Daniela Pařízková

Opening Statement of Executive Director PQ

The 13th edition of the Prague Quadrennial has been prepared over the course of several years, with contributions from thousands of artists, makers, theorists, arts managers, producers, technicians, coordinators, architects and representatives of many other professions from all over the world. When I compare it to the last four editions, whose preparations I also contributed to, the preparations for PQ 2015 were definitely the most demanding. All of us have had to overcome a considerable number of new hurdles and find innovative solutions to make it possible to properly realize this year’s edition of the PQ – I will discuss some specific reasons later. To start, I would mainly like to thank you – all my colleagues on the team in Prague, teams from all exhibiting countries and the hundreds of individual artists involved in the projects that make up the exhibition. I would also like to express my gratitude to cooperating institutions, primarily those on whose premises the PQ is taking place this year, as well as our many other partners and supporters. A key role, too, is played by our partners on the multiannual SharedSpace project, who help us to further develop the ideas, themes and forms relating to the Quadrennial.

Although the concept of space has changed and grown over previous editions, this time round it embraces the main section of the Quadrennial as a whole, the performance design exhibition, in which this year a record 67 countries and regions will participate. This year’s edition will take place across seven main, highly diverse, locations, while expanding to other buildings and, primarily, the public space. We are thus jointly realizing more than 120 site-specific projects, as virtually all exhibitions have been for their respective locations. For the first time in the history of the PQ, the dozens of curators and makers of national exhibitions met a whole year before the start of the PQ in Prague in order to select their own exhibition space. A major symposium (‘Spatial in Prague in April 2014) was held to initiate the extensive communications and cooperation for the event as a whole.

This year more than ever both we, in the set, inspiring artistic concept, and the curators and artists from participating countries, will, in our response, endeavour to address one of the main paradoxes of the Quadrennial – the performance design exhibition as a single part of a live theatre project without the presentation of the actual artistic piece for which it was created. However, national presentations will, this year, be even farther-removed from exhibition of costumes, sketches and models, as the PQ was simplistically described in the past. This year’s edition is oriented more towards live exhibitions, experiences, installations, performances, walks, performative lectures and countless other forms demonstrating the peculiarity and meaningfulness of this performance design event.

Apart from the space concept, participants will, this year, be aided all the more in their efforts by the theme of this year’s edition - scenography as a shared space – which will shift from the previous edition’s theme of space across artistic and other disciplines to the consideration of space as an element that plays a fundamental role in our everyday life. This fundamental shift. The concepts of individual expositions respond to the complex situation in which we live in the modern world. In its form, therefore, this year’s PQ looks like a playful live event, while its content addresses the serious problems affecting people in both the world as a whole and in individual countries, be these social, gender, national, ecological, psychological, technological, war, personal, emotional issues… I expect that this year’s PQ will be more playful and adventurous than ever before, as well as serious, and sometimes it might even frighten us…

In previous editions we have also with the PQ’s problematic structure, which was always based on countries’ and regions’ exhibitions: this is a simplified concept and this year, too, we will present projects and exhibitions in which, to the greatest extent thus seen, artists can participate as individuals. Over 1100 artists 60 countries applied to our Open Calls for participation in participate in Tribes, Makers, Objects, workshops, performances, Show and Tell, Sound Kitchen and many other sections. In creating these projects we took as our starting-point the massive amount of interest provoked in the appeals to the public in previous project, be these expositions, workshops, or symposia that we organize in the period between individual editions. Despite this broad range of options, we were forced to reject hundreds of other ideas, projects and makers due to lack of space on the PQ 2015 program.

We sometimes hear criticism, especially in the Czech Republic, that theatre and scenography are disappearing from the Quadrennial. However, scenography “is not about heating a space with a small vase” (in the words of major Slovak performance designer Aleš Votava) and theatre is not the mere staging of a dramatic text with actors. Scenography is the expression of our relationship to space and theatre is about cooperation between theatre makers, their specific relationship to both the space in which they move and to other people, their personal situation and to the world and its problems, as well as to the attitude and feelings of the viewer to the themes that theatre makers open up and the way in which they have experienced theatrical events. As one can see in the paragraphs above, all of this is, to a considerable extent, represented at the Quadrennial 2015. So yes, the Prague Quadrennial is, even after nearly fifty years, still about how thousands of people across the world see contemporary theatre and scenography; and everything you see in this publication and at the PQ as a whole – This is Theatre!’