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Beautiful Confusion Collective: Barokové prechádzky
Beautiful Confusion Collective: Baroque Walks
Event by: A4 - priestor súčasnej kultúry, Nomantinels divadlo, Beautiful Confusion Collective, Festival Drama Queer
Location: A4 - Zero Space, Karpatská 2, Bratislava - Staré Mesto
Tickets: Get tickets
Discussions and lectures, Theatres
About event
In the Baroque Walks project, the Beautiful Confusion collective looks at baroque aesthetics through a queer lens. Especially in the Czech Republic, baroque is ubiquitous. We are often literally surrounded by it through everyday events. Baroque is hiding in plain sight and it only takes a little encouragement to reveal its camp delights. That is, as long as you can get past all the religious references. And the cherubs... What is it with the cherubs anyway?
Becka McFadden and Daniel Somerville, the team behind the production of Black Dress, offer a playful and incisive walk through the baroque. They are based on their complementary movement routines and common butoh vocabulary. You are invited to take a walk with baroque music, architecture, sculpture, painting and the landscape in full bloom. Considering the period's gendered theater play - embodied by characters such as castrati or male performers of female roles - they reimagine the Baroque opera house as a non-binary playground full of larger-than-life personalities, exuberant decorations, queer pathos, tragi-camp and a healthy dose of euphoria.
Take the Baroque Walks in contemporary rendition and together with Beautiful Confusion reflect on the lasting legacy of one of our cultural camp moments.
"Nevertheless, the most reasonable starting point [camp] seems to be the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, thanks to the period's exceptional sense for artifice, for surface, for symmetry; for its penchant for the picturesque and poignant, thanks to the elegant conventions for representing momentary feelings and the sheer presence of character—i.e. j. epigram and rhyming couplet (in words), tirade (in gestures and in music). The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is the great epoch of camp.”
– Susan Sontag, Notes on the Phenomenon camp
Concept, actors: Becka McFadden, Daniel Somerville
Dramaturgy, choreography: Becka McFadden, Daniel Somerville
Costumes: Vojtěch Hanyš
Technical cooperation: Filip Obermajer
Translation: Eva Ullrichová
Production: Kateřina Kubíková, Anna Kuřátková
Co-production: Venus in Švehlovc
Length: 60–75 minutes
Drama Queer 2025 festival was supported from public funds by Hlavné mesto Bratislava (strategic event of the city) and Bratislava self-governing region.
Main partners:
Hlavné mesto Bratislava, Slovenskej Sporiteľne Foundation, Bratislava Self-governing Region, Open Culture, Embassy of the Kingdom of Norway in Vienna, Polish Institute, Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic
Partners:
P*AKT cultural center, A4 - space of contemporary culture, Lab Theater, DK Mirror Grove, DPOH, Clarion Congress Hotel Bratislava, T3 - cultural resource
Media partners:
SME, Radio_FM, Citylight, Dennik N, QYS, 34 Magazine, kød – specifically about theater, Mloki
Becka McFadden and Daniel Somerville, the team behind the production of Black Dress, offer a playful and incisive walk through the baroque. They are based on their complementary movement routines and common butoh vocabulary. You are invited to take a walk with baroque music, architecture, sculpture, painting and the landscape in full bloom. Considering the period's gendered theater play - embodied by characters such as castrati or male performers of female roles - they reimagine the Baroque opera house as a non-binary playground full of larger-than-life personalities, exuberant decorations, queer pathos, tragi-camp and a healthy dose of euphoria.
Take the Baroque Walks in contemporary rendition and together with Beautiful Confusion reflect on the lasting legacy of one of our cultural camp moments.
"Nevertheless, the most reasonable starting point [camp] seems to be the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, thanks to the period's exceptional sense for artifice, for surface, for symmetry; for its penchant for the picturesque and poignant, thanks to the elegant conventions for representing momentary feelings and the sheer presence of character—i.e. j. epigram and rhyming couplet (in words), tirade (in gestures and in music). The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is the great epoch of camp.”
– Susan Sontag, Notes on the Phenomenon camp
Concept, actors: Becka McFadden, Daniel Somerville
Dramaturgy, choreography: Becka McFadden, Daniel Somerville
Costumes: Vojtěch Hanyš
Technical cooperation: Filip Obermajer
Translation: Eva Ullrichová
Production: Kateřina Kubíková, Anna Kuřátková
Co-production: Venus in Švehlovc
Length: 60–75 minutes
Drama Queer 2025 festival was supported from public funds by Hlavné mesto Bratislava (strategic event of the city) and Bratislava self-governing region.
Main partners:
Hlavné mesto Bratislava, Slovenskej Sporiteľne Foundation, Bratislava Self-governing Region, Open Culture, Embassy of the Kingdom of Norway in Vienna, Polish Institute, Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic
Partners:
P*AKT cultural center, A4 - space of contemporary culture, Lab Theater, DK Mirror Grove, DPOH, Clarion Congress Hotel Bratislava, T3 - cultural resource
Media partners:
SME, Radio_FM, Citylight, Dennik N, QYS, 34 Magazine, kød – specifically about theater, Mloki