you die!” is a Slovenian children’s song. I

remember it as the first time I encountered the frustrating act of choosing.

However, it is not all that black and white. After life there is death; yet before we die, we shall live.

Needed Heroes - No Time for Heroics (?) And do we even need heroes nowadays? "With great power comes great responsibility." Do the powerful men of our time still follow that principle? Knights in shining armor? Oh come on… and what do you know about the homeless guy on the corner? That he stinks? He may surprise you… Searching for lost heroes.

Three lambswool suit-clad wolves fight for dominance; wheeling and dealing, comparing business cards and silk ties, these

wolves in a dog-eat-dog world attempt to pose themselves over their pack members by any means necessary.

This is a new work by the artist and collaborators.

The Para-dice Return Clan is made especially for the Tribes section. Costumes focus on the beauty of nature, and figures are covered with vegetation sprung from the softest and most delicate parts of the body.

Members of the Para-dice Return Tribe have flower seeds (symbolically, but almost literally) planted in their nose, ears, eyes and mouth, water them and flowers sprout - metaphorically, at least.

Georgia/USA

Performance - a grotesque part of our lives. People - puppets that play roles and games within a gender context. Behind the different characters exists a well-grounded, justified lie in our everyday lives, but also an opportunity for the creativity of both ourselves and others. With the support of the UN and the Marjanishvili Theatre.

Budil Theatre School sends a Bouffon tribe to the streets.

… from outsider to outcidre …

Bouffons as hyperbole of mirror, yell and scream, brutality of banality – vulgarity - triviality, edges of idleness … simply fermented apples.

VESTYL: with 50 meters of cloth, a constantly evolving textile structure, rooted in the traditions of drawing and painting, that weaves together our different identities. Each member wears a mask and full body suit, whose limbs extend several meters beyond his/her reach. These gender-neutral jumpsuits snap and tie together and apart in a variety of compositions. Our processional march idealizes our concept of belonging/separation and location/dislocation.

This project consists of separate parts in which separate words are set in an unusual context, creating a new reality.

Each part is not isolated and distant, but an intrinsic element of the collective, historical energy of mankind; hence the active use of cultural references, allusion and implicit and explicit silhouettes.

The strict black-and-white dress code, loss of identity and inability to be heard leaves them with only the words written on the flags.

'THE CHIPS ARE DOWN!' is a group of oversized ordinary objects that have got lost in the middle of Prague. Surreal and very bizarre individuals, they unite and try to find the right spot to fit in. On their quest to belong somewhere, they question our habits and how we perceive our everyday surroundings. They encourage us to use our imagination and offer them a story to tell.

Based on the novel "Le coeur Cousu" by Carole Martinez, our Tribe will be made of hybrid figures:

From a costume that belonged to a person charged with an experience, and partially reworked with the idea of telling the secret history of this character.

The first step will be to divide the garment in order to reveal its interior from every angle, revealing to light the hidden, unspoken taboo ... a family affair.

In the lining are objects from everyday life, mending, patching and the amplification of parts that represent a complex and unique individuality.

The costumes interconnect to form a procession, like an archaic rite.

The costume includes two red wedding dresses. Red represents jubilation in Chinese culture, and the embroidery on it symbolizes the virtue of a woman in ancient times. We will walk in a specific way and perform some unique gestures during the march, to show the dynamic expression of Taiwanese Opera and to present its aesthetic value to the world.

Screen-faces are a 21st century tribe. Born in a cyber wasteland of selfies and hashtags. Raised in a landscape filtered by Hudson and Ludwig to a soundtrack of Samsung whistles and Nokia’s Grande Valse. No consonants. Txt spk in105 characters. An ever-spinning hourglass. Neoprene screens protect them but inside their circuits are pulsing with electric blood. What will happen when you turn off the screen?

Kings of Busking is the first of a series of projects that Spielraum Kollektiv is going to produce as part of their project BUSKING = ASKING (Archa.lab 2015-2016). It is inspired by the increasing number of buskers in Prague and examines the social context of various forms of street art. Kings of Busking challenges the stereotypes of the 'living statues' that dominate tourist centers all over the world.

In this project we intend to raise awareness and stimulate reflection by means of ironizing consumption, which for many people is the sole path to development, as well as the ideal way of life. A large, deformed organism increasingly needs to feed itself with information, advertising and products. This 'anthropophagic body' is a metaphor for the lack of distinction and criteria in our behavior with regard to what we consume, what we buy, the waste we produce and ways of reusing the objects that we reject. Using an amorphous organism, we symbolize an example of the 'esthetics of devouring', that is, the overproduction of esthetic and social consumption standards.

Nomads on the move in the twilight. They are all alike, women and men. Each one carries a rolled-up mattress. The nomads walk in a line like refugees, following one another. One step at a time.

The sun starts to set. The nomads gather on a square and start to unroll their mattresses. They build a cover and a roof over the mattresses and go to rest under the shelter.

Moving slowly they start to build up a bigger tent, a shelter to protect them all.

Your home is where your mattress is.

The world we are living in is changing in the same way as the mechanical and mathematical symbols of the clock. This dictates us and inhibits our actions, transforming time from a natural process into merchandise.

Within our tribe of students, we are individuals who bring with us the culture of our parent nations. United together we create a new form a patchwork of our cultures and nations. No individual nation overpowers another, but they are now brought into high relief against each other and are forever woven together, interconnected. Together we create a new unit, a tribe, with a unifying purpose and goal. We, as students of the arts, wish to learn and create. Although we are a tribe, we still retain our individual characteristics, just as our costumes retain the silhouette of our nation though they are constructed of the same fabric. Our performance will feature all members of the tribe moving in a codified, almost stylized version of their own national or regional dance. As each dance is performed there will be one aspect that is identified by a second culture and that move is integrated into the first. The first then picks up the moves of the second and finds a common thread. As we progress, the movements become more harmonized and unified until we reach full synchronicity. At the end, the whole tribe will move as one unit, in a style that is made up of all the individual movements that were exhibited at the beginning of the performance. Our tribe, “Country of Many Nations”, is comprised of an international group of students who have all chosen to continue their costuming studies in the United States, at the University of Connecticut.

FUTUHERO is a fashion collection based on the vision of an extraordinary scientist of the future who has many interests and passions and is versed in all areas of human knowledge. An art-lover who is able to cross from one discipline to another with confidence, this brilliant mind is a pioneer of scientific development.

This project celebrates Chicago’s changing socio-political landscape. It is an attempt to capture and heighten the magic and mystery of the mundane, and in doing so, consider how something as routine as our everyday costumes, which may be categorized by hard work, nomadic traverses and ritual actions, may operate to energize a functional aesthetic. My body is the first site of my research. Placing it within new sites, materials, and social constructs, I investigate its movement, capabilities of transformation, cultural knowledge and the social perceptions its presence brings forth. In my exploration of the tribe named “Commissure” I employ my aesthetic of re-purposing and re-envisioning landscape, material, and historical representation with a community of collaborators to encourage connectivity, shared resources, and the cultivation of creative change. The works of such artists as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Mary Oliver and Pina Bausch have inspired my approach to the Tribes Project.

Costume objects are express themes inspired by Franz Kafka, commedia dell'arte and the weather. Performances will take place outdoors, in front of Kafka's house, at the location of student expositions, including DAMU. There will be dramatic motion and sound improvisation on given themes, as well as interaction with tourists and visitors to PQ.

Wandering the streets, 10 performers veil and unveil themselves. Odd figures and a disturbing soundtrack echo through a turbulent public debate. Can dialogue prevent war?

Man/woman, active/passive, dominant/dominated … Economical with its means, 'He War' reveals how these binary notions serve the political apparatus and shows the violent duality produced by the use of religious customs.

Neither man nor woman … is there a form that refuses to be on either side? Which fills interstices? This ambiguous question of the in-between might be answered by a type of dialogue and movement.

Land and city regenerate after bush fires, as birds return. Memories of the healing land show this re-emergence. After each natural disaster ravages the land, people congregate, forming tribes to heal damaged places. The city remains scarred, but is healed.

Schimmelpfennig's play 'Animal Kingdom' takes as its theme the relationship between actors and the characters they play and describes the hidden face of the acting profession. A wild animal mask is an integral part of the day-to-day life of its wearer and slowly permeates reality. human act like animals, animals think like humans and everyone has to defend their territory and survive at any cost.

Two-dollar shop objects become the vestments and accoutrements of modern-day gods and goddesses. Bargain Garden uncovers the appeal of the two-dollar shop, with unlimited access to affordable plastic. Consumers can afford to be whatever they want to be, fulfilling their desires, satisfying their needs and knowing all the while that they have nabbed a bargain in the process.

This project was inspired by artist and educator Simona Rybakova. Makers focused on a figure that resisted as a form of popular culture. The 'Baiana' is a traditional Brazilian female figure in real life, theatre and carnivals. Tribes: the performance of the carnival; its full range of possibilities for poetic retelling; movement and play of the collective.

The stimulus for our tribe is the beauty and fragility of the Great Barrier Reef, an environment at the mercy of both the natural and political climate. We will focus on human interaction with this vast coral colony since Australia’s colonisation. The costumes are based on silhouettes documenting the first 150 years of European settlement in Australia created in ocean colors, which are then encrusted with coral.

The main inspiration of this piece is the representation of hippie culture in the musical HAIR. Costume is multifunctional and recycled. Body makes a costume much like costume makes a body coy. This way, costume performs its spontaneous game and, through body movement, transforms itself. It shows to people this particular lifestyle and the attitudes towards body, ecology, love and spirituality.

The authors of the Urban reflections project invite you to take a part in a game which the Urban tribe plays with the surroundings and spectators. We propose costumes which reflect and multiply fragments of the city, passers-by and members of the tribe themselves. Our idea is to play with perspectives by means of reflective costumes, in which reality becomes deformed. We invite you to come closer to the tribe and become a part of the costume.

The Tribe originates in a Shakespearean notion of the fool and draws on elements from across the plays (in particular Hamlet, King Lear, Twelfth Night and As You Like it) to establish a stock character. The fool questions, probes and provokes. He disrupts form to reveal truths. Our Tribe revels in unearthing the hidden. It whispers, dances and laughs through the spaces in which it exists.

"Centripetal" is an experiment using materials and Chilean traditional fabrics as applied to stage costumes and executed through a video performance, combining craftsmanship and technology.

They are five dressing rooms with large and diverse volumes and only one point in common; materials are directed towards the body of the performer as the support and axis of the composition, creating a CENTRIPETO.

The five-video performance can be seen at www.loretomonsalve.com

Magpie: Black and White Army. These forms were designed for a Carnival, this piece was a contribution to a larger promenade that celebrated the first Caribbean Carnival in London, these festivities which went on to become the Notting Hill Carnival. Approaching from a personal angle, Rachel has referenced her home, and is a celebration of her origin. Magpie is a reference to the people of Newcastle upon Tyne, and aims to explore the relationship between a football team; its supporters and a place. Using the uniform and the chants from her hometown of Newcastle, this piece has been devised to reconsider the faith that surrounds football. Newcastle is famous for its football and its accent and its people are proud of their identity, they are joined by their voices and their memories. The Newcastle strip is black and white and people sing loudly in it. The costumes examine the power people feel when wearing a strip, how can a piece of clothing be imbued with a feeling. The people of Newcastle adore their team and their strip, as though the strip has become a tribal paint and the chants have become the folk music- like yarns from the past, they are known to them, they are sung and they symbolize unification. Conforming through their voices and clothing, Magpie addresses the power of a mass; its power and its threat. Inspired by sportswear and branding, it considers how people can unify. Magpie takes the everyday activity of football and compares it to a mystical spectacle.

'Cheer/Leader' is inspired by a low-budget documentary we saw about an American cheerleading team - we were struck by how tribe-like they were; obedient to their leader, protective of one another, dominating yet dominated. We decided to translate what we saw into a piece of work using video and live interactive performance.

Inspired by Crowded House’s song ‘Four Seasons in One Day’, this tribe highlights the extreme weather in Australia. The tribe combines both ancient Aboriginal

and modern Australian culture through both Aboriginal painting styles and modern fashion. This project explores the impact of climate change on the Australian landscape and society.

The Great Barrier Reef is one of the largest intact coral reefs in the world and is under immense pressure due to human interventions. The Australian Government is currently making moves to begin dumping on this beautiful natural expanse. This tribe depicts this destruction, using it as a metaphor for global political struggles.

The costumes for the 'Swans' Tribe were created for the Skutr group (Martin Kukučka, Lukáš Trpišovský) and for the 2014 production of 'Swan Lake' at the Klicpera Theatre in Hradec Králové. Origami swan masks s for the Tribes project were specially designed and realized by Ondřej Cibulka and Evžen Dub.

"My name is Siegfried and today I turned 21 years old. I will take a walk in the woods, to the lake. Each step will sound as the echo of a passage I have never done, of the door I have never opened into the rose garden. That is how the echo of my words sounds in your memory. Why should I swirl dust on the round vase with rose petals, I do not know."

Water as crystal which hangs above the dancers' heads in the castle's grand hall. Red lipstick, swan feathers, roots of memories. Reflection in the mirror. Soil. Black and white. Dreamless night. Past looking like drowning cathedral. Prince Siegfried, frond Beno, the Mother Queen, Redbeard, Odette, Odile and the cursed swans who change into illusions of girl in the moonlight. All of these are the attributes from the great myth known especially thanks to Swan Lake ballet of Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovski, Valentin Petrovich Begich and Fedor Vasiliyevich Gelcer. This myth is closer to our memories than a fairy tale; these memories get released as if from the Pandora box the moment the curtain closes.

The curtain falls and the theatrical imagery lives on in our minds. Swan, ballerina, white girl, black swan, Bluebeard, prince…Often I walk through the historical centre in Prague and I see so many swans on the Moldau river. Usually they are white, the young ones grey and those who, confused, get onto the road are dark, dirty. Not inside but from outside, hit by the city dirt. Sometimes their landing on the street is fatal and their lives are ended by a car. Their gracefulness and matter-of-fact way in which they move is charming and the look at them is delightful. Our actors exit the narrow theatre space and our imaginations into the real city space where we will be able to observe their encounters with real swans. Should the swan in danger be lucky she will be saved.

Our tribe is a hybrid of human and rat, our features and species blended so that we are each a colony, breaking out through flesh and clothes. Our existence questions where we send that which offends us and how it may be received on the other side of the planet. We are the anxiety of generations debating what makes a human worthwhile, and we are clusters of struggling individuals given communal form.

The performance consists of some musical executions by this small formation of non-professional musicians, all of which are art students at the Accademia di Brera. As a costume, they will wear a life jacket, modified in order to recall the classical orchestra fit (a tailcoat). They will also perform at the Baroque Chapel at the Italian Cultural Institute on the evening of 22nd June.

»Sculpting Fear - Obstacle« creates a rupture in the accelerated flow of the city life. The image of the lying body is charged and there is obvious provocation towards security and public order. Idleness, standstill and deliberate collapse are responses to the idea of forced self-optimization. Everything is under control – bodies are lying on the floor.

The project proposes the filling of semi-transparent suits with materials found by the performers in Prague in the days preceding the presentation in the exhibition, masking and deforming the initial bodily volume of each participant and also establishing a relationship to the residues and memories of the urban space, incorporating its cultural vestiges into the body.

Dally Schwarz, Aganju Oju

I was born in Moscow, Russia in 1983, and moved to the US when I was seven years old.

My mixture of identities and personal history of displacement has resulted in a fascination with masking. Thus, I am often experimenting with masking in public space, in an attempt to blur the boundaries between looking and seeing, between voyeur and spectacle. ‘The Temporary Tribe’ was first staged in Detroit as a way to temporarily re-inhabit a lost landscape; superimposing a tribe of women onto the landscape turned it into a surreal site of activity; a brief narrative was created and built into the story of that site. For the Quadrennial, I will recreate ‘The Temporary Tribe’ in Praha, a dense urban fabric conducive to weaving in a brief narrative of several masked humans, walking a choreographed path. Tribe members will be dressed in handmade costumes and masks and carry several ambiguous props. At the end of their walk they will dance. They will appear and disappear as visitors from the future and past.

We are not able to see anything except a screen of computers and rooms like a prison where we spend time. We would paint the world with blue and green on paper in our childhood when somebody asked us how could you draw the world. However, we have begun to lose these colors.

Giant buildings hide the sunset from us. Those buildings for who? Who works there? Who is designing the world or who is stealing our sun? We are. We refer to the world as the modern world which includes waking up at the early hours of the morning and wearing suitcases and just going to work as tribes without speaking every day.

Because of these situations, we see four surrealistic characters while they are going about their work as gears of a machine in this project.

Latex: Latex as found in nature is a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants.

Polyethylene: Polyethylene is a thermoplastic polymer consisting of long hydrocarbon chains.

Fabrics and acrylic colors.

And now my beauties!

Something with poison in it,

But attractive to the eyes,

And soothing to the smell.

Poppies, poppies,

Poppies will put them to sleep, sleep.

Now they’ll sleep.

"Papaveraceae” is a dynamic sculpture by Irish artist Emily Aoibheann. “Papaveraceae”

is a slow moving ‘unparade’,

a sleeping bouquet of beautiful long-haired ladies all afloat

with buoyant balloons!

The piece was originally commissioned by the St. Patrick’s Day Festival for the Patrick’s Festival Big Day Out event, Dublin, Ireland 2013.

“Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.” Coco Chanel. This project is based on a dream that I had. I was working in the National Theatre (not for the first time), hauling around costumes made from heavy fabrics, when suddenly I saw what looked like a small paper grouse passing by me. I stopped my work and observed this creature, feeling that I was somehow in the company of true beauty.

“Synthetic Scots” explores the meaning of Highland dress to Scottish identity; once the outlawed garb of rebels; then rehabilitated by Sir Walter Scott and appropriated by the British Army; now popular as occasionwear. With Scotland rejecting independence in 2014, this is an instinctive and obvious response to “Music Weather Politics”.

The story of costumes may be considered as a reflection of the age-old battle of Good against Evil to conquer Light. The brave prince sets out on his cassowary and travels long distances to rescue a princess threatened by an evil Light Guzzler. The princess, sitting in the light of her lamp, is looking through the daily print in an attempt to find the latest good news. The Light Guzzler is stalking her and gobbles up the articles as they appear. The closer he gets, the greater the danger that the princess will lose her light.

This piece reflects on an impromptu fiber artwork that was inspired by and created at the time of the 2007 Quadrennial and explores it in a larger scope and performance setting. We are constructing garments that will be unraveled as the tribe members walk through the city, reworked and reassembled immediately steps behind. This regeneration references the progress and evolution of a culture that continues into perpetuity. It speaks to the active involvement of community members emerging inability to fully detach from their own history and the elements have shaped them; their roots.

A SOLO TALKING COSTUME

HARAKANAY will be an individual/collective event taking the form of a conspiracy of 25 to 30 persons, performing as One Tribe of Five Tribes from HURAKAN•EYETHE (costume impact, music, weather, politics), a past workshop at Space Lab, from June 23-28. The idea is to match the one to the many-in-one, of unknown, incognita global participants, conducted by MER with CDG members. Their unveiled emotional ideas will build a costume of costumes, acting as a common, multiple work in motion, masking and unmasking their perforated 'body and soul' in a loud, whirling, inner/outer SOLO COSTUME.

Beyond Regalia will showcase the fruits of the labors of retirees from the Malešice Home for the Elderly, Prague and artist Riitta Ikonen. The group will take to the streets of Prague to display their handmade regalia that prove that beauty, age, and creativity can be synonymous. This multidisciplinary visual art and performance program will feature bright colors, uncommon materials, and innovative fashions.

Upright Regalia is a continuation of the Wearable Art Class, which started in 2013 as a collaboration between members of the Hamilton Madison House City Hall Senior Center in New York and a team of international artists comprising Riitta Ikonen (Finland), Alison Kuo (US), Yue Lin (China), Wei Xiaoguang (China), Karoline Hjorth (Norway), and Annie Collinge (UK). The project began with a meeting between costume maker and performer Riitta Ikonen and the blogger behind Accidental Chinese Hipsters, Alison Kuo, in which the two declared their intentions to make art with the dynamic and fashionable senior residents of Chinatown.

France/Japan

Fashion designer Hideki Seo combines his multidisciplinary experiences linking fashion and art to stunning effect. His work is characterized by perfectly executed couture fashion details. The 'Jump' project goes well with the exploration of fashion designer Hideki Seo's challenge to exceed the limits of creation, blurring the boundaries of art and fashion.

This tribe reflects beauty mania and the plastic surgery that people are fond of. Members of the tribe are dressed identically in skinny catsuits and high heels. Breasts are flattened to create gender identity confusion and highlight how universal plastic interventions have become.

The head is oversized, with layers of Botox and luscious lips that cover much of the face.

They are plas-tic. Beauty tics.

This tribe has a pinwheel for a face. When the wind blows, the pinwheel turns and the tribe moves forward. If this does not happen, passers-by have to blow in the face of the performers to help them move, and the audience intervention becomes the motor that drives the performance, making a statement highlighting alienation through machinery: if the pinwheel is not active, the tribe cannot keep going.

Inspired by the Calla Lily flower, the members of this tribe are wrapped in white drapery with a reflective lining that mirrors their surroundings, bringing the world to within the performer.

Experimental Fashion bodies, which are designed to push the boundaries of creativity in Fashion Costume Art to beyond its established traditional role and conventional cutline. In this project, a student of the National Textile University, Department of Textile & Fashion Design, explores various unconventional materials to express modern lifestyle mechanics symbolically.

Education and success has become people’s be all and end all. In this rat race, we have a tendency to overlook our passions. We set timetables as if a plane were going to take off. We turn away companions who drop in unannounced, we limit youngsters by not permitting them to take necessary breaks from their studies, and we think our guardians and in-laws should plan ahead before visiting us. These days, even older relatives comprehend the burden and visit only when it seems suitable for us.

Life has gotten to be so mechanical.

We will comprehend this when we too grow old and our own kids start to consider us as undesirable disturbance to be endured.

Umer Hameed, Saima Umer

Vladislav Nastavshev’s exhibit develops upon his set design for Miss Julie (2012, Valmiera Theatre), based on the play by August Strindberg. This interactive installation integrates scenography, soundscape and live performance where interaction between the object and the performer is essential. A horizontal wooden plank balances on a vertical metal rod fixed to the floor. Kitchen utensils placed on top of the wooden plank counterbalance each other. The object is a symbol of the kitchen as a balancing act, a space defined by the elementary laws of physics, where Christine and Jean desperately try to hold the equilibrium and to preserve the order which they obey.

The Latvian exposition for PQ'15 has been designed by Vladislav Nastavshev, whose directorial debut on the Latvian stage in 2010 marked a new relationship between the linguistic and visual aspects of performance. This tension became the dominant force in his work, and challenged Latvian scenographic tradition. The director, stage designer and musician inhabiting Nastavshev seem to compete with each other for leadership in his work. Fortunately, in the end, each of these identities triumphs. Nastavshev takes great care to create an integrated work of art in which space is shared equally by performers, the set, objects, sound, and light. Using minimal yet effective means, he turns empty, unaltered stages into imaginary rooms where all relative constraints fall away. Nastavshev brings carefully selected, precise, and radically minimalist aesthetics back to the performance, whether it be a tea-pot suddenly spouting sand or an old-fashioned spotlight that elevates the actors’ realistic performances into visual metaphors. The impact of these metaphors is virtually universal. Nobody is beyond their effect, even if the audience is unaware of their influence or even resents it.

Since 2010, Nastavshev has worked in Riga, Tallinn, Saint Petersburg and Moscow, staging plays by great classic playwrights such as Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and August Strindberg, or by Russian writers such Daniil Kharms, Mikhail Kuzmin, Yevgeni Kharitonov, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as works by contemporary authors. For most of his productions Nastavshev also designs the set and costumes and the sound and lighting design. Last season, his performance Travelers by Sea and Land at the New Riga Theatre received the annual Latvian Theatre Award for best large stage production.

What unites us?

What divides us?

Where lies our common ground?

What is our common language?

These questions had to be asked over and over again when we staged Sophocles’ classical play Antigone as a collaboration between the Gothenburg City Theatre and the Tanzanian theatre group Parapanda.

In the autumn of 2011, a group of Tanzanian actors came to Gothenburg to start rehearsing Antigone with a group of Swedish actors. After a month of rehearsals and workshops, the whole ensemble and artistic team travelled to Tanzania to continue working. The performance had its debut in Dar es Salaam.

The exhibition tells the story of this collaborative effort among theatre practitioners from very different performative backgrounds and experiences to create a performance with different languages on the basis of European theatre theories and East African narrative and musical theatre.

What are the challenges and possibilities when a group of Scandinavian and East African theatre professionals join to perform a text written 2,400 years ago in ancient Greece? Not only did we have to overcome the language barriers amongst ourselves, but the play was also performed in both Swahili and Swedish with subtitles in English in order to respect our native tongues and cultures.

As a theatre designer, how does one approach not only a performance but also a collaboration across national boundaries? How does one find a common imagery and visual signals that every human being can relate to, both as performers and as audiences, regardless of geographic birthplace?

My response to these questions and meetings gave rise to a scenography in which the central theme was a giant sculpture of a human face coming out of the ground.

It could literally be Antigone’s dead brother Polynices, whose denial of a funeral sets the drama in motion.

It could also act as a hill for the actors to sit and stand on, or even to caress or hit.

This turned out to be something that everyone of us could relate to. When an actor climbed up on the face and stood on its mouth, there was no doubt of the meaning, no matter what culture or history we came from.

Since I had made the sculpture using a cast of my own face, I also made myself the subject of the set. This is very different from most projects, where the theatre designer can hide behind the final production and in some way escape responsibility.

In a way, the design was a scenographic statement of participation – to take responsibility in this political cooperation involving many different views of the world and very different possibilities.

The result was a unique project with a strong visual statement about being human – in ancient Greece, in urban Sweden and in developing Tanzania, which today is one of the top 10 emerging economies in the world.

 

The curators of the Brazilian representation have chosen to gather a collection of stories of an idealized space. These are stories about a space that has not been revealed or is not commonly seen by the viewer. A previous and imagined place. We admit and emphasize that our choice is no more than an attempt to establish an image of the state of the Brazilian performance design over the last four years. For this purpose, the curatorial proposal starts from the performance designer’s point of view in order to establish a multi-dimensional arena in which several voices cohabit a live kinetic territory. We investigated the existence of a primeval place; a space built and inhabited by the designer and the space that predates the creation of the scene’s space, in order to make visible the origins of the idea by sharing the Creative Confession – to unravel, when confessing, the invisible scenography that exists and predates the scenographic project, with an idealized and utopian space. We emphasize that “the problem isn‘t so much to find out how we have reached this point, but simply to recognize that we have reached it, that we are here. There isn‘t one space, a beautiful space, a beautiful space round about, a beautiful space all around us, there‘s a whole lot of small bits of space“.1 If the perception of the scene creators‘ subjective spaces is readable, the grouping of the works creates a space landscape. Visitors cohabit this space when they, too, possess it and are illuminated by these stories. We adopt the concept of landscape as presented by Lopes2. According to this concept, the landscape opens to a wide range of possibilities, it is understood as an object of knowledge and aesthetic contemplation; then as an object of consumption, the domain of intervention and human activities, “where elements of nature and culture, geography and history intersect; where the interior and the exterior, the individual and the group, the real and the symbolic, meet.”3 Thinking of the landscape in this way implies a positioning before the world. A landscape “amplifies to any space, always conceived as a place of conflict.”4 We intend to discover invisible scenography: that which influences us all deeply, especially including the one coming from the set designers; to go back to the project that signals their sites of authority. To study its place and thus emphasize its territorial function. In accordance with this perspective, we present a landscape which aims to reeducate us in delicacy, albeit aware of the helplessness. A space which embodies, in a geometrical manner, the everyday relationship between the states of weightlessness and the daydreaming of creative imagination.

1 PEREC, George. Esp?ces d’espace. Paris Galilé, 1987, p. 13.
2 LOPES, Denílson. Invisibilidade e desaparecimento. In Espécies de Espaços: territorialidades, literatura, mídia. Organizadores: Izabel Margato e Renato Cordeiro Gomes. Belo Horizonte. Editora UFMG, 2008, p. 81.
3 LOPES, Denílson. Op. cit. p. 81.; COSTA, Antonio. Invention et reinvention du paysage. Cinémas – Reveu d’études Cinematographiques, Montreal, Université de Montreal, vol. 12, no. 1, 2001, p. 7. (dossi? Le Paysage et le Cinéma)
4 LOPES, Denílson. Op, cit. p. 83., MITCHELL, W. J. T. Introdution. In: Landscape and power. Chicago: Chicago Uni-versity Press, 1994, p. 1.