Performance festival Pragicomedionale 2025

31. 8. 2025
11:00 – 22:00

The festival does not have a fixed theme but opens itself to playfulness, humor, comedy, and creative engagement with the environment. It is a meeting place for both audiences and performers, offering space for dialogue, sharing experiences, and intergenerational inspiration. In addition to live performances, it also features lectures and a program for children. The curator of the first edition is long-time Pragovka resident, visual artist, and performer David Helán.

HUB 11:30–12:00 AAbattery (Anna Hušková a Adéla Mitová) – Milá performance (performance)

We grow up in a world of images that press on us every day. Visual impulses accumulate, staying with us, sometimes entirely unconsciously. To create today means constantly moving along the boundary between what is our own and what we have once glimpsed, what has remained within us. Originality is no longer an isolated act, but a relationship. In the Milá performance (Gentle Performance), we take from one another. Not because we want to imitate, but because we perceive each other, inspire each other, and listen. Every element we pass on resonates differently within us, growing in a different direction. We are not stealing from each other. We are sharing. We are trusting. And it is precisely because of this that something emerges which none of us could have created alone. We create together, out of reciprocity, closeness, and the presence of one another.

HUB 12:30–13:00 Zorka Lednárová – Anjel (performance)

The performance Anjel (Angel) is a personal and deeply humanistic statement by the artist, carrying above all a message of inclusion and sensitivity toward otherness. It is an almost spiritual confrontation with one’s own body and with the painter’s canvas within a performative process of recording movement through the archetypal language of the angel figure. To realize the performance, Zorka Lednárová requires four assistants who move her limbs, thus creating the imprint of an angel on the canvas. The performance speaks of surrendering control over one’s own body, of pain, and of the insurmountable barriers of an ill body. Yet above all, it reveals the will and the longing for wholeness and freedom, which society’s empathy and support can offer to an individual—allowing them to transcend their own physical limitations. Anjel aspires to be inclusive and sensitive in itself—not only on the level of social interaction, but also as a deeper existential statement.

HUB 14:00–15:00 tYhle – Kuličkobraní (workshop for kids)

Imagine finding yourself in a room where someone scatters 1,326 glass marbles. Can you picture it? What game shall we play with them? Shall we build a track for them? Of course!

HUB 15:30–16:30 Neil Luck – Radical Foliage (performance)

Over several years experimental composer and artist Neil Luck has developed a body of acoustic leaf playing techniques that reappropriate electronic and synthesised sounds. This performance reimagines local foliage of each performance location as noise objects. The natural and the artificial, the acoustic and the electronic resonate together in uncanny, sustainable, intentionally hyper-local ways.

HUB 18:00–19:00 David Helán, Miloš Šejn, Tomáš Ruller – Naslouchání okamžiku (performance)

Three prominent figures of Czech performance art come together in a shared gesture of attentiveness to the space, to one another, and to the present moment. Each performer enters the Pragovka courtyard individually, following their own path—through movement, voice, body, and silence they engage in dialogue with the architecture, the light, the surfaces, and the sounds of the place.
Gradually, their traces draw closer, intersect, and intertwine until, in the finale, they merge into a subtle yet absurd collective composition. The performance unfolds as a living event shaped not only by the performers themselves but also by the audience, the space, and the surrounding city.

ATELIER 11:00–12:00 Anna Hejmová – Obrazy dělnického těla a pohybu (lecture)

The theme of the lecture emerges from the space and history of Pragovka. What did the cultural performances of workers’ communities on the periphery of Prague look like at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries? How did the bodily culture connected to workers’ identity transform over time? The visualization of workers’ physical education and the process of forming workers’ athletic associations was long-term and diverse. Workers’ associations, much like those with nationalist orientations, co-created the culture of the city in the second half of the 19th century: bodily culture within workers’ physical education served a different function than the bodily culture conceived on the basis of the ancient philosophical concept, and the iconography of festive workers’ attire also went through a distinct process of adaptation. How did performances intended for workers’ audiences change in the 1920s? The dynamics of differentiation between the workers’ social democratic and communist communities were reflected both in the process of abstracting the visuality of workers’ bodies and in the ways communication in public space unfolded through abstracted symbolism.

ATELIER 13:00–14:00 Jakub Jansa – The Garden of Problems: Výstava jako seriál (lecture)

The lecture will focus on the transformations in the relationship between visual art and storytelling: from the rejection of narrative in the era of abstraction and minimalism to its revival in the 1990s, when artists once again began to explore intimate, subjective, and open-ended stories reflecting identity, sexuality, and politics. This “neo-narrative” turn is connected both to the rise of social media and the demand for accessible communication, as well as to a response against previous abstract and conceptual movements. Contemporary art thus draws on literature, film, theatre, and television, and approaches the exhibition as a unified work with its own dramaturgy and narrative structure.

ATELIER 15:00–16:30 Tužka v pohybu (education program for kids)

Everyone knows how to use pencils—whether we are big or small. With them we draw the world around us, record shapes and lines, and even write. A drawing on paper remains still and unchanging until we decide to pick up an eraser and remove part of it. But is it possible to set the drawing, or parts of it, in motion?

ZÁLIV 16:30–17:00 Jana Orlová – Oxytocin (performance)

The performance explores the search for a sense of closeness within impersonal relationships.

STUDIO 12:00–13:00Lucie Doležalová, Denisa Klementová a Michal Vejskal (performance)

In the performance, we address the theme of personal and public security/insecurity. We move toward extremism, embodied specifically in conspiracy theories. We want to play with the so-called thin ice of what can be believed or surrendered to. Through our direction and sound design, the performer responds to us and to what takes place on the screen. Associatively, she evokes a consumer of information, enticing certainties, and alternative worldviews that may be variously “distorted.”

STUDIO 14:00–15:00 Giulia Mattera – watermelon (performance)

watermelon is a participative performance shaped as a collective ritual contemplating fears and hopes.

STUDIO 16:00–17:00 Lucie Vobr Jestřabíková – Haufraukunst(performance)

Household routine as a never-ending comedy. No sooner do you finish than you can start all over again. A performance about a tragicomic routine whose outcome always dissolves before we can grasp it, sending us back to the beginning. In endless repetition, futility turns into absurdity, and absurdity becomes a source of ironic laughter.

EVENT 14:00–17:00Viktor Fuček – „hLadenie“ (performance and workshop)

In the spatial–movement–sound performance „hLadenie“, we caress, attune, fine-tune, and tune ourselves into a shared physical and mental space. We create a garden of sound and movement rooted in our own repertoire of knowledge, which gradually unfolds into a one-hour composition. Along this path, we seek to tune both ourselves and our environment—not only in the spatial sense, but also with regard to its cultural, social, and political layers. The composition thus becomes a form of embodied site-specific research, in which somatic perception is not only a means of expression but also a tool of orientation, disorientation, and sensitivity toward the environment. The performance is grounded in the principles of collective resonance, temporality, and instability, which emerge as productive strategies in an era burdened by overrepresentation, uncertainty, and global neuroses.

MAX SPACE 17:00–18:00 Kača Olivová – Nahota aktivistická: Odhalování (se) jako odboj, radost, revoluce (lecture)

The naked body in the service of a joyful, creative revolution. A performative lesson on themes of artistic, engaged, symbolic, and ritual nudity through the body of Kača Olivová as well as many other bodies. How and why we reveal ourselves.

MAX SPACE 19:00–19:30 and 21:15–21:45 Pavel Matela – permaperformer: Desire, sweet desire (performance)

Desire, sweet desire. Slightly deceptive, perhaps oppressive, but almost certainly bittersweet longing from the idea of someone or something that has passed us by or missed us by a hair‘s breadth. A few meters, a few moments, a mere coincidence. The name or idea written on paper burns, wrapped in hot glass, in whose shape it remains enchanted.

MAX SPACE 19:30–20:15 Rémy Louchart – Untitled (performance)

Untitled is an extended visual pun that crosses boundaries between language and image. The introduction of an organic element_ cigarette smoke_ invites the audience to consider that these (smoke) rings might be comparable to those orbiting around planet Saturn.

MAX SPACE 20:15–21:15 Celestína Minichová a Martin Kosorín – Vibrant Lakes of Loose Strings (performance)

The participatory performance Vibrant Lakes of Loose Strings addresses the question “How can we rearticulate the environment in order to understand it—and to understand together with it?” through the lens of climatic and geopolitical polycrises. Within a sound–movement performance, we turn to grief and mourning for the wounded Earth and for our relationships to it. By making these emotions present, we seek possible alternatives to capitalist ways of life—drawing inspiration from Donna J. Haraway and her “SF” theories, we strive to create a collective experience of mourning that carries the potential for change. Our story begins in negative values, in deep sorrow and catastrophic forecasts of loss, neglect, and futility. We perceive acknowledged and embodied grief as a productive tool for discovering joy and determination
to act.