Tour of the Winners – Jarmila Jeřábková Award 2015

PRESS RELEASE

Nina Vangeli

The international summer tour of the winners of the choreographic competition – Jarmila Jeřábková Award 2015 culminated in a concert that took place in the Archa theatre in the end of September. The tour went through the Central European countries from which most young choreographers competing for the Jarmila Jeřábková Award hail. The winners performed in Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. The tour was composed of the winners‘ new choreographic works created thanks to the monetary rewards given together with the prize – in accordance with the rules of the competition. The Jarmila Jeřábková Award thus motivates the creativity of beginning choreographers and supports the introduction of their work to the public. This year, the project was presented in the international context for the first time.

The choreographers who presented their work – and personally participated in their performance as well – during the celebratory evening in the Archa theatre were Inga Mikshina, Roman Zotov, and Pavla Vařáková. The audience, which filled every seat in the theatre, welcomed the show warmly, and justly so. The choreographies of conservatory graduates, in two cases fairly fresh graduates, were self-assured in their perspectives, emotionally engaging, and performed in the contemporary dance feeling.

Inga Mikshina, native of Siberia, completed her studies at the Duncan Centre Conservatory last year. In the Archa theatre she presented her work titled Hannah Harriet Chaplin cca 1925. The choreography dives deep into the internal world of memories and fixed ideas of Charles Chaplin’s mother as her son described her in his autobiography. The gradual blurring of the title character’s mind is the central motif of the piece. The audience of the winners’concert saw the second version of the choreography. – The first version, presented during the competition, involved more characters, which gave it more complexity and brought distinguishable personalities. While it did not involve any narrative techniques foreign to dance, it introduced the audience to a comprehensible situation that provided a basis for a clear and organic emergence of individual dance performances, including some bizarre, atmospheric and intuitive ones, as well as of their intense emotionality. In addition to dance, theatrical actorish expresiveness was employed. In its entirety, the choreography was a vibrant picture painted with a delicate sensitive brush. – The current version presented in the Archa theatre was reduced to three female dancers, perhaps Hannah Harriet Chaplin multiplied, and in a non-figurative way it expressed the essence of a woman’s soul unstoppably drowning in itself.

It brought a hypersensitive performance of three charismatic dancers – choreographer Inga Mikshina herself, Johana Pocková, and Kristýna Šajtošová. It was a dance of the tripled soul of Hannah Harriet. The three dancers‘ simple and elegant long dresses served as a non-intrusive hint to a bygone era. The dance was melancholic, hypersensitive, truthful in its expression, and refined. – On the other hand, the new, more abstract version lacked the subtle emotional claws, the tiny hooks, the fragments of reality that would get under the viewers‘ skin and go beyond a purely aesthetic experience, to a fatal, tragic sensation. The dancers‘ melancholy in itself is not enough, the sadness should affect the audience.

If we regard this choreography as part of the physical theatre trend that is currently prevalent in the “Prague school of dance,“ it is the soft sort, a piece of gentle, shy and sisterly touches, a yinpiece.

Roman Zotov, now working under the label of A+1 Company (which also includes dancer and co-creator Ivan Volkov), too introduced a new version of his original choreography Alisa Vasanta that was first presented at the competition. This piece could also be called physical theatre, but, in contrast to the choreography described above, it was an immensely expressive yang type of theatre, not only because its authors and performers were men. It was mostly because, similarly to the original version, it showed “a distressful physical theatre consisting of a series of harrowing dreams. Absurd, slightly naturalistic, a little ‚ready-made‘.“ The new work continues in the discovered style and develops it further. – The masculine presence, literally the masculine corporality, is of key importance here. The two young topless men keep their dance “low,“ close to the floor for a long time. In a way it is quite challenging to observe an exposed, if only half-naked male body. It is disturbingly intimate. We are still not accustomed to the look. The past millenia of our culture have led us to observe female bodies; to see a nude man remains somehow inappropriate. Likewise, the physical touch of two male bodies seems much more physical than the sisterly intimacy of female dancers. And as if the two men themselves, disrobed (and, one may guess, sweaty), did not feel comfortable in their own bodies, they search on the floor, and later through the entire space, for new shapes and body positions, new possibilities of a more appropriate, more easeful, less painful physical existence. Or, it seems at times, on the contrary, more painful. Beauty steps aside, showmanship steps aside, any concern for ladies in the audience steps aside. These are not some simple asanas, the dancers cruise through the space like earth-bound whirlers, they shake the space out like an old bed sheet. – Both dancers have provided an interesting and challenging definition of a man.

Choreographer Pavla Vařáková from the EKS group presented her piece titled She featuring Kateřina Blažková, Zdena Hüttlová and the choreographer herself. As the title of the choreography suggests, it focuses on a woman’s uncertainty in the face of the society’s uneasy rules. A sort of sensitive abstraction prevailed in the style of the dance. Therefore the sophisticated dance expression could not capture or specify the overly general “female“ theme, nor could it, one would assume, answer the complex answers about a woman’s place in today’s society, about the prejudices she faces, about her internal struggle with what is commonly understood as reality – which was the choreographer’s ambition. The hint of prop comedy (some sort of play with a small chair) did not cast a particularly bright light on the matter. What remained was a very sensitive dance performed by three interconnected dancers.

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