PLACCC Dance
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Placcc Dance will host projects inspired in different ways by our current situation, with the safe distancing measures for Covid-19 providing a source of inspiration for our artists instead of merely being an obstacle.
Dates: 28 May and 2 July 2021
This will be the fourteenth year that PLACCC Festival will host productions which are not created for traditional performance spaces. Despite the ongoing pandemic situation and thanks to the creativity and innovation of the artists working with the festival we are planning events in the spring and early summer of 2021 that provide maximum safety for both them and our audience. Placcc Dance will host projects inspired in different degrees by our current situation, with the safe distancing measures for Covid-19 providing a source of inspiration for our artists instead of merely being an obstacle. Most of these new dance pieces will be set in public spaces, while some will be set in virtual spaces. Placcc Festival has been held annually since its inception in 2008, and in 2012 it started inviting public space and site-specific dance productions because organizers realized how open choreographers and dance artist are to working in public spaces, gladly exploiting the many creative opportunities inherent in working on site-specific pieces. We have invited an all-Hungarian selection of artists to this year’s mini-festival focusing on dance in public spaces – despite the fact Placcc traditionally has an international scope – because we felt that this year we again had an obligation to support independent Hungarian artists through artistic commissions. In Mechanics of Distance Máté Mészáros experiments with the use of space. Though the performance was originally also set in an unusual location – the lobby of the Hungarian National Dance Theatre –, the version to be premiered as a part of Placcc Dance is planned to be set in a public space. The artists are preparing a Covid-safe version in which the movement patterns used in the performance will be illustrated on various pictograms allowing “audience members” to perform the dance sequences themselves, thus leaving behind the active viewer role and becoming quasi-performers of the piece. Choreographer Lili Stern follows a similar strategy when publishing NOWstalgy, her participatory dance performance in the form of a podcast, allowing audience members to individually experience the public space her performance is set in. NOWstalgy is both a ritual of initiation and release during which the individual has a chance to experience the people and nature surrounding them, alone or along with others, all the while being led – and sometimes aided – by a mediator. The performance was created in cooperation with Bethlen Téri Színház as a part of its Ambíció talent program. Brigitta Horváth is a dancer and choreographer whose performance Left behind is inspired by the Butoh technique and the aesthetic of “third landscape” (areas left behind by humans and reclaimed by nature.) This site-specific dance performance focuses on the mutual relationship between man and nature, while also examining this state of being “abandoned”, of being left behind, and expanding the concept of what we call “beauty”. The artists created a Covid-safe version of this work as well, one that also focuses on perception and experimentation with point of view. Summit is a hybrid genre performance by the Hollow collective (Viktor Szeri, Tamás Páll, Gyula Muskovics) which will be adapted to a public space location using elements of immersive technologies, choreography, roleplaying and poetry to create a vision of a planetary-scale event, one which radically changes life on Earth. The trio have been creating world prototypes since 2018 in order to call into question and transform the dominant systems of our consensual reality. Their interactive performance had its premiere in 2019 with participants wearing medical masks and being asked to stay in “quarantine” at various points of the space – Summit thus seems to have foretold the uncertain and lonely state in which we have found ourselves ever since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Emerging choreographer Zita Thury’s work is focused on how art and social problems affect each other. Thury is interested in the climate crisis and in environmental awareness, and her creative process is documentary in nature, which makes her work singularly unique in the Hungarian contemporary dance scene. Her new public space production was commissioned by Placcc Dance, and in it she experiments with a dramaturgy based on data, data processing, interviews, and a movement language that will form an organic unit with it. Ziggurat Project’s Unplugged is a hybrid genre open air performance inspired by rock climbing as a kind of choreography made up of movement after meticulous movement, searching for movement forms on the border between dance and climbing, in this way creating a new type of performance which will transcend not just artistic genre boundaries, but will bridge the gap between art and sport itself. The premier of this new piece will be held as a part of Placcc Dance and will be unique in that instead of a climbing hall the audience will get to see it performed on the rocks of the Kecske-hegy which can be found in the hills of the Second District of Budapest. The performance is realized as a part of the Staféta program of the Budapest Municipal Government. The venues and precise starting times of Placcc Dance events will be finalized by the middle of May. The main criteria when deciding these will be to ensure maximum safety for the health of all participants and artists involved. 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