Baroque Walks
Come indulge in the aesthetics of camp and the decadence of the Baroque at a special site-specific performance by the Beautiful Confusion collective.
Becka McFadden and Daniel Sommervill, the team behind the Thalia Award–winning production Black Dress, will show you that the Baroque is more than just cherubs and religious symbolism; it’s a period that can be viewed through a distinctly queer lens.
You’re invited on a captivating journey through Baroque music, painting, sculpture, and architecture – one you won’t soon forget. The setting? A nonbinary playground bursting with extravagant décor, queer pathos, and a healthy dose of euphoria. Step into the unconventional world of Baroque Walks and reflect on the lasting legacy of one of our culture’s campiest moments.
In her iconic essay Notes on ‘Camp’ Susan Sontag wrote: „The soundest [starting point for Camp] seems to be the late 17th and early 18th century, because of that period’s extraordinary feeling for artifice, for surface, for symmetry; its taste for the picturesque and the thrilling, its elegant conventions for representing instant feeling and the total presence of character – the epigram and the rhymed couplet (in words), the flourish (in gesture and in music). The late 17th and early 18th century is the great period of Camp.“
Dramaturgy, choreography: Becka McFadden, Daniel Somerville
Assistant director: Markéta Pščolková
Technical direction: Filip Obermajer
Costumes: Vojtěch Hanyš
Production: Kateřina Kubíková, Anna Kuřátková
Translation: Eva Ullrichová
Photography: Michaela Škvrňáková, Paul Wade
Videography: Aneta Baldovici
Co-production: Venuše ve Švehlovce
Project partners: SE.S.TA. Centre for Choreographic Development, Worcester Theatres
Baroque Walks is created with support from the City of Prague and the State Fund for Culture of the Czech Republic.
Entrance fee – free
Accessibility – suitable also for children and teenagers, accessible with a dog
Vibe check – outdoors
Organized by – Beautiful Confusion Collective
Beautiful Confusion Collective views live performance as a space to slow down, get reacquainted with presence and experience time differently. Our projects emerge from the questions we find most pressing, often at the intersection of the individual and a structure, be it a built space or a social construct in need of interrogation. Movement research, drawing on
practices from dance and theatre, including butoh, choreology and Viewpoints, is at the heart of our work, but we also draw approaches and inspiration from photography, collage, live art and sound art. We view our projects as ongoing, multidisciplinary research projects expressed through performances, installations, site-responsive works and/or digital art. We are currently in our third season of collaboration with Venuše ve Švehlovce, an independent theatre in Prague and have worked with a range of partners and festivals across the Czech Republic and in the UK. Our approach to dramaturgy is both intuitive and rigorous, and informed by felt sense and embodied reading and writing techniques. We are interested in the liminal, the queer and the complicated, as well as the personal and the specific, which we understand as means of getting at the issues that impact us all. With wit and humanity, we try to open space for our spectators to engage in deep dialogue with themselves.
