How to be together?

As the name itself suggests, the performance will consist of duets, i.e. two bodies, two people as a minimum for the establishment of a community. In an age of individualism and loneliness, the creators decided to explore ways to meet, to communicate without words. How to be together when we come from a very different environment and context? What does it mean to understand one another nowadays?

Together with dancers and performers, people who have never been on stage before meet in the PONEC Theatre. Duets arose in an unconventional form through workshops in which performers and dancers Tereza Ondrová, Viktor Černický and Sai first met a person they did not know before the workshop. The meetings were based on a simple script. The participants of the workshop were both actors and witnesses of these meetings. Each Duet also examined our ideas and prejudices, as well as our ability to perceive closeness and sympathy. The meeting between two strangers focused on mutual attention and the present body.

The performance of Duets is based on minimalism, the resulting writing of movement on simplicity, but also on the coincidence that will arise among those people that evening. It is a portrait of people and their relationships happening directly in front of your eyes.

How to mediate and create a space where it is possible to slow down for a while? How to record such an encounter through the body in the resulting production? How to grasp the complexity of the human relationship that takes place at the level of social diversity, genetics, hair colour, our emotions, etc.? And how should such encounters be perceived?

 

A short interview with Petra Tejnorová

1. What was the impulse for you to create the project?

Already in my previous production (though not dance) I focused on the topic of community and meeting. It was in the Speech to the Nation, at the New Stage of the National Theatre. I was looking for a way to meet the audience of the National Theatre, what kind of community can be formed with that evening's audience – within an institution like the National Theatre. How do you understand someone who does not have the same opinions, who comes from a very different environment and context? What does it mean to understand nowadays? And from here it was just a step to a conversation without words. I wanted to work with the body, because the body connects us all. I also took inspiration from a recent personal experience, a visit to the Building Conversation project. For some time, I have been trying to question the importance of the theatre and thus the relationship with the audience. So, of course, I start to ask more often what theatre can offer and it doesn't matter whether it is dance theatre, movement theatre or alternative or drama. I enjoy developing perception strategies. Since I like crossing borders rather than building them, by crossing borders between dance, theatre, installation, performance, social experiment, etc., the viewer not only "watches something" but also "goes through something" – they watch, immerse themselves, attempt to understand, move away… And so, my efforts and impulses for creation also come from exploring the nature of the theatre itself, the viewer and perception.

2. Can you tell us about the process of creation and the work itself? 

From the beginning of the audition process and the whole research, we began to invite people to audition who are not accustomed to working with the body. We wrote a few calls or addressed people whom we just met casually. They might have sold us a movie ticket and the next day we were together in the rehearsal room or in the gallery. These meetings surprised us and showed us the need to slow down to see the details that may have become so obvious to us that we no longer see them. For example, in the very attitude of the body you can see a person's entire life. Gradually we started to develop the final shape of the production, which is based on the REAL TIME COMPOSITION method. We used the format of a dance evening and the theatre to arrange a meeting of several people who would not normally meet. Many hours of work with structure, composition, but also chance went into the creation of Duets. Duets thus offers space for sharing intimacy, joy, empathy, but also embarrassment and all those fragile things, including the minimalist and authentic movements that shape our encounters. Duets is simply our bodies speaking. 
 

3. Can you tell us more about TEMPORARY COLLECTIVE?

We have been operating under the official name of the platform TEMPORARY COLLECTIVE since 2018. But I have been working with Tereza Ondrova already since the production of WHAT IS THE WEIGHT OF YOUR DESIRE (VERTEDANCE), so since 2012. Michal Somoš (another member of the new platform) produced almost all my independent projects and the start of our collaboration was also around 2012, beginning with LIFE SHOW in the Archa Theatre. We met for the first time specifically as a trio in a dance essay about perception called You Are Here. Tereza and I share a common style of humour and irony that we like to work with, which can be seen for example in the dance production SAME SAME, which was created in cooperation with Belgian choreographer Karine Ponties,  or in the productions of LET'S GO TO DANCE or NOTHING SAD. Together with other members of Temporary Collective (TC) – photographer Marek Bartoš and musician Dominik Žižka, we also made the short film HELLO? IS ANYONE THERE?, which was a kind of documentary aimed at kids and adults who like dance and sci-fi. And the newly established TC platform follows up on this almost eight-year production tradition. Our first two things under the TC banner are DUETS and the live cinema PUTIN'S AGENTS at Jatka78.