Australian-British choreographer works with refugees and Romani people in the Czech Republic as part of international project
Bridget Fiske, an Australian-British choreographer, is currently working with asylum-seekers, refugees temporarily living in the Czech Republic, and Romani people. She is an artist-in-residence with Tanec Praha (Dance Prague) as part of a European project called "Be SpectACTive!"
A performance of the work developed during her residency will be held on 30 November in the Truhlárna Studio in Prague. Another performance will be given in December during her final residency in the Romanian city of Sibiu.
Fiske won support for the international co-production of a new piece as part of the project. Thanks to the funding, she is able to visit Ljubljana, Prague and Sibiu to work with specific communities.
On the basis of her dialogue and interaction with people in these three very different European cities, she has developed an intensive dance theater work called "YES move. NO move. – MOVED?", which is full of challenges. The piece asks what is actually at risk when people fail to accept others among them.
The play is also about what brings people together and what distances themselves from each other. Fiske has focused on two social groups in Prague – asylum-seekers or refugees, whom she has directly visited in detention facilities at Bělá-Jezová and Kostelec nad Orlicí, and Romani people living in the Žižkov quarter of Prague. She spent the first half of November in Ljubljana, Slovenia, is working in Prague from 20 November to 1 December, and then will travel to Sibiu, Romania.
Be SpectACTive! is a four-year international project supported by the Creative Europe program for 2014-2018. It follows three main lines of programming – active spectatorship, international residencies for artists, and research.
Eight European cultural organizations and three research institutions are contributing to the project implementation. The partner in the Czech Republic is Tanec Praha, which holds the festival of contemporary dance of the same name and runs the Ponec Theater in Prague.
