“How and why we group together”: 12th edition of Bazaar Festival focuses on community
The 12th edition of the international Bazaar Festival opens today in Prague, bringing contemporary dance and performance from across Central and Eastern Europe to various venues across the capital. I spoke with the festival’s artistic director, Ewan McLaren, and first asked him why “community” became the central theme of this year’s festival.
“Well, our festival always builds its programme around a theme that we observe happening around us. We travel around Central and East European countries, attending performances at festivals and other events, and try to look for points of connection between very different pieces from countries and communities with very different issues and aesthetics.
“And we find that, more often than not, there is some kind of common theme. In recent years we’ve noticed that many artists from this wider region of Europe are exploring questions of how we group together, why we group together, why we leave some people out of our groups and why we include them.
“We also saw that there are performances and practices by many artists concerned with the natural world and taking inspiration from nature. So together this works as a theme that brings performances from many different parts of Europe together in the Bazaar Festival.”
The festival opens with Pieces and Elements by Isabelle Schad. Could you tell us a little about this performance and what audiences can expect from the opening night?
“Isabelle Schad’s performance is a wonderful opportunity to discover a top German choreographer whose work has never been presented in the Czech Republic.
“However, Isabelle has long been a dance teacher and leader, and many of the artists that we have presented, or are even presenting this year, have been touched by her inspiration. So we said this is the time to bring one of her great works to Prague and Czech audiences.
“This also opens up the theme for us, because in Pieces and Elements a group of humans, a human community if you will, transforms or morphs into natural elements.
“It’s a wonderful performance based on light, shadow, closed and open bodies moving between being human and non-human.”
What are some of the other highlights of this year’s programme that audiences shouldn’t miss?
“Where to begin? Right away on Friday we have a performance which we’ve decided to combine with a gathering of people from Czech and Slovak sci-fi communities, both sci-fi writers and the choreographer of the performance, which is called The Story.
“The piece features a human community confronting some kind of enigmatic power, and we thought it would be fun to bring together people from the literary sci-fi world and the performance community. It allows audiences to think about how dystopias and utopias can be portrayed not just in books but also on stage.
“Then I would also highlight some performances that deal with the natural world. On Monday the 16th we present a work co-created by a Romanian choreographer and a Canadian artist.
“It’s a very unusual piece in which the dancers’ choreography is dictated not by the choreographers themselves but by cultures of bacteria and microflora grown in petri dishes. The performance was created in collaboration with scientists and is an attempt to imagine what it would be like if we listened to the non-human communities in our own bodies.”
This year marks the 12th edition of the festival. How did the Bazaar Festival originally start and what was the idea behind creating it?
“Thanks for asking. In this area of Europe, which includes many newer EU member states and their neighbours, there hasn’t been a long tradition of collaboration in the creation of major performance works like there is in Western Europe.
“We felt there was so much to share. The aesthetics and even the politics can be very different from one country to the next, but the possibility of sharing across borders, sharing ideas, financing or resources, and also provoking each other creatively, was too strong to resist.
“So a large group of us came together and offered artistic residencies to artists from about fourteen or fifteen countries. We also realised that artists needed the chance to meet the public, and the public needed the chance to see what these artists were working on.
“We created the Bazaar Festival in 2015 as a showcase of works in progress. We also realised that to bring audiences we needed to show them how central they are to the arts. Eastern European artists are creating fantastic innovative works that tour around the world, so we also bring finished productions into the festival.”
Who is the festival mainly aimed at, dance professionals or the general public as well?
“Our festival theme is communities, and that is really what it is about. We try to address the general public through themes and ideas that resonate with communities outside dance, performance and theatre as well as within them.
“This year we are particularly interested in reaching people outside the contemporary dance world, for example people involved in hip-hop and street dance, or families whose children take part in those communities.
“We also want to speak to people who are thinking about the sociology of our countries and the state of our democracy. So it is definitely aimed at a wider audience.”
