Theatre Journal

While the Prague Quadrennial has been billed as a festival of design since its first iteration in 1968, part of its charm lies in how performances are integrated into the festival. The 2023 edition of the PQ—centered around the theme “Rare”—offered an array of performances that directly addressed the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic and the emotions and questions we lived through as a global community.

Promenade, conceived by Eliza Soroga, was one of the performances most overtly related to COVID-19, combining the strange bedfellows of joy and anger in the time of the pandemic. The performance took place as a walk through the Old Town of Prague from DAMU (the Academy of Performing Arts) to the Old Town Square. Each participant wore a t-shirt with a QR code for their vaccination record. As we marched through town, emotions in the crowd ranged from solemnity to excitement over new connections. There were happy babbles of conversation as we approached the square, erupting at the end of the journey in a release of anger and emotion through a collective scream. This emotional range highlighted the rare brew produced by the pandemic: the joy of reconnecting with other people, the rage produced by isolation, and the release of expressing both those emotions despite the tension between them. We obviously lack rituals to take people from isolation to reintegration into community, and the pandemic left many people in the liminal space in between. This performance was extraordinarily effective in offering a means of bringing the season of the pandemic to a close in a way that honored participants’ experiences during the worldwide crisis while also suggesting a means of reentry into post-pandemic life.

Wreck: List of Extinct Species, directed by Pietro Marullo and produced by Insiemi Irreali Company, continued to explore how the pandemic collided with what we previously thought of as a normal life. Ostensibly a production about a mythical leviathan invading a world and exposing the vulnerability of its citizens, the conceit of the show was quite simple: an enormous, inflated black plastic bag rolled about the space as performers interacted with it. The performance built steadily on the spectacle of the plastic bag. When it first appeared, moving through the gigantic Trade Fair Palace, it revealed dancers paralyzed in place, arrested by the fear of encountering the monster for the first time. The company slowly began to move as the performance progressed, seeming to overcome their initial fear but still not quite ready to interact with the plastic bag. Eventually, the company began to touch and interact with the leviathan. The analogy to COVID-19 was obvious during this section of the performance, and as the first half of Wreck ended with the bag interacting with and floating over the audience, many left, assuming the performance had ended as the monster had touched all of our lives.

The second half of Wreck, however, went from a simple analogy of the pandemic to a more thoughtful interrogation. The plastic bag had touched audience members and performers alike, and it settled softly in the hall after the exuberance of its frenzied hunt for people. The energy shifted to the performers. They began to attack and manipulate the bag, and the bag responded by moving away from each touch as though it wanted to be left alone. The bag took on a different persona than the monster it seemed to be at the beginning. It became an object of pity—and, as the dancers eventually chased it down and deflated it, the audience was left to ponder the sense of loss left behind when an object of fear meets its demise. The pandemic induced worldwide trauma, yet this production asked what we miss about that collective experience. The leviathan’s deflation signaled its extinction, but as the dancers circled the deflated bag in its powerlessness, it seemed a warning to remember that our own extinction was always precariously close.

Promenade and Wreck...