Fairy Tales

Fairy Tales is a dance performance with a strong visual identity for eight dancers and two live musicians. Working with themes related to womanhood and the values femininity brings to our world, we reveal the process of becoming oneself by returning to the places of our childhood. We try on and take off different roles as if they were just another dress or game. We know these roles well, from fairy tales, or real-life figures. We are creating new fantasies for ourselves, reimagining our identities and how we see our happy endings. With lightness and humour on one hand and depth and horror on the other, Fairy Tales explore the thin line between fantasy and reality.

Award

Sabina Bočková and Johana Pocková are Scaling Up Artists in the European project Big Pulse Dance Alliance.

About the company

POCKETART collective is an internationally acclaimed team of artists working in the field of contemporary dance and physical theatre under the direction of the choreographers Johana Pocková and Sabina Bočková. POCKETART’s projects bring together artists from the fields of dance, music, scenography, fine arts and lighting design. Their work has toured internationally and been part of Aerowaves Twenty20 and Twenty21, as well as European projects such as Shape it! and Big Pulse Dance Alliance’s Scaling Up Artists program.

The collective’s work is characterised by tackling topics that go beyond the personal experience of the individual and touch upon societal issues, such as manipulation through media, global environmental threats, stress in a competitive environment, or the position of an individual in the corporate work system. The artists try to approach these topics comprehensively, through detailed work with all theatrical elements. In creating each work, they search for a new style of physical expression unique to the topic at hand, creating dance images from specific bodily references. Through their distinctive aesthetics, visual purity and strong original music, the performances aim to give birth to a spiritual experience, compelling the audience to reflect on our society.

In 2018, the team introduced their first performance, Warehouses Full of Emotions, inspired by intergenerational views of femininity and the authentic memories of an old lady. Under the choreographic direction of Johana Pocková, four dancers collaborated on this work, along with Pockova’s 89-year-old grandmother and an 8-year-old girl. This performance was later transformed into the dance film Folds of Touch. In 2019, POCKETART introduced Onto the Scale!, Johana Pocková’s duet with the central theme of stress in a competitive environment.

In 2019, having previously collaborated on several projects, Sabina Bočková and Johana Pocková created The Lion’s Den, a duet pondering themes of media manipulation and political populism. This work was selected for the Czech Dance Platform 2020, included in the choreographic platform AerowavesTwenty21 Top 20 and performed at the festivals TANEC PRAHA 2020 and 2021, Kenya International Theater Festival, New Baltic Dance Festival, Malá Inventura, and the Flora festival in Olomouc.

Later, The Lion’s Den was transformed into two other projects. One is an outdoor performance, The Lion’s Den UNLIMITED, which involves 14 professional and 14 non-professional dancers, who co-create and subsequently perform choreography based on the original duet. This project was part of the festival TANEC PRAHA 2021 and was shortlisted for the European platform Big Pulse Dance Alliance. The Lion’s Den was also included in the project Shape It!, which allows artists to collaborate with children and adapt their work for young audiences. The partners of Shape It! are The Place London, Comune di Bassano del Grappa, Tanec Praha and Annantalo.

In 2020, the team premiered Treatment of Remembering, a performance created by Sabina Bočková, Johana Pocková, and Inga Zotova-Mikshina. It touches upon the global threat to the environment and the disappearance of nature from our world. This piece won the International Jury Prize and the Audience Award at Czech Dance Platform 2021 and was also included in AerowavesTwenty22. In 2021, POCKETART produced To the Madonna with Rust, a solo performance by Johana Pocková, which was nominated for Czech Dance Platform 2022 and the 2022 TANEC PRAHA festival.

One of the latest POCKETART productions, Bodies Together, a performance co-created by seven performers under the direction of Jaro Viňarský and Lucia Kašiarová, deals with the impact of corporation structures on our lives. Sabina Bočková and Johana Pocková created Fairy Tals as an upscaling coproduction with Big Pulse Dance Alliance.

The long-term co-production partners of POCKETART are Tanec Praha z.ú. and PONEC – the dance venue. The creative team is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the Capital City of Prague, the State Cultural Fund and City District Prague 3. POCKETART’s works are regularly performed on Prague stages including PONEC, Venuše ve Švehlovce and Studio ALTA, as well as in venues around the Czech Republic and abroad.