The BAZAAR Festival: Identity in Art and Motion

The BAZAAR international festival of independent performance takes place March 18–20 2016 with performances at the Alfred ve dvoře Theatre, Studio ALTA and the PONEC – the Dance Venue. This year’s festival program revisits themes of identity – identity as a territory where the private and the political intersect, identity as a sphere of personal autonomy, but also identity as something susceptible to manipulation. The culmination of the festival will be the Saturday Bazaar, showcasing works-in-progress by artists from the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Russia, and Slovakia. The BAZAAR Festival is one of the few “development festivals”, supporting the development of new works, in central and eastern Europe.
 
In today’s Europe questions of identity and its transformations have become politically charged. ‘Fears creeping through our society, unfamiliar to us just a few years ago, are being transformed by some into political capital. It almost seems like late 19th century nationalisms are back on the march in a new form. Now, in the early 21st century, opinions on identity, both political and personal identity, are tied to the question: where do we want to take things?’, says festival program director Ewan McLaren. ‘What are our options? With characteristic irony and intelligence, artists working in the post-communist context have been exploring how we can defend our identity against manipulation, exploring the visions and dreams now available to us, and how we can maintain a place in which to think and create freely.’
 
The festival opens on Friday, 18 March with We Do Not Know the Logic of the Wind by Sonja Pregrad and Nives Sertić. This production, first developed as part of the Identity.Move! project, questions the hierarchy of different ways of articulating the world: the observed vs the observer, the body vs the camera lens, dance vs the language of film. Austrian dancer and multi-media artist Silke Grabinger will be festival special guest with her performance Versuchsperson Silke Grabinger in which dancer becomes “test subject” In her solo choreography this former Cirque du Soleil performer explores ways of establishing her own rules in someone else’s game.
 
Saturday Bazaar, which will be held in two blocks on 19 March at Studio ALTA, will offer a look inside the creative labs of six innovating artists. In Absolutely, Roman Zotov (RU) presents an excerpt from a story about searching for home. In This Very Moment, award-winning Slovak dancer Jaro Viňarský presents an artistic exploration about perceiving others completely free of prejudice. The afternoon session closes with a collaborative work-in-progress by Halka Třešňáková (major personality of the Czech indie scene) and Hungarian artist Lászlo Fülöp,Timothy and the Things: Plan B. During the evening block of Saturday Bazaar Polish-Romanian duo Agata Siniarska and Madalina Dan will perform an excerpt from their future work Mothers of Steel, an investigation into the phenomenology of tears that touches on themes like memory, history, death, happiness, fragility, innocence, and strength. Tereza Hradilková will present an excerpt from Swish, a future solo about work, play, and madness. The close of the evening will belong to the creative team Ufftenživot and an excerpt from their piece Loneliness and Stuff, exploring isolation and self-determination. There will be a closing discussion on the dramaturgical approaches of these productions led by Alice Koubová from the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences, who specialises in the study of performative philosophy, post-phenomenology, and the philosophy of corporeality.
 
The BAZAAR Festival will conclude with a pair of performances on Sunday, 20 March: End Dream by Romanian ensemble Unsorcery, focusing on ways in which we can actively alter reality. Pygmalion, by special festival guest Wojtek Ziemilski, is a story about communication and an exercise in extreme empathy: the relationship between a mother and her son with a speech impediment, becomes a metaphor for how society relates to those who are unable to speak for themselves. On Sunday at 4pm there will also be a public presentation of an excerpt from On the (Non-hierarchical) Dialogue between Two Media, the workshop headed by Sonja Pregrad and Nives Sertić that will run for the duration of the festival.
 
The Bazaar Festival was created in 2015 as part of the Identity.Move! project, an international platform supporting theoretical and artistic research into identity through contemporary dance and the related performing arts. The main organiser of the festival is now Motus, producers of the Alfred ve dvoře Theatre in cooperation with many foreign cultural institutes, Tanec Praha, and Studio ALTA.
 
For more information, visit www.alfredvedvore.cz/en/bazaar.
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