It is less than a year since the creative contemporary dance group 420PEOPLE staged their first premiere in Prague. The preparations of the second show, which was premiered with three shows in the Archa theatre, took part from January to December 2008. The show also attracted people thanks to the collaboration with choreographer Ohad Naharin, who also presented a workshop of his gaga dance technique.

The core members of the unit are the same as they were at the beginning, Nataša Novotná a Václav Kuneš, Ondřej Kotrč as the producer and a group of important coworkers and dancers. 420PEOPLE managed to break through and both the professional and amateur audiences are expecting what the group will do next. For the time being, we asked them about the premiere.

What are your impressions from the premiere, how did the audience react?
Nataša: Me personally, I was very excited, the audience certainly didn’t disappoint us. I hope we didn’t disappoint them. From the beginning we believed that we’ll manage to finish this project and I’m happy that the dream we had a year ago have come true. It is a journey on which we learn a lot and it is a great satisfaction when reactions of the audience ensure us that we are going in the right direction. The audience brings a lot of energy, which can be both good and bad or a mixture, it simply comes out of them and we should hand it back.

How about the discussion with the audience?
Václav: I like it when members of the audience begin to discuss with each other. They speak without looking at each other. There was a lady in the first row who wasn’t quite satisfied with the show and she spoke about it and another one who sat right behind her opposed her and even when she looked at us, she actually reacted to the first opinion. Those are very interesting moments because you are facing both the involved parties and you act only as a mediator. We are trying to involve as much people as possible. Every opinion, including the negative ones, can be right in a sense and we don’t want to pretend that our performance is perfect. We need to learn more about an ordinary audience and their opinion. We can’t count only the opinion of professionals. We would like to attract the attention of the non-professional viewers so that they grow into a learned audience and tell it to the others.

N.: Somebody who actually was a professional told me: “I like your shows because I never know what to expect and you always surprise me.” That means that it isn’t boring, that we always bring something new, which is exactly what we wanted and what we want to keep.

V.: We are always trying to do something new. We are now working on two new shows which will be very different, one of them will be staged in the theatre and another one on location, it’s a challenge. We’d be happy if people who are used to come to combined shows would enjoy also a full length piece even though they will already have known half of it from smaller pieces. This will be the case of Small Hour. We should be able to preserve the tension so that the viewer would be curious what comes next and where it all comes to.

How did the collaboration with Ohad Naharin come up? Did you have to persuade him?
N.: We can’t say that we persuaded him in any way. We openly told him what we wanted to do and that we needed his help and he was very open. I think that people who are already famous think about continuity and they remember that there was also someone helping them on their way up and that there is more to life than just concentrating on their own career.

It is also true that you already know each other from other projects.
N.: He remembers us from the times of NDT II, but you have to consider that a choreographer like him meets hundreds of different dancers each year so it obviously takes time to build a relationship. And we somehow managed to do this, not only with Ohad but also with other people, just because we were abroad for a long time and created our connections. It is about trust and common attitude to work.

V.: Of course, we had a well prepared concept and it could inspire Ohad to work with us. We couldn’t just come and say that we needed a new choreography. You have to have something to offer. We would like to preserve this. If we are to invite famous collaborators, we should inspire them somehow.

Naharin said that Bolero was a byproduct of a movement research, do you know how this choreography was created?
N.: We didn’t participate in creating Bolero but we are the first ones to stage it. He told us that he created this piece all by himself. In other cases, he draws some inspiration from the dancers but this time he did it all by himself. But he didn’t tell us why.

How about dancing with Rei? You looked so cheerful on the stage...
N.: It is hard to dance in a choreography for music like Bolero, but with Rei, we tried to understand the substance of it, which in our case was to enjoy the music. But I can’t tell how the audience perceived that.

Nataša, we heard, not only at the press conference, that you worked a lot with Tomáš Rychetský on his solo. What was the collaboration like?
N.: At first, we agreed on that I would help him somehow, but we didn’t know how. As a choreographer, Tomáš had already the piece in mind, he chose the music and he had the rough dramatic structure in mind. We also had to take into account that we didn’t have so much time to meet very often. First I helped him with the choice of music, then before we actually began to dance, we agreed on some basic principles and then we worked on the technical aspects of his interpretation but the final decision was always on his side. I participated in the project mainly as an advisor and the ‘second eye’, which is so important for a choreographer.

Why are you participating when it is his solo?
N.: From the beginning we thought that we needed to include this element, Tomáš knew that the choreography is about a relationship with something or someone, so there has to be an extra element on the stage, even though it should be only a small notion it has to be there.

Is it necessary? The choreography is comprehensible enough for the viewer to derive the existence of another element...
N.: That may the reason that the other character is included. It may also mean something for Tomáš as a dancer. Globally it made more sense to include it. It could as well be a man, it is not so substantial if it’s me or somebody else. 

Now I have a few questions for Václav. Why did you start to build the Small Hour trilogy from the middle?
V.: the reasons were very practical. At first, it should have been a trio and when Rei got pregnant I started to create a duet with Nataša. And when we were finished, I thought we needed to put something in front of it and something behind that. I never thought that we should create it from the beginning but I knew it would be a trilogy and a full length piece and I wanted to create another part, which is On an Even Keel. As soon as it was finished, I found out that it had to be a precedent to the first one. When I created it, all the choices were still left open, and they still are, individual parts can be rearranged in a different order, music can be changed because it will be written anew...

Is the Golden Crock a beginning of another story as well?
V.: I admit that it was hard to find the ending for this choreography, because it is inspired by a real situation, which does not really end. But the viewer doesn’t know that and he shouldn’t know that. However, it wasn’t really easy to find a dramatic ending for this piece. But I don’t think that it should go any further, it has a beginning and an end and that is enough.

What are your further plans for 420PEOPLE?
V.: Apart from the triptych? Triptych, that sounds horrible (laughs). I think we can disclose something... After the complete trilogy, we are planning to do a combined evening and dedicate a part of it to improvisation. It is nothing new and we don’t want to pretend it is, we only want to show the potential of an improvised choreography. We will use two Bach’s cello suites.

N.: We have to invite dancers that can improvise and who are trained in it, their so it will be interesting also with the personal input.

V.: Another piece will be a duet for two men (Shintaro Oue, Tilman O’Donell), one of them is in Frankfurt and the other one is freelance. This duet is a work in progress, they call it Plan A, Plan B, Plan C etc. and they got first prize in a choreographic contest in Hanover. They are also very good dancers, they have absolute control over their movements, they work with gravitation and contact movement.

And finally, Nataša will have her solo.

N.: And we also plan a site-specific project with other dancers.

What will that be about?
V.: We already have a certain choreographer in mind, Shusaku Takeuchi. You could have seen him in Prague a few years ago when he did a duet for NDT III as a part of the Golden Prague festival. He works on site-specific projects and performances. He also has his own group of physical theatre. We would like to bring him to Prague, his work is very poetic. It is again something different.

N.: We want to show the audience something new, so that there is something unexpected. We always care about the creative spirit, as long as certain level of quality is preserved. We also create the evening not only dramaturgically but also with respect to the dancers and Shusaku can work with any material and adapt it. Not everyone can do that.

V.: I dreamt about staging one of his shows, which he still creates, now also with the support from the UN. It also has this dimension that he works with children from Israel and Palestine and this also includes their mothers, so it is a very interesting piece. At the beginning they told him that it is impossible but he believes that he will manage to finish it. But what is more important is that he is familiar with the Czech culture, he knows a lot of Czech artists and dancers and also our history and literature. As a creative artist, he will certainly draw some inspiration from Prague. So the show could be something unique.

And you must be planning workshops, including the one on Naharin’s gaga method.
N.: Yes, we also plan to do some workshops. We would also like to put up a workshop for the music accompaniments. It is something dancers experience everyday, we know how difficult it is to start the rehearsal in the morning when you are tired after a difficult performance. It is a matter of details that create the performance as a whole.

V.: Then maybe a workshop with a well known author and his works, we would also like to put up two-stage and weekend workshops.

N.: We will also do our own workshops with Václav, those will concentrate on training our future colleagues, young talented dancers. Ohad Naharin’s gaga method workshops will partly be held for non-dancers, so there will be some space to reach wider audience.

How did the workshops with Ohad Naharin go?
V.: We were very pleased by the interest among the conservatories, there were participants from every conservatory we reached. It also shows that the dancers are interested. It is also a good opportunity to work with a visiting teacher like Ohad Naharin, who does not come everyday.

N.: The first workshop took place in Laterna magika and it was done exclusively for the conservatories (where we have our personal links): the state conservatories in Ostrava and Prague and then TCP. We thought that we might ask people who helped us to get where we are, so we offered them with this chance. Each school had a limited number of students, which is also a good motivation for the students. It creates a competitive environment. The second workshop took place in the large hall and in the rehearsal room of the National Theatre for professional dancers and HAMU students. We found out that some schools would be interested in future projects. We invited some dancers from our previous workshops so it was full very quickly so we didn’t even have to promote it so much.

Another thing you did in summer were the ‘open rehearsals’.
V.: Yes, we staged the Golden Crock in Laterna magika and we opened the doors for three Thursday afternoons so anybody could come. We were surprised how many people came, there were always seven or eight people. We were surprised that there were people who weren’t professional and they only found it at our website. But the professionals also came.

N.: Even if there were only few people, it is important. We would like to continue if we have the opportunity.

Where do 420PEOPLE earn their daily bread :)?

N.: 420PEOPLE can feed only their shows and their guests.

V.: Otherwise, they are quite underfed :-).

N.: If you are freelance, you can’t say that you make your living with this or that. Even though we have some stable projects or venues, it keeps on changing. You always have to plan about two years ahead. We dance, we do assistant jobs, we do choreographies and we teach...

V.: And these are jobs we really enjoy, there is enough of work, especially of good work, we can’t even manage to do it all. But as you grow older, you find out that you can’t do all of these things 100%. You have to leave something out. And something will disappear somehow naturally.

N.: Of course that we can’t always do only the things we like. We would like concentrate mainly on this but there are also things that have to be done...

V.: I would like to keep a certain level of creativity, and it doesn’t have to be creativity only in the studio, we can also be creative in planning our future projects and activities... I still like dancing very much, but most probably it will not be my primary occupation, I think I will dance fulltime for about a year or two, but not longer. It is important to prepare the grounds for something new, to stay creative.

Lucie Kocourková December 2008
Translation: Pavel Drábek