Emotion is an intensity that takes place between people, concepts, and objects. Both cognitive and sensory, it moves around and sticks. It arises in a crowd, originating from no particular consciousness. As it circulates in the world, it is difficult to define.
#MeToo, climate change, fascism, antifascism, racism, refugees/migrants, cancel culture. Today’s political culture often seems to be driven by irrational, fictional fears and anxieties. We feel empty, anxious, angry, fatigued, harmed, violated. Often it is our personal suffering and trauma speaking. But is that a good compass?
Can we feel hopeful again?
It seems we live in an era of heightened emotions which are often labeled as toxic and appear not to lead anywhere. Emotions – be they highs or lows – are coded into the social media platforms on which we spend so much of our lives and which thrive on our emotional engagement, as our own emoticons remind us every day. The boundaries between the private and the public move too quickly for us to track.
We react emotionally to what is happening around us, but sometimes it seems as if the ways in which we react make us incapable of dealing with the problems at hand. We shift from politics to personal and back. Have the political passions that were associated with twentieth-century revolutions and social strife been exhausted? Can we forgive each other? And whom should we not forgive? What emotions can unite us, and which emotions divide us? Which emotions should we trust to be our guides? Can we feel hopeful again?
The festival of performance art We Are All Emotional will take place in Prague, Czech Republic on 6 – 7 May 2021. The event is being organized by tranzit.cz / Matter of Art in collaboration with Divadlo X10 and co-curated by members of the tranzit.org network (Judit Angel, Dóra Hegyi, Livia Pancu, Georg Schöllhammer, Tereza Stejskalová & Attila Tordai-S.)
The program comprises new works by Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, Larisa David, Helena Eribenne, Anetta Mona Chișa & Lucia Tkáčová, Kolektiv Prádelna/Laundry Collective, Hajnal Németh, Ovid Pop, Maja Štefančíková, Doris Uhlich, and Zorka Wollny. The ten new performative pieces will be performed by members of the ensemble of Divadlo X10 – one of Prague’s most prolific theatre spaces for contemporary drama. The joint event heralds the upcoming 20th anniversary of tranzit.org, which will be celebrated in 2022.
Interviews with participating artists can be found here.
Admission to the festival is free of charge.
Festival of performance was supposed to take place in November 2020 and in December 2021 but had to be cancelled due to the pandemic of COVID-19. In the meantime the organizers decided to connect with the artists through a series of interviews thematizing emotions in difficult times. The interviews were being published continuously throughout 2021.
More information about tranzit can be found at our website or at tranzit.org.
