The Motto of the Festival TANEC PRAHA 2015 Is: "We Cannot Be Held Responsible for Your Imagination!"
The 27th year of the festival TANEC PRAHA is about to begin. Among the main attractions of the festival programme we can find two prominent figures in the world of dance: Sasha Waltz & Guests and Ohad Naharin's Batsheva Dance Company. As usual, TANEC PRAHA will bring dance to Prague and other 15 cities and municipalities in the Czech Republic throughout the whole month of June.
Sasha Waltz and Ohad Naharin are the undisputable highlights of the season, among medium-sized companies and other artists we can find, for instance, Mossoux-Bonté, Liquid Loft and Olga de Soto. An essential part of the programme are performances by young talented artists, featured within the scope of European dance laboratories as well as in the regions alongside their Czech colleagues. In addition to that, TANEC PRAHA also features an accompanying programme in a public space VEN.ku TANCI and events for children.“The foreign part of the festival programme is selected by the Arts Council from hundreds of candidates, the council members having seen a great number of productions live due to their participation in international festivals, platforms and juries of renowned competitions. The Arts Council has been closely following prestigious companies for a number of years. Narrowing the selection down to ten productions is always difficult, even more complicated are talks regarding particular requirements and funding. Extraordinary quality and courage to search for new, unexplored paths are the most important criteria for the final selection," the organizers claim. This year the programme is dominated by two prominent figures: Sasha Waltz, who was present at one of the first TANEC PRAHA festivals in 1994. In Prague, the main programme kicks off on June 3rd with Impromptus from the beginning of the new millennium, when she turned away from dance theatre towards classical music and decided to create a distinctive choreography to Franz Schubert's music, performed live. Then, on June 15th, the audiences in Pilsen will have a chance to see her piece Travelogue I – Twenty to Eight. Czech audiences first encountered the works of Ohad Naharin, performed by the Geneva Ballet, at the beginning of the 1990s and later on, in 1999 and 2004, performed by the junior company of the Batsheva Ensemble. This year for the first time ever, the Batsheva Dance Company, one of the most acclaimed companies in the world, will come to Prague. LAST WORK is a symbolic name of a piece that dozens of promoters are waiting to premiere, but only a few of them have the chance to present it right away in June, i.e. right after the Israeli premiere. TANEC PRAHA is one of them. The performances are scheduled for June 24th and 25th. Both the Batsheva company and Sasha Walz & Guests will perform at the Karlín Musical Theatre, the rest of the Prague programme will be presented mostly at the Ponec theatre. “It is not the first time Cie Mossoux-Bonté have been to the festival either. The unique poetics and movement stylization of this creative duo always inspires and surprises. By contrast, Vienna-based artist Chris Haring with his visual-physical concepts for Liquid Loft company is in Prague for the first time. An installation in motion, broadcast live on TV is the first part of the festival programme that takes place in the premises of Studio Hrdinů,” the organizers add. TANEC PRAHA FOR STUDENTS this time analyses the masterpiece of Kurt Jooss thanks to a brilliant concept by Olga de Soto. The European Dance Labs are occupied by artists chosen for the Aerowaves platform. They come from Hungary, France and Italy, those in the regions from Slovakia. As for the Czech artists, TANEC PRAHA features a world premiere of a production by Tereza Ondrová and Peter Šavel (June 21st, 2015, at the Ponec theatre), who have become the faces of the festival campaign as well. In the regions (outside Prague), Czech artists will perform 43 public productions in 15 towns and cities across the Czech Republic. More than 20 Czech dancers are involved in site-specific projects of international cooperation situated at unusual venues: cafés, shop windows, parks etc. Our artists work together with their colleagues from Germany (Micha Purucker, Alexandra Karabelas), Japan (Yukio Suzuki) and the Netherlands (Studio Zijspan).
The programme is available at www.tanecpraha.cz.
Source: TANEC PRAHA
Josef Bartos
Thank you for your thoughts. One got stuck in my mind – that passion makes us different from AI. Just yesterday I read…I am a dance critic. I am a member of an endangered species