Kristýna Celbová: Round and Round and Back Again
Tereza Indráková: Between Heaven and Earth
Kristýna Lhotáková: The Swan
Kristýna Boková: I Was Under the Table

Kristýna Celbová: Round and Round and Back Again

Czech Republic

choreography: Kristýna Celbová
dancers: Kristýna Celbová, Marta Trpišovská, Jana Hudečková
music: Tim Robbins, moravské lidové písně / Moravian folk songs
stage design and costumes: Kristýna Celbová

Kristýna Celbová - dancer and choreographer; has danced since childhood, started at the Dance Conservatory at the age of ten, and from 1996-2001 she studied at the Duncan Centre. In 2000 she studied in Amsterdam. During her studies she participated in a wide range of different dance projects, and has presented her own choreography work at arts festivals and showcases (Amsterdam, Jordan - Amman, China - Macau, Portugal). In 1999 she won second prize in the Jarmila Jeřábková choreographic contest for her piece Charon's Brides. At present she is an independent artist.

There aren't many young women who, immediately after graduating from dance school, find their choreographic debut honoured with a full-page article in a leading cultural magazine. Yet a September 2001 issue of Literární noviny (The Literary Gazette) praised her "discarding of the lyric female mask and the total absence of any sentimentality" in a huge spread, going on to celebrate the precision of her choreographic signature, and again stressing the "mystery of non-sentimentality" in her work. Kristýna Celbová is one of the most engaging talents of the younger generation of choreographers. Though to date her work has been on smaller canvases, it is always very sophisticated, featuring many tones and nuances.
          Round and Round and Back Again is the history of the female body in Bohemia in miniature. The dancers squirm under the collective memory of their "tribe", and try to chase it away like some troublesome dog, only to resign themselves and submit to it again. The "spasmodic tic of their tribe" and its "inborn malformations" appear through the dance in caricature, in clean, cybernetic symmetry and in mechanical teamwork. Ridiculous in a gentle way, the dance still manages to imprint itself in the audience's visual memory with the clear, sublime beauty of its colours and bodies in space. Black, white, and green. Kristýna Celbová's specialty is unsullied irony.

Kristýna Celbová, Holandská 10, 101 00 Prague 10, Czech Republic, celbova@email.cz

Tereza Indráková: Between Heaven and Earth

Czech Republic

choreography: Tereza Indráková
dancers: Helena Arenbergerová, Pavlína Černá, Věrka Ondrašíková, Tereza Ondrová
music: Kronos Kvartet, Jablkoň
stage design: Vladimír Burian

While staying in Prague and walking through the Old Town, you can't look into its hidden corners, palace gardens, up onto terraces and balconies or down onto roofs without thinking: "what if…". This city sets the imagination marching, fabricating theatrical images. This young choreographer and dancer dreamed up her own theatrical vision while standing on Charles Bridge. And this is exactly how the dance was first presented - it was a site-specific performance where the audience looked from the "theatre balcony" of Charles Bridge down onto the dancers in the Kampa square area.
          I envisage Tereza, leaning with her whole body over the bridge's stone wall, staring down onto the imaginary stage below for so long that she began to experience a form of tactile illusion - the feeling that the depths below us and inside us are an inviting horizontal playing surface, which we can step onto without fear. Staring into such depths allows the Sirens and the Loreleis (Lorelei was the woman/mermaid of the Rhine who unwittingly trapped sailors with her charms) in us to speak out. This is a special kind of departure akin to vertigo, and it is only at the last second that we are only able to resist its seduction. Tereza Indráková and her dancers play with this illusory change in perception with ease. The humour of it all rises to the surface, getting swept up by the game, moments from everyday life, youth and the irony of the dancers. But don't forget that the piece's context is the view from a stone bridge: if you lean too far, you will get that funny feeling in your bellies…

Tereza Indráková - dancer, choreographer; graduated after eight years study at the Dance Centre Praha conservatory, and currently studies choreography at the dance faculty of the HAMU academy. She has participated in study courses at the London Contemporary Summer Dance School, the Ballet Academy in Cologne and in a year long residency at Dance WEB in Vienna. She has worked on dance projects with renowned choreographers - Bruce Taylor, Derek Williams, Viktorie Marks, Jan Kodet and Petr Tyc. Her residency under Ohada Naharina in 1998-99 at the junior Batsheva Ensemble in Israel was an important experience, as well as work with another Israeli company, Ido Tadmor Dance Company. In 2000 she was member of the F.X. Šalda theatre's dance company in Liberec, where she worked under Petr Tyc. Her first choreographic works were developed during her studies - I Swim with the Anchor in 1997, Throw Your Worries Away and Sonata in 1998, and The Fiddler's Child in 2001. She presented her work On the Same Wavelength in 1999 at the Tanec Praha international dance festival. The work Between Heaven and Earth was developed for a festival of street theatre in Prague's Little Quarter in 2000. As a dancer she performs in the pieces The Little I Know About Sylphs by Petr Tyc, and Danse Macabre by Jan Kodet. She is currently preparing Breathe-Pulse-Light a project relating contemporary music and dance, which will premiere in March at the Ponec theatre.

Tereza Indráková, Na Šutce 405, 182 00 Praha 8, Czech Republic, terule@cbox.cz

Kristýna Lhotáková: The Swan

Czech Republic

concept, choreography, dance: Kristýna Lhotáková
sounds: Ladislav Soukup

Kristýna Lhotáková - education: Folkwang Hochschule - Essen, Germany (Dep. of Contemporary Dance), Duncan Centre Conservatory - Prague, Czech Republic, Václav Hollar's School of Fine Arts - Prague, Czech Republic. Stipends awarded to attend: Symposium of conemporary dance Reperages, organized by the Dance in Lille Foundation - Montreal, Canada, The American Dance Festival - Durham, USA. The most important choreography: 2001 Two, too ( in cooperation with Anna Huber), Trans IT!, 1999-2001 Venus with Rubic's Cube, 1998 Duet, Europalia, Brussels (Belgium), 1998 Dream with Angel, Budapest (Hungary), 1997 No 9, Britchwater, Frome (Great Britain).           Engagement: 1998/1999 Anna Huber Die Anderen und die Gleichen (Germany), 1996 Simone Sandroni Strappi stuzicanti (Czech Republic), 1995 Peter Schumann The Day is Morning, Noon and Evening (Czech Republic), 1993-1996 Lenka Flory Duncan Dance Company (Belgium, Great Britain, Finland, Hungary, Germany, etc.). International Awards: In 2000, the choreography Venus with a Rubic's Cube took 3rd Place in the International Aerowaves Festival at the Place Theatre in London (Great Britain). In 2001, the choreography Venus with a Rubic's Cube received First Place at the Fringe Festival of Contemporary Arts in Perth (Australia).

It is a strange coincidence (and a call to look at local history in pictographs), that in Prague the white swan, one of the most well-known symbols of dance and of all that is ideal and romantic, became the White Swan (Bílá labuť) shopping centre, the star attraction for pragmatists and pilgrims from Prague and from the countryside. Across from the White Swan we find the Archa Theatre, which in spite of its own symbolic name referring us to the bible, resides in the building of the Czechoslovak Business Bank, home to only one kind of animal: the golden calf. It is in the passageway that runs through this bank building that Kristýna Lhotáková (who used her own pictographic dance to connect the worlds of myth and the post-modern with her last piece Venus With a Rubik's Cube) has chosen for her performance. Her ambiguous words about this project: "This evening, January 18th, 2002, let's just say that I imagine that I'll be trying to express the meaning of life in some gentle fashion. I will choose the exact spot, and there I will dance a short piece between the canteen and the café, and behind me, across the street there will be a department store." Who knows, perhaps the piece takes it cue from the examination of "Golden Prague" which the Gob Squad company started here (see Blažek's article Falcon Flight in this issue). Kristýna Lhotáková is easy-going yet consistent in her work. She knows exactly what she doesn't want and has her whole life ahead of her to decide what she wants. Her Venus With a Rubik's Cube has traveled extensively and this is why this young choreographer has received carte blanche with Swan.

Čtyři dny, Celetná 17, 110 00 Prague 1, Czech Republic, ctyridny@login.cz, www.ctyridny.cz

Kristýna Boková: I Was Under the Table

Czech Republic

choreography: Kristýna Boková
dancers: Kristýna Boková, Petra Púčiková, Lenka Bartůňková
ASS="podtit">music: Leoš Janáček

Kristýna Boková - dancer and choreographer; took Eva Blažíčková's courses in expressive dance then studied at the Duncan Centre conservatory in Prague. In 1996 she participated in the Archa Theatre and Min Tanaka's Grimm Grimm - A Pilgrimage from the Past to the Future and in 1997 in the continuation of the project Grimm Grim - Book Two and Grimm Grimm - Stories of Snow White. While touring these pieces in Japan she also spent a month in residence with Min Tanaka. In 2000 she presented I was Under the Table as her graduating project from school. Her next work I am Like Water Grass was awarded the Jarmila Jeřábková first prize. She went on to present this piece at the 2001 Dramaturgy Festival in Regensburg and Port. The same year she was one of the creators of the Contempo-Terezín project, revisiting the Second World War Jewish ghetto. Last autumn she took the Bodybalance Technique course in New York. Her latest piece Tetel opened the third annual Jarmila Jeřábková award ceremony.

A memory moves out of the darkness, pulled out by the hair to the forgotten tones of Leoš Janáček's music. In this music is the ripe pain of memory, the music is here, now, while the childlike appearance of the dancers is there, in the past. The flush of youth radiates throughout the entire piece, as if we were smelling cinnamon with that master of reminiscence, author Bruno Schultz. The girlish faces of the three dancers. Like children who have just woken up, they place foreheads, temples, elbows and palms on an imaginary table in a composition of movement which is more or less minimalist, yet sensual, soft and damp like the complexion of a child warm and tired in the evening. The dancers need nothing more than sensitive lighting and their clothes, which are a distant, gentle allusion to grandma's wardrobe. The light alternately brings out the faces of the girls as they "sit" on imaginary chairs at an imaginary table, and then their dangling legs under the table - the light makes manifest some kind of inner movement, the hidden secret the children look for under the table. The secret remains secret, for memory does not disturb childhood secrets, memory seals them - especially here, in the land between the vampire and the werewolf. We have opened and closed the book of pressed leaves, leaves with tiny soft veiny ribs, and the feeling of their fragile beauty stays with us.

"I Was Under the Table is about what one feels when hidden in a room full of people, and gets to see them in a new light. And discover new dimensions in oneself." (K. B.)

Kristýna Boková, Březinova, 186 00 Prague 8, Czech Republic, krisibok@hotmail.com