Festival Norma 2024
Dance as Destiny
The conceptual focus of the seventh annual Norma Festival is dance as a lifestyle—one so deeply immersive that anything outside it seems insignificant. In keeping with tradition, the festival will span two days and feature five performances by Polish and Czech artists. A key component of the festival, since its inception, has been the emphasis on commissioning at least one performance piece specifically for the event. This year is no exception, with two new works set to debut. The festival’s programming is designed, as always, to encourage the audience to view the festival as a cohesive whole, ideally attending all of the performances.
The first day of the festival will showcase three performances by Czech and Polish artists. The piece My Tail and I by Holobiont Collective initially presents itself as a playful performance for children but gradually reveals a more complex world that captivates adult viewers as well. It is historically the first children’s show presented at Norma festival. The evening block of performances will kick off by the premiere of Hit, a new solo project by dancer, actor, and performer Jan Bárta, building upon his previous work Pitch, which was also presented at Norma Festival. Bárta’s minimalist yet intensely focused performance is highly engaging, and we trust it will again prove to be a remarkable experience. In her latest project, choreographer Ramona Nagabczyńska takes on the subject of the phenomenon of performing on stage itself. At the meeting of an anonymous group therapy Performers Anonymous tell their intimate stories and confide what they risk by going on stage, what they are willing to sacrifice for it, and how far they are prepared to go in order to be noticed and watched.
The second day opens with the premiere of a performance commissioned by the festival: two prominent artists from the Czech Republic and Poland—the visual and virtual artist known by the pseudonym NIVVA and Polish theater and opera director Magda Szpecht—will explore the popular yet unsettling field of artificial intelligence in their project Bliss. This work, created specifically for the festival, was co-produced with Æfekt Productions, Komuna Warszawa and Pawiłon Poznań, where the performance will also be staged. The festival will conclude with the musical performance Headbanger, direct from Brno’s performance platform Terén and the artistic collective D’epog, thoroughly tying together the festival’s overarching theme: dance as destiny.
Saturday November 16th
2.00 pm Holobiont collective: My Tail and I
4.00 pm Holobiont collective: My Tail and I – SOLD OUT
7.00 pm Jan Bárta: Hit
8.00 pm Ramona Nagabczyńska: Performers Anonymous – in Polish with Czech and English surtitles
Sunday November 17th
7.00 pm NIVVA, Magda Szpecht: Bliss
8.30 pm Terén & D’epog: Headbanger
Holobiont collective: My Tail and I
concept: Hanna Bylka-Kanecka
choreography: Holobiont collective in collaboration with Heike Kuhlmann, Adalisa Menghini, and Ka Rustler
creation and performance: Aleksandra Bożek-Muszyńska, Hanna Bylka-Kanecka, Dana Chmielewska
set design collaboration: Mr.Tail
music: Józef Buchnajzer
light design: Łukasz Kędzierski/Ewa Garniec
production: Performat Foundation
co-production: Polish Theatre in Poznan, The Jan and Halina Machulski Ochota Theater in Warsaw
partner: Somatische Akademie Berlin
distribution: Performat Production – Karolina Wycisk
photos: Marek Zakrzewski / SZKICEzWIDZENIA
The performance is focused around an inconspicuous decline from our evolutionary ancestors – the tail bone. Built on a somatic approach to the body and movement, My Tail and I invites families to accompany and take action in the process of becoming creatures, called humans.
With a humorous atmosphere and in a form appropriate for the youngest audience, the performance asks: How many tails do we have? How do we feel them? How can they support us in our daily lives? How can they feed our movement and our imagination?
The performance is an artistic response to one of the contemporary plagues of civilization, which is sitting for a long time without moving, very often causing back pain, especially in its tail section. It affects both caregivers and, unfortunately, children, who are mirroring the adults, and who are often trained not to move too much. Long-term freezing often means cutting off valuable signals flowing from the body. One of the main goals of the performance is to deepen the awareness of the body and encourage them to enjoy the common family dance.
My Tail and I is a clear gesture emphasizing the great importance of early artistic experiences, embracing an open and critical attitude towards art, respect for diversity (intergenerational and bodily) of every being, and strengthening family bonds.
Co-organised by the National Institute of Music and Dance as part of the “PolandDances / Choreographic residencies” program. Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage
The performance was selected to the Polish Dance Platform 2024, organized by the National Institute of Music and Dance.
Supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
Holobiont collective is made up of choreographers Aleksandra Bożek-Muszyńska, Hanna Bylka-Kanecka and creative producer Karolina Wycisk. The artists are interested in interdisciplinary, multi-generational projects. All their works are based on the assumption that every participant of the performance – regardless of age and experience – is fully competent as a recipient of art. The collective has produced roundABOUT (2017), Moonland (2018), on_line_ (2018), Where shapes have necks (2019) and My Tail and I (2021).
duration: 60 minutes
Jan Bárta: Hit
concept and performance: Jan Bárta
photo, video, graphics, projections: Dita Havránková
technical support, lighting design: Václav Hruška & Studio Hrdinů
production: CreWcollective
“And I would scream, but they have places for people who scream.”
~ Charles Bukowski
How much do we need to scream to be seen? How much do we need to show to be heard?
The solo performance Hit explores themes of amplification, exaggeration, and extension present within the act of a blow. It plays with non-aestheticized physical gestures, overflowing into action, image, word, and text, using a minimalist approach to theatrical action that is fundamentally communicative. Impact, radicality, and anger are transformed into the language of the quotidian.
The performance is loosely related to the 2015 solo performance Pitch staged both in the Czech Republic and abroad, and aligns with the straightforward style of the Bárta-Třešňáková creative duo (It’s actually about, not the paradise (2010), Sticker (2014), the latter of which was nominated for Performance of the Year and the DNA Nová síť Award).
Thanks to: Studio Hrdinů, CreWcollective, Cabin Studio Pěčice, Bubi, and Franta
Supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Hall, Studio Hrdinů
Duration: 40 minutes
Ramona Nagabczyńska: Performers Anonymous
choreography: Ramona Nagabczyńska
dramaturgy: Agata Siniarska
set design and costumes: Wiktoria Walendzik
music: Lubomir Grzelak
lighting director: Jędrzej Jęcikowski
production manager: Ewa Grzebyk
stage manager: Patrycja Węglarz
cast: Karolina Kraczkowska, Ramona Nagabczyńska, Maja Pankiewicz, Rob Wasiewicz, Bożna Wydrowska
production: STUDIO theatregallery in Warsaw
Premiere: 6 September 2024
In her latest project, choreographer Ramona Nagabczyńska takes on the subject of the phenomenon of performing on stage itself. At the meeting of an anonymous group therapy, performers invited by Nagabczyńska will tell their intimate stories and confide what they risk by going on stage, what they are willing to
sacrifice for it, and how far they are prepared to go in order to be noticed and watched. And finally, what addiction stage constitutes and is it possible, or are they even willing, to recover from this addiction.
The therapy convention showcases various relationships with the stage and the performance: incessant vacillation between love and hate, fiction and truth, endless attempts to “recover” from the addiction and complete immersion in it. The essence of Performers Anonymous is navigating around the questions about the truth, both on stage and beyond it. Do we perform for others in our daily lives? Does a “truth about us” even exist? Is theatre reality, or is it rather reality that is constant theatre we cannot live without?
Warnings: 15+, nudity, vulgar language, nicotine-free e-cigarettes, flashing lights, audience
interaction
Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland from the Fund
for the Promotion of Culture — national special purpose fund within the program “Dance” conducted
by the National Institute of Music and Dance
Ramona Nagabczyńska
Dancer and choreographer working both in Poland and internationally. She received her artistic education in the Comprehensive Ballet School in Warsaw, Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, and in London Contemporary Dance School, while her theoretical studies were completed at the SWPS University and the University of Warsaw. Her choreographic works include New (Dis)Order (2012) selected in 2014 for the Aerowaves network, Re//accumulation (2012), gallery performance The Way Things Dinge (2014), solo pURe (2015), MORE (2017), gallery performance Networking (2018/19), Body parts (2019) selected for the Aerowaves network as well, Silenzio! (2021) for Nowy Theatre in Warsaw, Le Jeu de Massacre together with Barbara Kinga Majewska for Studio Theatre in Warsaw, and Błogo (Blissfully) for the National Museum in Warsaw. In 2021 she was awarded for directing the production Silenzio! at the Divine Comedy Festival in Krakow.
She is one of the co-founders of the Centrum w Ruchu collective.
duration: 65 minutes
NIVVA & Magda Szpecht: Bliss
director: Magda Szpecht
artistic concept: NIVVA
music: NIVVA a Dominik Gajarský
dramaturgy and text: Olga Drygas
producers: Michał Rogulski and Madla Horáková Zelenková
performing: Anežka Kalivodová
At the invitation of the Norma festival, visual and virtual artist NIVVA and Polish theater and opera director Magda Szpecht meet. The Czech-Polish team creates this project directly for the festival in co-production with Æfekt Productions, Komuna Warszawa and Pawiłon Poznan. Bliss is a performance that imagines the possibilities of relationship between a virtual being and its human creator. Using motion capture technology, we speculate about a future where digital beings may emerge with a sense of agency beyond human design.
Drawing inspiration from The Bliss, the serene landscape photograph immortalized as the Windows XP wallpaper, this narration becomes a metaphor for the entanglement of human and non-human, remaining and leftovers, autonomy and dependence. Bliss-a being, is both a subject of harmony and a point of tension in a world where creator and creation are equals.
duration: 30 minutes
Terén & D’epog: Headbanger
direction and choreography: Lucia Repašská
concept and dramaturgy: Matyáš Dlab
performers: Zdeněk Polák, Janet Prokešová, Zuzana Smutková, Pasi Mäkelä
live music: Matyáš Dlab, Pasi Mäkelä and Zákonodárce Orgánu (special festival guest)
scenography: D’epog
costumes: Jan Matýsek
lighting design and technology: Jonáš Garaj
sound: Jozef Esto Fertaľ, Václav Marián Šesták
visual collaboration: Max Lysáček
special thanks to: Exorcizphobia, Robert Vlček, Tomáš Nerad, Edward Lodewijk Van Halen, Distortion, Overdrive, Fuzz, Boost.
Distortion, Overdrive, Fuzz, Boost. A musical performance inspired by the phenomenon of headbanging, an iconic dance move closely associated with heavy metal music genres and their subcultures. A new collaborative production between Terén and the artistic collective D’epog.
“We’ve designed a performance created for the stage that stems from our love of musical worlds—their genres, subgenres, and sub-subgenres, their cultures, aesthetics, icons, and fetishes. It’s an intense physical performance by a five-member group—a blend of concert, party, light show, and dance choreography. We draw inspiration from headbanging, a cyclic, repetitive, dance move, often limited to the upper body or just the neck. Headbanger emerged from a fascination with the theatricality and fictions of music, artistic alter-egos, stage identities, costumes, and scenographies. It was born out of the joy of transgressing what is acceptable in everyday reality, obscenity, pathetic song lyrics, symbolism, mythologies, pseudo-beliefs, bizarre spiritualities, conspiracies, images of hyperviolence, hypersexism, and commercial countercultures. Headbanger celebrates the collective experience of concerts, atmospheres, and moments that compel us to physically react with our own bodies. These are moments where we can be emotional, expressive, and spontaneous—where we can express ourselves without fear of judgment. Headbanger is a performance that has passed through a distortion pedal.”
D’epog
D’epog is an artistic collective specializing in intermedia creation rooted in practices associated with the performing arts. The group does not have a dedicated performance site, and performs most of its projects in non-theatrical spaces. Based in Brno, the group has been active since 2010 creating both staged productions and one-off performances exploring unique artistic formats.
Lucia Repašská
As the director and artistic leader of D’epog, Lucia Repašská focuses on actor training, audience perception research, and experimental stage creation, primarily in site-specific, dramatic, and performance-based settings. She regularly presents D’epog’s work and her teaching (seminars and workshops on presence, montage, and dramaturgy of space) at conferences and festivals in the Czech Republic and abroad. Repašská graduated in theater direction from the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts (JAMU) in Brno having studied with Arnošt Goldflam. She completed her interdisciplinary research on autopoietic feedback loops and communication techniques in collaboration with the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and HumeLAB-Laboratory for Experimental Humanities in 2021 detailed in her publication The Art of Persuasion.
Jan Matýsek
Visual artist and stage designer Jan Matýsek studied scenography at JAMU. He completed his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU) where he attended the New Media 2 studio. He has exhibited solo installations and curated numerous exhibitions. Currently, he works as an assistant in the New Media 2 Studio at AVU.
He completed an internship at Berlin’s UdK in the Experimental Film Studio. His work primarily focuses on creating video installations as immersive environments. He has participated in the International PAF Festival in Olomouc, as well as several group exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad (Germany, Poland, Greece, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine). He has held solo exhibitions at the Kostka Gallery in Prague’s MeetFactory and at TIC Gallery in Brno. As a curator, he has organized several exhibitions at Umakart Gallery in Brno and was part of the curatorial team for the Czech student exhibition at the Prague Quadrennial. He currently works as an assistant in the New Media 2 Studio at AVU.
Pasi Mäkelä
Pasi Mäkelä is a Finnish performer, director, choreographer, musician, and conceptual artist living in Prague. He studied at the Turku Arts Academy in Finland, where he earned a degree as a theater director and educator. He has been a long-time member of the Finnish theater communities Reality Research Center and Circus Maximus. Currently, he is involved in musical projects such as The Spermbankers, The Mond, and Federsel&Mäkelä. Among his notable works are his solo performances such as Tonttu and Walrus Vampire Show, as well as projects with his own music/performance group Sabotanic Garden. He regularly appears as an actor, performer, or musician in a variety of one-off or staged productions.
Jonáš Garaj
A graduate of the Theater Production and Stage Technology Studio and the Lighting Design Studio at JAMU in Brno, Jonáš Garaj has been professionally involved in stage lighting and lighting design since 2010. In the past, he has collaborated with the National Theatre Brno, Studio Marta, music clubs Fléda and Sono, Studio Alta, Švanda Theater, Bratislava’s Studio 12, the Philharmonic in Rzeszów, Poland, Moravian Theater Olomouc, Cheb Municipal Theater, South Bohemian Theater, and the Chamber Opera of HF JAMU. In his personal artistic work, he explores the possibilities of light kinetics and work with glass, metal, smoke, and various technologies. One example is the light-kinetic installation TeePee, which he created for the Prague Signal Festival in collaboration with the Tabula Rasa group, or the permanent light installation in Brno’s Spektrum bar. He has also been a long-term collaborator on technological and design projects for the Czech club music scene.
duration: 30 minutes concert + 55 minutes performance
There are stroboscopic effects used in the performance.
