Staging the Plants
"When I put down a garden it's a performance in time."
"This struggle about beauty and no beauty, that's what I like. Seeing beauty in ugliness. Beauty in death, beauty in decay, beauty in the unexpected." Piet Oudolf
The principles and philosophy of world-famous garden designer Piet Oudolf in the context of Prague and its climate.
Tereza Kerle presents a multi-layered site-specific performance based on the search for extraordinary beauty in plants, their textures and changes throughout the seasons. Its protagonists are the plants themselves, which in the style of the Dutch New Wave, with regard to local conditions, create a "Žižkov highline", whose natural shapes, sustainability and textures recall the wildness of prairies, meadows and plains.
Adaptability. The existence of the unit in the wider whole. The circulations and cycles in which a plant resembles the cycle of human life. Unlike humans, however, the plant repeats it year after year. Decomposition, transformation and subsequent renewal. Everything the plant takes from the soil it always returns. Every year it dies only to be reborn in its own ashes in the spring.
This cross between land art, garden design, site-specific and dance performance reflects the spirit of New York implementation and maps out what direction the transformation of this place could go in the future.
Concept, dramaturgy, performance, land art: Tereza Kerle
Choreography: Jan Razima
Dancers: Anna Benháková, Lucie Matoušková, Jan Razima
Music: Tomáš Kerle – electronic instruments, percussion, Ian Mikyska – string and wind instruments
The Prague art collective Zóna focuses on site-specific performances, visual-musical installations and sound art. The concept creator, Tereza Kerle, is a graduate of the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU), Tomáš Žižka's studio, and a member of the Topos Collective focusing on improvisations in musical-spatial performances.
Jan Razima is a graduate of the Duncan Centre Conservatory and is currently studying choreography at the Music and Dance Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (HAMU).