ShowOff
A podcast by the Arts and Theatre Institute that addresses the performing arts’ sensitivity and response to current professional and social issues.
www.showoff.cz
In each episode, we show off a hot topic of discussion amongst performing arts professionals and work to highlight emerging trends. Our main topic is the adaptation of theatre, dance and contemporary circus to the (post)covid era, but this issue is closely related to questions about the sustainability of the performing arts and the quality of life in today’s civilisation. Even as we call for a return to “normal”, it is far from clear just how that normal is going to look. Each episode is an audio-essay inspired by the international discussion series “Green Thursdays” with guests and moderators from the ranks of dance and theatre artists, curators, cultural managers and researchers from the Czech Republic and abroad.
A Green Deal for the Performing Arts
The springboard for discussion in this, the most recent podcast, was the Theatre and Environmental Protection survey, a piece of research carried out in spring 2020 as part of Theatre Night in the Czech Republic, in which the majority of respondents stated that they actively try to minimise the environmental impact of their activities, albeit in a somewhat haphazard way. We spoke with guests from the Czech Republic, Poland and France about current ecological trends in theatre management or production and cultural mobility, as well as how the topic of sustainability resonates in communication with the public, in artistic programs and the pandemic-induced slowdown, which we are coming to terms with on a daily basis, more or less organically. We progressed from concrete examples, attitudes and measures, through emphasis on their sustainable management and systematic evaluation, to reflecting on artistic and personal practices and the lot of the performing arts in the context of the European Green Deal and the new – pandemic and post-pandemic – normality.
Author of the podcast: Martina Pecková Černá / Czech Republic, ATI International Cooperation Department
The next episode – ZOOMing Theatre – will be released on May 10.
In this episode, we present a number of digital theatre projects. In dialogue with theatre makers from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Portugal and the USA, we unpacked a theatrical sub-genre that has expanded tremendously in the current climate, considering the possibilities it offers, the creation process for online projects and strategies for holding an online audience’s attention. Our discussion also dealt with the differences between traditional theatre techniques and digital theatre and the issue of their relationships in the future evolution of theatre.
Author of the podcast: Ádám Fónai / HU, Károli Gáspár University in Budapest
Next episode of the Green Thursday discussion will be held on May 27 at 3 PM CET on the topic “Healing (with) theatre” in both perspectives: theatre as a healing tool for the pandemic society, theatre as therapy and therapy for theatre, help for artists impacted by lockdown.
Click here to register for the discussion (on the ZOOM platform).