D'epog
D'epog is a platform for contemporary performance art. The group of artists has been active in Brno since 2010. As part of its long-term activity, it is dedicated to the creation of regular productions, one-off performances, borderline art projects and educational activities in the form of practical and specialised workshops.
The D'epog collective includes Lucia Repašská, Matyáš Dlab, Zdeněk Polák, Janet Prokešová, Radim Chyba, Zuzana Smutková and Magdalena Straková.
The group's activity has the character of a laboratory, exploring the possibilities of live art beyond established genre categories. D'epog programmatically develops research into theatricality, actorly expressivity, and formal and compositional strategies with attention to the physical and contextual qualities of the spaces in which they perform their productions. There is a strong emphasis on the role of the audience, their degree of interpretive freedom and their contribution to the creation of the semantic structure of the work. The main points of departure of the activity include the integration of the thinking and means of other artistic fields into the language of performance art, sustained self-destruction as a continuous process of denying one's own cliché, a permanent redefinition of the status of the author and the reason, relevance and lifespan of artistic communication, total aesthetic plurality and the courage to formulate a new artistic language that we do not yet speak.
The repertoire of productions consists of regularly reconstructed scenic forms of various profiles, from ensemble productions to monodramatic projects, usually performed in non-theatrical spaces. Each production is usually installed in its own space, in collaboration with exhibition houses and halls, cultural centres or very specific spaces. The titles of the productions are not linked by a coherent aesthetic practice, but rather by a conceptually driven formal and content heterogeneity. The characteristic features of the production are the original authorial background and the radical materialisation of adapted materials, the targeted work with and questioning of aesthetic expectations, the deconstruction of the representativeness of theatrical reality and the testing of the boundaries, limits and possibilities of artistic communication in shared time and space. The group's work is characterised by the search for new narrative compositions through the simultaneity of means of communication and acting, the exploration of new forms of dialogicity, the sovereign manifestation of the presence of authorial identity, the layering of autonomous semantic structures, the combination of sign, metaphor, associative montage with civil personal acting, and the integration of spatial qualities through the means of scenography. The ensemble pays concentrated attention to the search for new models of relations with the audience as a co-responsible subject in the process of artistic communication in the form of interpretive freedom as a commitment to the work.
In addition to fixed stagings, a series of paratheatrical projects - long-form performances in which ordinary reality is intervened and colonised, on the basis of which a new reality is created, formulated by completely autonomous performers. The primary aim of these productions is to find the authentic existence of the actors in the performative work outside of fictional frameworks. The individual performances are based on continuously deepened training strategies, on clearly articulated formal and compositional procedures that are revisited again and again, but the concrete form is quite different with each realisation - the productions do not start from fixed structures. The individual performances are united by a simple, radical challenge - to be, to exist in artistic communication - to be, to exist in front of an audience. The group of performers brings its own motivic and thematic structure and narrative content. In this free interface, the actors guarantee their own existence instead of the production team, the theatre technology or the author of the text. Authorship as a manifestation of their own existence, their own existence as a manifestation of authorship.
Parallel to the movement between theatricality and parareality, D'epog conceptually develops interdisciplinary contacts in the form of practical seminars, on the basis of which it explores and practically verifies the possibilities of performative works to express themselves through the means of other artistic fields. As part of its ongoing educational activities, D'epog regularly organises specialised workshops and seminars and, since 2014, an annual summer school. (2023)
- Links
- Website
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- Video profile, Artycok.tv, 2020
- Wild Wild Beast 1, Artycok.tv, 2023
