Letní Letná Festival 2008

Praha, August 8 – The 5th annual Letní Letná festival will take place between the 20th of August and the 2nd of September in the traditional location of Prague´s Letná Park (near Chotkovy sady tram stop). The festival once again offers a rich theatre program – with 30 theatre companies, over 90 performances and two concerts. Visit children´s world for fairytales 5 times a day (from, for example, Divadlo Romaneto, Buchty a loutky, Bilbo Compagnie, ANPU Theatre and the bubble-blower Václav Strasser), activities for children or simply just as place for fun and relaxation in the middle of the park (with bar and café).

For the first time under the big top seven tightrope walkers perform together, seven singular and remarkable high wire virtuosos. Besides demonstrating feats of technical excellence, they deliver a choreographed routine in the air, their bodies singing a seven-part harmony, sensitive and poetic. The performance is part autobiographical. Antoine Rigot introduces the act into the ring and remains grounded. The master of the tightrope fell six years ago, and it is his story that they recount now. Held in suspense we watch their every move, transfixed by what this high wire dance tells us of our life journeys, light and so fragile, beset by danger and desire…

“Someone dreamed one day of this impossible act- if it existed, it would be magic…I tasted this magic, fell in love and have made it my art – my life´s art. Life is a mystery; after twenty years spent perfecting my agility, a terrible accident stopped me in my tracks. Abrupt and irreversible. When one year later I began to find again my own two feet, the first inklings of balance reappeared. The goal became learning to walk again, responding to that vital need, to set out on the road, to be a “funambule of life”.

In working with younger tightwire walkers, and sharing this passion, hidden sensations have come back to me- sensations I had thought long-forgotten…

Together, today, we have created a show exploring the emotions, obstacles and challenges we find scattered throughout life.  A poetic evocation of the path along which each of us walk.

A stage. A cliff. Made of metal. A vertical block which sits there, abstract in its geometry, the only reason for its existence being to furnish a surface, without depth nor background, even if one imagines that at the top there is indeed headland stretching away to new horizons. But what counts is the flat vertical plane – pure smooth perfection – on this sheer cliff. An empty block, itself sitting in the emptiness.

In I look up, I look down, Chloé Moglia and Mélissa Von Vépy occupy this stark space, the only dramatic art being the game they invent to defy the void – to find ways of overcoming the vertiginous shock of this sheer drop and to be reunited with the ground, only to look back at the summit they fled from and to experiment new methods of returning to it.

It seems very simple, but the game becomes so dense in the space of time, in the stretching of each moment of suspension, in the sensuality of the bodies battling against the harsh dryness of the cliff, that the circus performance is lived prodigiously, without the least showing-off of virtuosity. I look up, I look down is circus, it belongs to the circus yet also detaches itself from this sphere and enters another form close to dance – poetry transposed into physical form. It’s a small jewel, chiseled by two young performance artists, 1999 graduates from the Centre National des Arts du Cirque in Châlons-en-Champagne, France. I look up, I look down is their fourth show, and the complicity which reunites Chloé Moglia and Mélissa Von Vépy plays a large part in the flavour of the piece. Their complicity shows; in their relationship with the looming cliff, they would be nothing without each other. In their generosity to help the other, to offer a foothold or an anchor in the shape of their own bodies, there lies a humane dimension which overrides the sacred aura of their technical skill, strips it of the over-fascination it might wield on us and transforms the space into a tactile world – senses alert and nerves on edge. There is also a gentle touch of metaphysical circus, all the more so since Chloé Moglia and Mélissa Von Vépy have nourished their work with the texts of Jankélévitch (and also from his lectures recorded at the Sorbonne University of Paris) on the perception of the void, “between fear and fascination, on the border of dangerous and absurd, in unstable equilibrium.”

Man, Woman, Obsession …Tragic and comic performance blending theatre, dance and aerial acrobatics on the rope wall. For its first independent project, the ensemble Décalages invited the Russian director Irina Andreeva. This project is truly international: the Russian-Czech-French team rehearsed not only in the Czech Republic, but also in France.

Obsession examines the extreme limits of the relationship between man and woman, the need to control, submit, transform, resist, approach, possess, share, be alone, be together …

To find the right effect and image, we experimented with miles of ropes, tons of old newspapers and dozens of wooden boards to create a purely functional set that lets the audience to immerse itself in the depths of the performed stories.