Korzo National Gallery Prague - Trade Fair Palace / czech / 240 min

Modes of Perception and Their Transformations
A participative theatre event with a follow up discussion about forms of audience perception

How much of what audiences perceive in the theatre is what they bring in with them? Are there methods to free their personal material to organically intertwine with the impulses from the creators and enter a shared space of experience? How to engage spectators in the process of perceiving a theatrical form in a way that can free their creative potential?

In a joint discussion and on the basis of collective embodied experience, we will seek answers to the question of how to negotiate with audiences the opportunities for their engagement in a theatre event. A special attention will be paid to changes in sensitivity, which is this year's festival theme. We will examine the ways to incite audiences, open their sensory receptors, dissolve prejudices, reflect on previously accumulated perceptions, unlock associative processes, and create space for trying new and perhaps unusual methods of reading and perceiving reality.

We will try to gradually formulate an open-access catalogue of strategies that can be used to literally bring the audience into a play, to release their perception, feelings, and thinking, and open them up to the transformative potential of a theatre encounter.

The discussion is moderated by Karolina Plicková.

The programme includes a dance-theatre event entitled Be Provoked by Dance!.

A show which is not a show but a world of imagination.

Nowadays we find ourselves under a lot of pressure and exposed to many realities that cannot be ignored: war, inflation eating up our savings, high energy prices. We have been taught to keep distance from everything that can upset us – it is important that we function at full capacity! So we turn on our defence mechanisms: we stock up, build a bunker, isolate ourselves. But then, in this solitude of ours, nonverbal emotions begin to accumulate. And they gradually start getting to us. Until one day we realize that our personal and professional relationships and our friendships are falling apart. And that we don’t know what to do about it.

The presented dance and theatre project features a new artistic format based on sharing, as a reaction to our tendency to isolate ourselves and the psychology of audiences’ perception. Using artistic format of the programme designed as a collage and with the moderator’s guidance, the performance allows spectators to experience and understand how they and their community feel about current events. It is based on a heightened sensitivity in perception of contemporary audience, which the author uses as an opportunity to draw spectators into the play. Under his guidance, it is them who begin to determine what they want to experience in terms of the perception of the presented artwork, whether they want to co-create it through their own experience and what key (instruction) they want to discover in it for themselves.

Author and moderator: Michal Nikodem
Cooperation: Tereza Krčálová
Music: Václav Chalupský
Choreography: Jitka Čechová, Yuri Korec /SK/
Interpretation: Jitka Čechová, Daniel Raček /SK/
Artistic supervision, production: Honza Malík & Pulsar z. s.

Supported by: Donio.cz, Helena a Jakub Urbanovi (Studio TEP39), Berrak Yedek (Limpid Works Studio), Jana Dolejšová, Štěpán Zahálka, Anna Línová.

Registration required.

Contact to register: nelahettenbergerova@novasit.cz