Opening evening
Films / concept / choreography: Jiří Kylián
Moving Still / Installation
Moving Still, promises to be an all-embracing experience.
News
2024
Presenting the project to the dancers and recording with Jiří Lábus
2024
Nils Petter Molvær – top-notch contemporary jazz musician
2024
Testing the sculpture installation and its illumination
2024
Fine-tuning of the project
2023
The sculpture of Valentina is born
2021
Beginning of Moving Still
The Hague, The Netherlands
Scanning of bodies
Jiří Kylián about Moving Still
I am a choreographer since many years and obviously movement always fascinated me.
Moving Still is an installation consisting of nine life-size sculptures of dancers who were scanned 3-dimensionally. I have asked these dancers, with whom I worked for many years, if they would participate in this project and whether they would be willing to be scanned nude in 3D, printed life-size and publicly exhibited. The dancers are Lorraine Blouin, Cora Bos Kroese, Valentina Scaglia, Shirley Esseboom, David Krügel, Ken Ossola, Stefan Żeromski and Michael Schumacher.
Since years I am fascinated with movement in general and moving inside or outside of a space in particular. The life-size 3D prints of these dancers should be situated either inside or outside of any windows – or they should be caught just in the midst of their flight through the glass with their bodies cut in half. I started working on this project in October 2021 in the middle of the pandemic. At that time we were not allowed to move anywhere. That is why I gave my work the title Moving Still. It is an installation of motionless sculptures flying through space between life and death. Their bodies are marked with cuts and wounds… But while working on this project, I have realized that neither a living dancer nor his static 3D print ever stands still. Nothing ever stands still....
But movement and stillness in choreography was not the only inspiration for this project. I was equally inspired by the sculptures of the deceased people of Pompeii who died in October 79 AD when mount Vesuvius erupted. This tragedy happened 1945 years ago and still today these motionless sculptures move us deeply.
Why Prague?
This event has a very broad Czech base:
The film Between Entrance and Exit, which was filmed in Hýskov, uses the furniture from Jiří Kylián's childhood home in Prague as decor. Jiří was born in a street just across the bridge from the National Theatre. Jiří started learning ballet at the National Theatre from the early age of 9 in 1956. Many of his ballets were performed there – either by the Czech National Ballet or by his own company the Nederlands Dans Theater.
The film Schwarzfahrer was shot in Prague in an old tram designed by František Křižík. In the film Scalamare one of the protagonists is Peter Jolesch. He is half Czech and half German, and the majority of the film crew was Czech: Jan Malíř, Olga Špátová, Šárka Sklenářová, Petr Tůma and others…The film Car-men was filmed in the brown coal mines in the north of the Czech Republic – again, much of the crew was Czech. The inspiration for this film came from the book The Black Triangle with mesmerizing photographs by Josef Koudelka.
The statues of the Moving Still installation were printed life-size in Liberec by Petr Klokočník and his firm Cotrex. And finally and most importantly, this very unique project came to final fruition by Kateřina Hanáčková with the generous support of the National Theatre Prague: Martin Rypan, Filip Barankiewicz, Karolína Kopecká, the dancers and staff of the Czech National Ballet.