Eastern Bloc | Perform Czech

The Eastern Bloc catwalk concert explores the socialist-communist past of Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland in an international co-production. Through this collaboration scenes from the common past of these four nations appear through costumes and music.

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The Eastern Bloc flashwalk concert performed at PQ is an essencial extract of a 90-minute theater producion from the idea of Hungarian costume designer Fruzsina Nagy and music composer and conductor Dóra Halas together with Soharoza experimental choir. The presented fashion-show style performance in Prague focuses on the harmony of costumes and music, as in the Taboo Collection catwalk show which was presenteded by the same group at PQ in 2019.

Catwalk concerts are a new performing arts genre somewhere between theatre, choral concert and extreme fashion show. The performances are themed and feature a group of performers who present vibrant, innovative, storytelling costumes on a catwalk-like stage, while singing contemporary compositions written for the scenes. In this way, the music and the costumes themselves become the two main protagonists.

The Eastern Bloc draws on aspects of the social, aesthetic and everyday life of the communist-socialist era in the various Visegrad countries.

Soharóza – founded in 2008 – is an experimental choir led by Dóra Halas. We play and work with the human voice, different tones and timbres and sounds of the human body and surrounding space to create unique performances that defy categorisation. Our methodology is collective composition, with members not only performing, but co-creating each performance. Our common interest involves the formation and perception of sounds through extraordinary means, whether through choral improvisation or sound-choreography, resulting in unusual performances. Our repertoire is constantly growing through collaborations with artists from a wide range of fields. Our first catwalk concert, Taboo Collection (2016), was created in collaboration with costume designer Fruzsina Nagy as a result of experimentation with cross-disciplinary forms and was followed by The Issue (2018).

We enjoy working in extreme venues and have sung in caves, abandoned factory buildings, baths and courts in Budapest. We have performed at the largest theatre and music festivals in Hungary, the Budapest State Opera House, the Hungarian Embassy in Berlin and an international choir competition in Macedonia.