The second annual International Laterna Fest of the National Theater (ND) will offer dance, electro punk, movement theater and comedy from May 9 to 16. Ensembles from the Czech Republic, Japan, Australia, and Sweden will perform on the New Stage. According to Radim Vizváry, the artistic director of Laterna magika, the invited ensembles, including the Japanese Sankai Džuku or the Australian The Umbilical Brothers, are top representatives of their fields. The festival will also offer an accompanying program in the form of discussions with the creators after the productions. Dita Táborová informed about it for the festival.
“Laterna magika continued its legendary history with the first year of the festival realized two years ago and became a crossroads of multimedia and multi-genre theater. Dramaturgy then and this year highlighted technologically and artistically interesting ensembles and artists. The invited guests are top representatives of their field and together form a representative overview reflecting history and the present, roots and retrospective with today’s technological innovations. Laterna fest celebrates the dialogue of genres, underlines openness and experimentation,” he said Vizvars.
The Japanese troupe Sankai Dzuku will start its European tour at the Laterna fest with a production of Utsushi, a dance-music composition about the body and nature. The performance will consist of excerpts of key works from the ensemble’s repertoire, a showcase of more than thirty years of work by choreographer Ušio Amagacu.
The comedy duo The Umbilical Brothers from Australia will present The Distraction, which relies on slapstick, pantomime and humor. Two performers, principles of theater and television, six cameras and nine plastic dolls meet on stage. The pair work with camera effects and green screen.
The Swedish electro punk pop group Sirqus Alfon creates its unique poetics with a novel combination of interactive technology and lasers, the involvement of artificial intelligence, the use of optical illusions and video loops. The ensemble has been active for over 20 years and will open the Laterna fest on May 9 with its Play 3.0 performance.
The fourth troupe that will be presented to the audience at the Laterna Fest is the troupe of the Moravian-Silesian National Theatre. He will bring to Prague the virtuoso dance work Hora by the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. “The whole is a dynamic world of surprising opposites, seemingly incongruous things are balanced on the scales, beauty and ugliness, spontaneous and unrestrained joy from dancing with precise technique,” they stated organizers to the show.
Laterna magika returned to the international scene under the leadership of Radim Vizváry. We have more and more invitations abroad. We invite interesting ensembles from all over the world to our festival, and we want to cooperate with some of them in the future.” said the director general of the National Theatre Jan Burian.
There will be a video installation by the Canadian multimedia artist and director Jeremy Segal in the New Scene Video Gallery. It will include digitally edited images of water and clouds, thus creating a contrast between natural images and their artificially created digital derivatives.
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