The TANEC PRAHA Festival is celebrating a semi-round-number birthday. Every year it boasts unmissable visuals, and this year is no different. We once again invited creative director Roman Číhalík, who has been part of our vibrant visual identity for five years, to collaborate. Like every year, Roman established a brand-new collaboration with contemporary artists. This time it was the photographer duo SHOTBY.US, which consists of Lenka Glisníková and Karolína Matušková. 

"Dozens of hours of talking about dance, hundreds of hours of work, meeting many talented people and I still don't know much about dance," says Roman Číhalík about the creation of this year's visuals. "And that's the beautiful thing about collaborating with the festival. It's a constant search for new feelings, opinions and movements to define and capture dance. Just when I think we've reached the end of the road, that we have a clear idea, another door opens that is the beginning of a new adventure. I am very happy to have had the opportunity to meet Lenka and Karolína from the photography duo SHOTBY.US on this year's journey, and thanks to the openness of the client, we managed to create a story that cannot be described in words but that you have to experience yourself."

SHOTBY.US created not only a new story, but also a whole new world. "A blooming soft meadow, an endless blue sky and a colourful, fantastic landscape that does not end beyond the horizon. It is here, in this idyllic place, that colours, movement and structures meet. We wanted to evoke a feeling of joy. To free ourselves from the current crises and to be immersed for a moment in a world full of life and energy, where the centre of our undisturbed attention becomes the movement of the diverse bodies of the dancers, which, unlike alienated virtual worlds, are charged with energy and raw physicality."

By using a modelled virtual landscape, the creators wanted to underline the beauty and realism of authentic human movement captured in photographs. As a counterpoint to this is the "absence" of the dancers themselves, which refers to the theme of this year's event. The main goal is to point out the importance of the human experience, the personal and the intimate, which can never be fully conveyed if you are not directly "there". And paradoxically and with a touch of hyperbole, to invite the viewer to return from virtuality back to reality. Dancers Eva Stará, Tereza Holubová and Radim Klásek lent their bodies to the visual.

In the spot for this year's festival, the girls from SHOTBY.US collaborated with the guys from the NotReal_Virtual studio, who created a world shaped by photos and video, directed and produced by Jiří Horenský together with the ALTERNAUT collective. Jakub Kaifosz aka Lazer Viking lent the wonderful, dance-inducing song "Gibber Gabber" to the campaign. Kateřina Hynková designed the costumes full of colours and frills, tailored to the movements of the dancers.