ARTIST'S STATEMENT
As an author, I want to find the language that will speak more clearly than any verbal one. I want to touch something godlike within us. As a spectator, I want to meet myself in the image in front of me. The actor is now my mirror, the mirror that can bring me a new image of myself because his experience is now my experience and, I have changed. This is an encounter. This is the miracle of theater. Only in the here and now can the encounter between the audience and the actors happen.
“The World is already here. There is no sense to copy the World. We have to create new images of the World.” This concept comes from expressionistic painters that strenuously search for the essential expression of real life. The theater should do the same. The theater has to provoke through its beauty: it has to provoke you to feel life, to reveal the animal and the child within us. Theater has to disturb, to confuse and to attack the audience in order to change them to allow them to experience something new. The theater has to touch something within us, something that resonates: open forgotten dreams, images and hidden memories to give the chance for the audience to become a co-creator. Not to explain, not to give the instruction manual on how to read the performance, but to create the spectator’s own map of understanding through their own life experience, the emotions, dreams and moments that resonate with their lives.
- Miřenka Čechová
ABOUT THE WORKS
S/He is
Nancy Joe
named "Best of 2012 in Contemporary Dance" by the Washington Post
Recipient of a 2013 Herald Angel Award from Edinburgh Fringe
S/He is Nancy Joe is a movement and visual performance piece that utilizes a unique style of street ballet in conjunction with animation, projections and recorded sound. Miřenka Čechová combines hip-hop, pop and lock, physical mime, contemporary dance, and classical ballet with interactive comic book visuals and spoken narrative to create an art form that is truly contemporary. S/He is Nancy Joe tells the story of questioning and gender identity.
“This performance is a documentary dramatization of the stories of those transgender people I have been privileged to meet, and to live and become friends with,” says Čechová. “All are amazing, strong, and exceptional people who have enriched me tremendously as a person and as an artist. To them I owe the ability to see further and deeper. They have also taught me how to consider beauty and meaning from a new perspective.”
What the critics are saying:
"But most impressive of all is simply Čechová's body, which she turns into a battleground of self-identity and societal censure. Amid all the imaginatively used technology of this show, that body is an element of surpassing wonder." - Sarah Kaufman, Washington Post
“This performance wakes people up and opens their eyes.” — Jakub Novák, Aktuálně
“Perfect synthesis of the worlds of drawing and theatre…” — Radmila Hrdinová, Právo
“Ethereal physicality…” — Peter Marks, The Washington Post
Awards: The Best of Contemporary Dance by The Washington Post (USA), Herald Angel Award, Edinburgh Fringe Festival (UK), Young for Young Festival main award (CZ), Nomination for Czech Dance Platform Festival award (CZ)
Performances: Czech Republic, Scotland, India, Korea, Poland, Cyprus, USA
FAiTH
Following the success of the Atlas Residency, Faith had its world premiere. Have a look! The US premiere of Faith is to be presented in the 2014-2015 season.
Author, director and performer, Miřenka Čechová’s newest work, “FAiTH” is an exploration of art, faith and the search for essential meaning through art.
In this story of a prima ballerina who lost her art and consequently the will to live, Miřenka Čechová and Andrea Miltnerova offer a docu-dance-graphic production concerning the question of what it means to be deprived of art and a sense for life and, what it means to have daily actions transformed into rituals by their finality. It reckons with the beauty of decay, the crisis of belief turned false and the intersection of past and present in one irrevocably pivotal moment.
From this premise, Čechová has created a work of abstract movement theatre informed by nature and the human spirit in all its frailty and power.
Concept, direction: Miřenka Čechová, choreography and performing: Miřenka Čechová, Andrea Miltnerová, music: Bohren und der Club of Gore, sound design: Matouš Hekela, lighting design: Martin Špetlík, set design: Jakub Tauš, Petr Boháč, costume design: Judy Hansen
What the Critics are saying:
"Although the two dancers in FAiTH focus rather on the dark side of the dance, they also in a special way map the strength and the joy that art brings. All negative aspects also simultaneously have their positive side. Sadness at the same time sets out a space for pleasure or carries its potential. Miřenka points out the opposites that attract each other. Life and death. Flowers and fading. The aesthetics and the atmosphere of her Faith reminds us of Japanese calligraphy. It is strong, and even with the use of very little, it scares the audience by its monotony, which they have to overcome themselves."(Taneční zóna, Jana Bohutísnká, February 2014)
"Distinctive and award-winning work with artistic and audiovisual resources is characteristic for Tantehorse, however, I think that this sensitive and delicate, almost bland but, due to that, even more intense screening in this case will transform into a persistent recollection."(Divadelní noviny, Dominik Melichar, February 20, 2014)
The Voice of
Anne Frank
The Voice of Anne Frank speaks to the cares and delights of a thirteen-year-old girl forced to reckon with the extraordinary circumstances of her time. Her message endures far beyond the last pages of her diary to express not only her very special voice but also that of those who survived, those who didn't and those of us who are left to find contemporary meaning in her story.
In a production that features movement, music, spoken text, lighting and sound Miřenka Čechová brings The Voice of Anne Frank to life in a way that is touching, humorous and deeply affecting.
Use of text fragments of the Diary of Anne Frank with kind permission of the Anne Frank Foundation, Basel, Switzerland.
Awards: Outstanding Performance Award (Prague Fringe), Best of Fringe (Amsterdam Fringe), Best of Oversea Performance (National Arts Festival in Grahamstown)
Performances: Roxy / NoD (CZ), Fringe Prague (CZ), Small Inventory 2008 (CZ), Festival Evropských regionů (CZ), Divadlo Děčín (CZ), Palác Akropolis (CZ), Die Etage (DE), Katzen Art Centrum AU (USA), University of Tampa (USA), Bohemian National Hall (USA), Mercersburg Academy (USA), site-specific Statek Rabín (CZ), International Festival Zero Point (CZ), i-camp/Neues Theater München (DE), Prague Fringe (CZ), Amsterdam Fringe (NL), National Arts Festival (JAR), The Market Theatre (JAR), Acco Festival (ISR), The Kennedy Center / Terrace Theatre (USA)
"...a treasury of physically expressive theatre arts."
-- Sarah Kaufman, Washington Post June 3, 2013
The Death of the Marquis de Sade
- On the Dark Road
&
Dante-Light in a Darkness
"Astounding...Brave artists...pushing the limits..."
-- Justin Schneider, DC Metro Theatre Arts June 1, 2013
Light in the Darkness is based on a trilogy that was continuously created from 2007 – 2009, which aimed to introduce the visual and metaphorical richness of the physical theater imagination to audiences.The work started with the motif of unrequited love in “Virginie”, the motif of dying love arising from the haze of memories in “The death of Marquise de Sade”, to the love that is passionate, sinful, and devilish, encountered in “Dante”.
The poetics of the entire work move from the surreal and decadent towards elements of rococo and mannerism. The various scenes recall the first paintings by Salvador Dalí, the work of Giorgio Chirico and the films of Jan Svankmajer and Peter Greenaway.
Authors, performers: Miřenka Čechová, Radim Vizvary, directing supervision: Petr Boháč, music: Matouš Hekela, J. S. Bach, stage and costume design: PetraVlachynská, Lucia Škandíková, lighting design: Martin Špetlík
What the critics are saying:
“With their two amazing, infinitely malleable bodies — oozing like melted rubber one moment, hard-edged and dangerous another — the two performers conjured up a thrilling phantasmagoria. The stage became foreign turf with only the merest echoes of reality… That’s the great gift of Tantehorse: As stylized, mysterious and preoccupied with death, sex and violence as these creations were, they sizzled with life. The source is the intensity of those finely calibrated bodies.”(Washington Post, Sarah Halzack June 3, 2013)
