COINCIDING WITH THE FINAL WEEKEND of Art Basel, the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space took over the Czech city’s historic center. Organized around the three themes of Music, Weather, and Politics, the thirteenth edition focused on the “social function” of scenography, and featured more than sixty participating countries, with street performances, talks, exhibitions in Baroque interiors, sound walks, and boat rides down the Vltava River. There were easily as many perspectives as there were nations. “The world is not global as everyone is trying to tell us. It’s local,” said Sodja Zupanc Lotker, the quadrennial’s artistic director. “And for me, that’s good news.”
At the opening ceremony in Prague’s Old Town Square, four massive Fiat Ducatos rolled in with the Berg Orchestra and the Polana Choir from Jarabina, entertaining the gathered audience and passersby with a short, blaring concert of gypsy jazz and female folk polyphonies before driving off with Czech minister of culture Daniel Herman—who allowed the festival to use Kafka’s house rent-free—and the quadrennial’s director, Pavla Petrová. I met with Hong Kong–based curator Allan Shek Pang Tsui and the rest of his team. He talked about Hong Kong’s first participation in 1995, how they missed the 2003 edition because of SARS, and their love for the festival’s openness. Though he emphasized that the recent Umbrella Movement wasn’t part of their focus, I still caught allusions to it in their national pavilion.
The shows varied in quality, and some were downright disappointing—though isn’t that the risk and pleasure of theater? “All of this is happening today?!” and “Where is [yet another event here]?” were questions I heard hourly from confused visitors, and indeed which I often expressed myself. But we all tried to take the confusion in stride, and roaming around this gem of a city in search of the quadrennial’s signature red banners and blue wooden chairs became a performative experience in itself. At the Clam-Gallas, an eighteenth-century palace off Husova Street, the main stairway was taken over by an installation of smiling skeletons by the Norwegian set designer Signe Becker. Upstairs, the United Kingdom projected a mélange of stage productions from years past. “It echoes the wallpaper that used to cover these rooms,” said theater designer Kate Burnett, pointing at the DVD menu page projected on the wall, which was festooned with paintings. Judging by the hypnotized looks of those seated on the floor, it worked. Latvia’s contribution, designed by Vladislav Nastavshev in a small room of Kafka’s house, featured a tense performer hanging by her waist from a wooden plank. At the Colloredo-Mansfeld palace, another eighteenth-century pile located opposite the Charles Bridge, one room had ice blocks hung from the ceiling in a sound installation by Finish artist Antti Mäkela. “Can you hear it?” asked curator Maiju Loukola, passing her hands under the dripping cubes.
Part industry mixer, part student event—sometimes it felt like queuing with fans for the musical Rent—the program officially opened to the public on Thursday. I was offered coffee by the greeter for the “Makers Exhibition,” a series of live “food and dining experiences” held in the Bethlehem Chapel Gallery, where some artists moonlighted as chefs as they developed and shared their epicurean concepts with visitors. There was France and Cyprus’s obscure channeling of Sartre’s No Exit and a lively cooking show by Icelandic artist Thorunn S. Thorgrimsdottir demonstrating a traditional receipe involving sheep head, but made vegetarian, as the artists weren’t allowed to cook meat in the venue. The coffee was divine, though. My scenic enthusiasm was restored by the invigorating, immersive four-channel video installation Glastonbury: Land and Legend, curated by the Victoria & Albert’s Kate Bailey across the street at Galerie Jaroslav Fragner.
“If it weren’t for this room, they would have torn this place down already. Amadeus was filmed here,” I was told while back in a hall of the Colloredo-Mansfeld palace, where many SRO talks were held. I managed to catch some highlights, including Bianca Casady’s poems about dusty chandeliers and early-childhood synesthesia. She passed around her hat, into which we were encouraged to drop questions. “What’s with the feathers?” one paper read. “I guess I am attracted to things that are a little dirty,” she smiled. There was also a laborious Skype talk with Jerzy Gurawski, the revolutionary Polish scenographer who mixed spectators and sweaty actors in his unconventional stagings of the 1960s.
On Friday, Taiwan hosted a party celebrating Taipei’s hosting of the 2017 World Stage Design festival. The fete took place in a lackluster conference room of the Jalta hotel, though it did feature the best performance of the week: a sultry and elegant piece of choreography by Po-Cheng Tsai. Things were really beginning to heat up, and by the time I left Prague, I heard that people were arriving three hours early to the talk featuring Canadian polymath Robert Lepage. Altogether, it was Austrian curator Vero Schürr, in conversation with dramaturge Tom Sellar, who summed it up for me. “What makes a powerful experience is one that you remember, or one that actually changes behavior.” I don’t know about the latter, but certainly this unusual and generous exhibition made me feel like a student again.
