The Bear Who Floated on an Ice Floe

The theater performance about humanity, fear, courage, time and compassion in the story of a bear, who might not even be a bear. 
A three-year-old male polar bear was brought to the Icelandic coast on a chunk of Arctic ice from Greenland on June 5, 2008. Iceland’s minister of environment, Thórunn Sveinbjarnardóttir, gave the green light for police to shoot the bear shortly after its arrival. Deciphering real events on stage. 
“This is a production about people who want to be good, or perhaps not.”
Jana Burkiewiczová

“Featuring both boisterous and quiet scenes, the 90-minute-long production presents refined choreography and complex acrobatic acts.”
Tomáš Štástka, MF Dnes

“Jana Burkiewiczová’s production keeps the audience in uncertainty as it’s never clear how to interpret the individual scenes, situations and symbols. Becoming better, having to choose and decide what’s right and wrong – these are very topical themes today.”
Jana Návratová, OperaPlus

Jana Burkiewiczová
A graduate of the Music and Dance Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts, she has choreographed two iconic theatre productions – the opera Don Giovanni (National Theatre, Prague) and the musical Mowgli (Kalich Theatre, Prague). In 2015, she founded burki&com, an ensemble that explores topical themes through a contemporary approach to theatre. Combining contemporary dance, physical theatre, contemporary circus and acrobatics with stage installations and text, her original productions involve actors, dancers, artists, architects, designers and leading figures from the independent music scene. In 2015, she choreographed Walls & Handbags, a production for Losers Cirque Company which won the Divadelní noviny Award for Dance and Motion Theatre and The Wilds: The Vanity of Plumage in which she explored, through a collage of motion, text and visual images, contemporary society and human interaction with nature. In 2017, she choreographed Find the Others! for DOT504, an experimental production for children about imagination, and The Bear Who Floated on an Ice Floe, a production by burki&com. Jana also collaborates on projects that link theatre with fine art, fashion and design.