2025 performance wilderness
LUSH BLAST:
TASTING THE UNTAMED
A dance performance grounded in the soils of Carpathian high altitudes, challenging conditions and rewilding dreams.
LUSH BLAST: TASTING THE UNTAMED is a visceral dance performance cutting through notions of wildness, domestication, protection and vulnerability. Emerging from fieldwork in the Carpathian wilderness, it transposes ecological, political, and somatic insights into dense, corporeal experience. Performers use the physicality of their own bodies and chains, voices, and music as vessels of multiplicity, shifting between fluid synchrony and acidic humor. They shape a dramaturgy of vital ritual, transformation and rupture, a sensual feast and battlefield.
LUSH BLAST is an intimate, challenging, collective work reclaiming power as a vital force rather than a tool of control and exploitation: an embodied poetics of empowerment, interdependence, and forest logic.
The project began in the summer of 2022, when, during our first field study in the Carpathian Wilderness, we encountered a young bear and an over 800 year old arolla pine. Since then, we keep learning from the old-growth forests and wildlife about what ‘power’ and ‘relatedness’ mean.
PERFORMANCES:
CREATIVE TEAM:
Choreography Dorota Michalak, Alica Minar
Creation and performance Dorota Michalak, Alica Minar, Breanne Saxton, Ola Zielińska
Music Ola Zielińska, Vi Huyen Tranová
Dramaturgy Maikon K
Set design Natálie Rajnišová
Light design Raquel Rosildete, Teres Bartůňková
Production Dorota Michalak, Alica Minar & col.
Pictures Asidron, Vojtech Brtnicky
Poster Lena Czerniawska
Thanks to Erik Baláž, Alina Hriscanu, Ondrej Kameniar, Anna Poppa and the team of Foundation Conservation Carpathia, for guiding us through Tatra and Fagaras Mountains and sharing stories about wilderness, Carolyn Hall and Matthias Nuß for exchanging perspectives
on the relationship of science and art
PARTNERS:
Dock 11 in Berlin (DE)
Bazaar Festival in Prague (CZ)
CO.LABS in Brno (CZ)
Divadlo Radost in Brno (CZ)
Teatrul Andrei Muresan in Sfantu Gheorghe (RO)
Studio ALTA in Prague (CZ)
Hellerau - Europäisches Zentrum der Künstein Dresden (DE)
SUPPORT:
Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, National Recovery Plan & European Union
Culture Moves Europe & Goethe Institut
State Fund of Culture of the Czech Republic
Prague City Hall
Czech-German Future Fund
IDU Prague & PerformCzech
Contemporary Arts Alliance Berlin
PRESS & MEDIA