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.

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

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