“Culture is a body of knowledge concerning survival in a hostile world, inherited and passed on from generation to generation.” - Gretchen Vogel

 

 

a fragile son took his first breath at the Czech Majales Festival 2015, May 28th at the Sfinx in Ceske Budejovice.

My original concept was to research through dance: How is culture is 'embodied'? For a series of residencies, I called the research process- Fluid Culture Body, and I invited dancing people to explore this question in many cities in the Czech and Slovak Republics. The process reflected a desire to contextualize my dancing ‘Self’ in my new foreign home.

At first I searched for ways to frame the dancer’s experience into a cultural context. So, during research sessions, we shared personal and historical stories while dancing- imprints from our past to frame our dancing. After learning some of the movements from the participants, I searched for ways to reflect a cultural self questioning back to the observer. This became the solo.
 
It was through the personal stories that re-occuring themes started to reveal themselves. Mother. Father. Faggot. Fire. Rebellion. Obstacles. Offering. Outside. Inside. I experience fear as something already living inside me that seems to respond to the world around me. I wonder, ’If fear is something a person can perpetuate within themselves unconsciously (supported by cultural surroundings) where does courage come from?
 
Does the brain’s system lead naturally from survival to transcendence? If so, then do we just let it happen? Let those chemicals flow, change, adapt and accept the journey of cultural assimilation and its opposite. The fear of threat is present in work, but so is the openness to face the consequences of transgression. I find ways to highlight how my 'culture' performs through me.
 
The deeply personal desire to dance freely sometimes comes in conflict with the internalized aspect of my own culture, the familiar. Confronting culture together through the Fluid Culture Body research process, each unique body gave birth to a fragile son.

 

"For the viewer, it is about the delicate sharing of "not knowing" which everybody can identify with. The key is to "sense" it rather than "view" it. Which is the tough part." - Kamil (FCB Žilina)

"This solo will always be the same. Never still. Calm provocation. Does it hurt?" - Kateřina (FCB Prague)

"Intimacy. Writing a message, sending a message, across time and space, timeless. Garments of memory, of imagination, of theater, of rehearsal, of play." - Tatyanna (FCB Bushwick/NYC)

"Solo about crazy little thing called life. That our thread of life is not going from A to C, but from B to D, on coil, in circles. All alone, we are re-digesting not just our past, but also future." - Samo (FCB Bratislava)

 

Photo: Ján Chmelík, Bjorn Bolinder