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Month: February 2024

The Rise of Experimental Circus in Prague: Artistic Research over Entertainment

Posted on by Katie L

It’s early evening and the National Theatre: The New Stage in Prague is sold out for the premiere show of Krajina těla or Land of Body. Sounds of waves crashing and a cello fill the hall as aerial acrobat Alžbeta Tichá climbs up a dangling rope, twisting, flipping, and falling dangerously fast before pulling the rope taut. While she moves through her choreography, eight LED screens placed around the stage show close-up images of hair follicles.

This is circus. Or, a kind of circus. With its understated exploration of physicality—a visual poem through movement—Krajina těla is an example of the experimental circus style emerging in the Czech Republic. Decidedly different from the theatrical and showy version of modern circus that Czech companies have mastered, the change comes as a new generation of performers enters the field, bringing with them new techniques and concepts.

Alžbeta Tichá, in motion midair supported by a rope held by another performer

Alžbeta Tichá on the rope in “Krajina těla”
Photo courtesy of Vojtěch Brtnický, Narodni divadlo

Czech contemporary circus was created right after the fall of communism in 1989. “Metaphorical, symbolic—the circus as a physical form was there as a metaphor for something else. Like you are on the trapeze, so you are representing a bird, for example,” says Veronika Štefanová, research supervisor of CIRQUEON, a Prague-based circus center. Theatre folk were inspired by touring European circus companies, but, without formal training to make stand-alone circus shows, they began incorporating these elements into their theatre productions.

The style’s popularity exploded in 2004 with the annual summer festival, Letní Letná, started by Jiří Turek, who has a background in dancing, miming, and alternative theatre. When he first hosted the festival in Prague, there were 6,000 attendees. Now it attracts 60,000 people, making it the biggest contemporary circus festival in the Czech Republic. “We invite the biggest companies,” Turek says of his festival direction. “We must do it. The smaller festivals cannot invite them; it is too expensive.” The necessity of featuring large companies has developed a large, unvarying style of circus—commercial and theatrical.

Cirk La Putyka is a case in point. It is the latest company in Prague, currently performing Cesty, which features more than 50 performers in a classic circus top. The acrobats, dancers, and actors wear flashy costumes while thunderous sound effects accentuate the stunts. In one act nine women flip around Hula-Hoops spinning high in the air. In another, a man walks amid the audience seats and breathes out orange flames. These moments are interspersed with storytelling and dialogue. The show is a glamorous spectacle.

A performer seated with legs crossed in an aerial hoop suspended from a light rack

Cirk La Putyka performers in “Cesty”
Photo courtesy: Cirk La Putyka

This “wow” factor is necessary, explains researcher Štefanová. “They would like to really live on circus and work only in circus, and it means you have to sell a lot of tickets.” Cirk La Putyka and other large companies have successfully done so, regularly selling out shows. In recent years the experimental shows have gained popularity with new techniques by younger artists. The kids, who 10 years ago signed up for informal circus classes at CIRQUEON, are of a professional age now. Tichá, the rope acrobat in Krajina těla, performs in several avant-garde shows. Along with Krajina těla, she is part of Thin Skin, a production staged in the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art.

Tichá emphasizes that she is not so much entertaining an audience as pushing the limits of her art, conducting a kind of research while onstage. “When I go on the rope, I have to be present. There is no chance to think about anything else.”

Repurposed and edited with permission by Dispatches

Around the World in 97 Years: A Brief History of NYU’s Global Network

Posted on by Kristin Law

Cover of The Floating University bookLong before study abroad was a rite of passage for curious students, NYU recognized the many merits of an international education. While the University founded its first study away site in 1958, Professor James E. Lough took 350 NYU students on a for-credit sailing trip around the world back in 1926, an experience he dubbed the “Floating University.” Tamson Pietsch, associate professor in social and political sciences and director of the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney, detailed this little known journey in her recent book, The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge.

“NYU actually ran the very first study abroad program for academic credit in the United States and the world,” Pietsch asserted in a recent discussion facilitated by NYU’s Dr. Jini Kim Watson, professor of English and comparative literature and faculty liaison at NYU Sydney. During their conversation, Pietsch shared her work with Dana Burde, associate professor of international education at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and Shirin Nadira, assistant director of the NYU Office of Global Awards.

Yellow rounded corner building

NYU Madrid

Pietsch’s book details the fascinating history of this educational experiment as well as its implications for higher education. “A contest emerged in the 1920s between expertise and experience as the foundation of knowledge claims about the world,” she explains. For eight months, 350 students and another 150 crew members traversed the globe on a ship, taking a variety of courses and disembarking at nearly 50 ports. Much like NYU’s global network today, the advertising materials lauded the voyage as an opportunity for students to “develop the ability to think in world terms through firsthand contact with places, people, and problems.” Indeed, students met recognizable figures such as Gandhi and the Pope. “The basis of the voyage was that you can teach students to be global citizens at sea—you can teach worldly-mindedness,” says Pietsch. However, the press covered students’ antics as much as their learning, and it would be some years before NYU students once more studied abroad.

Facade of NYU Paris

NYU Paris

More than three decades later, in 1958, NYU established the first academic center in its global network, NYU Madrid. There, students hone their Spanish language skills while immersing themselves in the Spanish capital’s vibrant culture. Then, in 1969, NYU Paris became the second site, founded as a center for immersive French language study. Today, students from a diversity of fields come together to visit world-renowned museums and key historical sites while getting the opportunity to supplement their coursework with classes at French universities. In the years that followed, the NYU community established a dozen additional global sites, including two degree-granting campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai.

As our world fractures, reconnects, and evolves, NYU’s global network has continued to grow and change. “In a way, I think that not much has changed,” concludes Pietsch. “The form of encountering engagement with the world does that same work of helping students understand the place of their nation in the international order.”

Written by Dana Guterman

On Art and Diasporic Aesthetics: The Art Scenes of Berlin and New York City

Posted on by Maxine P
Kulturbrauerei complex on a day with blue sky

One of NYU Berlin’s academic centers is located in the Kulturbrauerei complex, pictured here.

Cecilia Bien, a Global Research Initiative Fellow in Berlin, discusses the differences and similarities between two cosmopolitan art scenes, Berlin’s and New York City’s, as well as her thoughts on what makes art considered art with Nina Katchadourian, a clinical professor on the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study faculty.

Their conversation has been condensed for clarity.

Cecilia: I’m interested in what is not yet framed as art. I’m interested in attitudes, the impulse. I am thinking about how to show “marginal” work in a contemporary context without the feeling of it being used for representation or shown in a way that has to be overexplained. 

Nina: When you compare Berlin to New York City, what are the differences or similarities you see in fashion, style, or haircuts, for example, or how people walk down the street?

Cecilia: Reference to club culture doesn’t happen the same way in New York City as it does here. Fashion in Berlin subscribes way less to trends in favor of individuality—even if it’s ugly. I find that refreshing because maybe it means that the hierarchy of taste is always being questioned. 

There are different codes here. A lot of the styles in Berlin seem to be more lived. I also see how subcultures can complicate expectations of diasporas. On the flip side, I feel like a lot of what gets absorbed by the cultural industry in Berlin is appropriated from what’s been happening for a while in New York City. 

Nina: We’ve talked in a lot of different contexts about when something from the periphery gets absorbed into the mainstream. I think you have a good antenna for this and that it’s deeply interesting to you. How can you tell when something like this is happening?

Cecilia: Recently, I’ve been focusing on when and why certain tastes change. When an incisive political message gets diluted, the aesthetics attached to it become normalized. I think about what the term “diasporic aesthetics” means to people who understand things through representation. Diaspora is so layered and complex, but it seems to be becoming a euphemism for a certain kind of woke taste different enough from the norm but only with a certain kind of difference being accepted. It cannot feel bourgeois, but it must be digestible though not necessarily understood, and it must be appreciated without being deemed “trashy.” When I hear such aesthetics embraced as “beautiful,” I wonder what makes them so and which cultural tides had to change or switch course for them to be considered that way. 

Nina: I’ve always known you as someone who thinks from two positions: a maker and a critical analyst of systems and institutions. When you think from those two positions, does one enhance the other? I know you’ve recently done some work as a curator. Do you think curating is a type of making? 

Cecilia: I think it can be because it’s a way to conceptualize the making of an idea. I guess curating is also the making of an exhibition or the making of an argument. That said, making an exhibition about a so-called diasporic group does not count, for me, as the making of an argument. For example, I am no longer an Asian American outside of America. At least, this is how I feel I am perceived here. There are countless versions and political positions and reasons why people move from place to place, so how can you group them all by a prescribed cultural background? It’s quite superficial and certainly not enough to base a concept on. 

Nina: What are some examples of an exhibition addressing a “vague diaspora,” and when do you think it works and when do you think it doesn’t? 

Cecilia: A lot of times these exhibitions are accompanied by super research-based texts, which I often have a hard time with even though I also write some myself. Sometimes, I’m not sure what the relationship should be to the artwork, like whether it should exist in parallel as a complementary work or whether it should walk the viewer through, because a lot of times it is hard or impossible to place the work in an art historical context or within a canonical framework, which is what many viewers going to a museum or institution might expect. And still, the curatorial choices for non-Western art are also often from a Western-educated lens.

So these rather heavy-handed texts might be trying to contextualize the works in a new temporality but often come off as dry justifications of why the work is allowed to be there. There’s something slightly insecure in the overcompensation, and it feels a little like it’s not completely sure of what it should be doing. 

At the moment, I work at an archive that is a collection of people globally reacting to and rejecting the canon and art history, a global network which came to be called Fluxus. In Prague Milan Knížák’s Aktual Walk considers everything between how to wear a garment and walk down the street to how to interact provocatively. This kind of work is impossible to pin down as an art object, as something that can be placed in a museum, or something understood purely by looking.

So it’s interesting to try to give these works significance without placing them in categories structured by a hierarchical order. Every day, we deal with questions of how to contextualize collective action outside of art history, how to show what is not necessarily called art, as art, and whether we should do it at all when most of what was created was ephemeral and meant for impermanence. But I still want to curate a show with Knížák’s drawings and sketches and correspondences between the artists in the collection as a way to show the very attitude that we’re talking about right now. 

Repurposed and edited with permission by the NYU Berlin blog

Cecilia Bien in front of a bookshelf

Cecilia Bien

Cecilia Bien writes and organizes programs in Berlin, for artists as well as para-institutions such as SAVVY Contemporary and Archivio Conz, a Fluxus archive. Previously working in applied art and fashion contexts in New York City, she came to Berlin to complete studies in art and cultural theory, recenter her critique of dominant narratives, and understand her own subjectivity outside of an identity politic tied to living in the US. Her current practice concerns diasporic aesthetics and situating play, chance, and community coming from the periphery in the context of art.

Nina Katchadourian

Nina Katchadourian

Nina Katchadourian is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography and public projects. Her video Accent Elimination was included at the 2015 Venice Biennale in the Armenian pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. In 2016 Katchadourian created Dust Gathering, an audio tour on the subject of dust, for the Museum of Modern Art. A traveling solo museum survey of her work entitled Curiouser opened in March 2017 at the Blanton Museum of Art and toured to the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University in fall 2017. It will conclude at the BYU Museum in Provo, Utah in March 2018. An accompanying monograph, also entitled Curiouser and edited by curator Veronica Roberts, is available from Tower Books. Katchadourian’s work is public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Morgan Library, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Margulies Collection, and Saatchi Gallery. She has won grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, and the Nancy Graves Foundation. Katchadourian lives and works in Brooklyn and she is a clinical professor on the faculty of NYU Gallatin. She is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, and Pace Gallery, New York.