SE.S.TA Blog

Kathy Casey – dramaturge and director of Montreal Dance in Canada was one of this year coaches who together with Alice Chauchat – dance maker and artist based in Berlin and also a coach of this year Coaching Residencies presented conversation about their work during the round table untitled Beside the Black Box: Re-inventing Aesthetics of Coming Together on Sunday 23th of August 2020 in National Gallery in Prague. For the panel, Kathy Casey was sharing some works she is currently involved with and which are needing time frames and environments that black boxes don't necessarily suggest for active audience involvement. She opened up how some of these works rely on “devotions”: repeated and investigated over long periods without much predetermined organization, challenging preexisting concepts of dramaturgy and choreography.

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

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