An exceptional solo performance by Chinese dancer, choreographer and documentary filmmaker Wen Hui, this year's J. W. Goethe winner. The breath-taking solo stage composition combines an original screening of archive films with a personal statement by Wen Hui. Her dance is the fabric of a multimedia production in which the visual recordings of female representatives of early Chinese cinema are connected with authentic texts and stories of the present.
The production discovers for European audiences the Chinese progressive women's cinematography of the 1930s and reflects the growing feminist movement in today's China.

Choreographer and dancer, Wen Hui also makes documentary movies and art installations. Frenchmagazine Télescope describes her as “a pioneer of dance…a miracle”. Wen Hui graduated from Beijing Dance Academy in 1989 with a degree in Choreography. In 1994, she studied modern dance in New York attending José Limón, Erick Hawkins and Trisha Brown’s classes. From 1997 to 1998, she received a scholarship from the Asian Cultural Council to further her study of modern dance and theatre production in New York. In 1994, she founded with Wu Wenguang, a documentary filmmaker, the Living Dance Studio in Beijing, the first independent art company in China. She has participated in curating and organizing numerous arts projects. For twenty years, Wen Hui has insisted on using theatre as an intervention in the society. Since 2008, she has begun to research the ways body forms the archive of personal, social documentation, using personal means to experiment how bodily memory catalyzes collision between history and reality.

Since its inception, the Living Dance Studio has become a pioneer in contemporary Chinese art.The company is committed to exploring the artistic process in an open arena, working with artists of all media and all disciplines, and creating performances that integrate dance, theatre, and all forms of audio/visual art. Its mission is both to perform the here-and-now realities in which we all live, and to bring public attention to the narratives and experiences that we can use to reflect on the past. The Living Dance Studio has presented its work in numerous local and global festivals including the Venice Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, the Festival d’Automne de Paris, Biennale de la Danse de Lyon, Archa Theatre/AKCENT Festival, SPIFI ART Festival Munich, IN TRANAIT BERLIN, TheaterHebbel am Ufer of Berlin, Kampnagel Hamburg, JULI DANST, Wiener Festwocheh, ZUERCHERTHEATEER SPEKTAKEL, DECEMBER DANCE Belgium, EUROKAZ FESTIVAL,Festival/Tokyo, Sesc Pompeia Sao Paulo, Singapore Arts Festival, Hong Kong Art Festival, etc.

Credits

Choreography & dance : Wen Hui
Dramaturgy and consulting : Zhang Zhen
Music : Wen Luyuan 
Video : Rémi Crépeau et Zhou Xueping
Lights and stage management : Romain de Lagarde 
Stagehand : Francisco Linares 
Administration and booking:Damien Valette
Coordination : Louise Bailly
Production : Théâtre de la Ville, Living Dance Studio et Damien Valette Prod
Coproduction : Théâtre de la Ville/Festival d'automne à Paris 

Wen Hui benefited from a residency at the Théâtre de la Ville - Les Abbesses and particularly thanks the technical team of the Théâtre des Abbesses
Laureate of the residency program from the French Institute at the Cité internationale des arts, Paris
With support from the Goethe-Institut in Beijing 
With support from micadanses-Paris
Benefited from a dance studio at the CND Centre national de la danse, Paris

With support from the French Institute in China.

Theatre performance Those Who Speak For Themselves transforms Archa Theatre into a huge gallery where authentic life stories of twelve women become the exhibits. The audience is left with the decision whether they will experience all the stories or only certain parts of them and the order in which they will assemble them.  An important part of the unique theatrical installation by theatre director Jana Svobodová is the original music of Michal Nejtek.  

Those Who Speak For Themselves is a show in which the performers are not actors. They don't play roles. They only represent themselves. Stories intertwine, people meet unexpectedly. Like when you walk down the street, you think of something, someone passes by and you catch his sentence. And it folds into a new story. Then it becomes the only story, yours.

This performance is performed in Czech only!

Media

When the theatre hall is transformed into a gallery where the viewers choose what they want to see – Prague Daily Monitor, August 10, 2021

Theatre performance Those Who Speak For Themselves transforms Archa Theatre into a huge gallery where authentic life stories of twelve women become the exhibits. The audience is left with the decision whether they will experience all the stories or only certain parts of them and the order in which they will assemble them.  An important part of the unique theatrical installation by theatre director Jana Svobodová is the original music of Michal Nejtek.  

Those Who Speak For Themselves is a show in which the performers are not actors. They don't play roles. They only represent themselves. Stories intertwine, people meet unexpectedly. Like when you walk down the street, you think of something, someone passes by and you catch his sentence. And it folds into a new story. Then it becomes the only story, yours.

This performance is English spoken!

Media

When the theatre hall is transformed into a gallery where the viewers choose what they want to see – Prague Daily Monitor, August 10, 2021

Czech spoken. Small auditorium. Duration 70 minutes.

If the citizens of our country, who are in foreclosures, inhabited an independent region, it would be the sixth largest region in the Czech Republic. The Execution Order of the Czech Republic entered into force in 2001, so this year we have its 20th anniversary. Do we have a reason to celebrate?

Credits

Directed by: Jiří Honzírek
Performed by: Denisa Cupáková, Jan Jedlinský, Daniel Gajdoš
Music: Ondřej Kolín
Technical cooperation: Petr Beránek
Dramaturgical cooperation: Roman Černík
Production: Petra Štěpánová
Photo: Michal Poustka
Special thanks to: Laco Toušek, Michaela Šímová, Jitka Kylišová, Jiří Prošek
Premiere: September 13, 2021, Moving Station, Pilsen

The production was created with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

An original gaming performance takes its viewers to the parallel world of online video games. It is an exploration of a digital society which is formed by millions of people around the world who log into the vast gaming worlds every day. The virtual spaces offer its users endless possibilites to enjoy themselves without contraints of harsh reality. But every game has its rules. Urbanist Osamu Okamura, YouTuber Atlet, photographer and gamer Adéla Vosičková and will form an expert gaming panel to unpack hidden mechanisms, prototypes, rituals, that shape seemingly weightlesness world of online videogames. What norms, rules and codes are allowed to surpass in virtual space? And in reality? What role does the gaming principles play in our society? By means of original use of a live video, 3D animations and YouTube formats, the performance unveils hidden links between real and virtual living spaces set at the backdrop of fast growing gaming industry changing the ways how we understand reality.   

Celebrating the centenary of Korean theatre, the South Korean theatre maker / composer Jaha Koo realized that there is actually no space for Korean theatre tradition: what is regarded as Korean theatre is largely determined by the Western canon. But why are the South Koreans so proud of this Western interpretation? And why does everyone keep referring to Shakespeare? It raises questions about tradition, self-censorship and authenticity.

In this final piece of his Hamartia trilogy, Jaha Koo resolutely focuses on the future. Meticulously, he exposes the tragic impact of the past on our lives, unveiling the small cracks in modern Confucianism - an ideology that continues to define the moral system, way of life and social relations between generations in South Korea. With a new generation of South Koreans in mind, he attempts to break with a tradition full of self-censorship and keeping up appearances. Because only when based on an authentic version of history, he can pass on a future to the next generation.

Like the performances Lolling & Rolling and Cuckoo, which respectively focused on South Korea's past and present, The History of Korean Western Theatre is an intelligent documentary theatre performance in which Jaha Koo interweaves personal stories with historical, political and sociological facts. Often themes that contain a clash of Eastern and Western culture: from cutting string of tongue to make it in the West, to the heavy personal toll of Western interference on a macroeconomic level.