The 24th edition of the international festival of contemporary art 4+4 Days in Motion will take place on October 4-12, 2019 in Prague. More than 60 contemporary artists will revive the Desfours Palace at Florenc as part of the main exhibition project Places of Acts subtitled Nobody Has Anything. The theatre feature of the festival will start with Jeremy Wade’s new production The Clearing. Visitors may look forward to topical, provocative and innovative theatre and dance projects from Belgium, Egypt, Finland, France, Iran, Israel, South Africa or the USA, which are going to be staged in the Archa Theatre, Ponec and the Centre for Contemporary Art DOX. The full programme of the festival will be published in September 2019.

The Desfours Palace at Florenc will become the center of the main exhibition project of the 4+4 Days in Motion 2019 called Places of Acts. The curator is the Czech visual artist, journalist and teacher Milan Mikuláštík, who is going to present 60 artists from Slovakia in particular. “The exhibition part title Nobody Has Anything is an answer to social, environmental and economic changes we are experiencing and to which we should react. Places of Act in the Desfours Palace will also present installations of international artists acknowledged at this year’s Biennial in Québec, and four Czech theatre premieres from Wariot Ideal, Spitfire Company, Tereza Hradílková and Viktor Černický. The symposium focused on the hot issue of water sources and a number of accompanying events cannot be missing,” says Denisa Václavová, the festival organizer. Schools and children visitors can attend the accompanying programme of the Do You Have a Knack for Art? Platform and art professionals will have their festival school.

This year’s international theatre programme depicts productions of non-European performing artists. “We have chosen several original and top performers and dancers, who destroy deep-rooted stereotypes with their radical and critical production. Most of them will present their work to Czech audiences for the first time,” says the festival programmer Pavel Štorek.

The festival will start with the American performer Jeremy Wade and his provocative show The Clearing. In his new solo, Wade expresses deep concern about the future, using his superphysical demonstration – dance, physical action, singing, text appeal, music and stage design. The Finnish and Egyptian actress Samira Elagoz will bring her successful performance Cock, Cock.. Who’s There?, in which she combines performative techniques and video, making the universal style of “docu-fiction”. The French musician and performer Gérald Kurdian will present his stand-up performance Hot Bodies full of metamorphoses of sexual revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries. His sensual collage is based on interviews with people, whose perception of sexuality and/or gender exceeds the deep-rooted stereotypes. Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor, ranking among the most outstanding performers of contemporary Israeli dance, will bring their most intimate production The Third Dance, in which they reflect 15 years of their life and work together. The Belgian artists Louis Vanhaverbeke will examine the limits of normality in the performance Mikado Remix. The documentary performance Mining Stories uses testimonies about the tragedy in the Brazilian mining region Minas Gerais, analyzed by Silke Huysmans and Hannes Dereere, focusing on memory, politics, and religion. The American dancer and choreographer Trajall Harell will present his feature production for three dancers Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem, in which he merges two distant worlds – postmodern dance’s minimalism and Vogue’s lavishness. In his ode to vulnerability called Savušun, based on the eponymous Shiite festival, the Iranian non-binary artist Sorour Darabi oscillates between a real and symbolic loss, comfort and discomfort, toxic masculinity and vulnerability of one’s own identity. In her distinctive stand-up Black Off, the South African actress and performer Ntando Cele sharply criticizes prejudices and disregard, and offers the audiences with new ways to think about racism.

The full programme will be published in September 2019 at www.ctyridny.cz