CLOUDS by Handa Gote Research and Development, with guest performance by Julia Pello & David Hall at Links Hall

Handa Gote’s show, Clouds, is a terrific lo-fi aesthetic in which the performer, Veronika Švábová, simply tells us about her grandparents. They, variously, founded the Czech communist party, were imprisoned in concentration camps, became high-ups in the secret police and were shot as traitors, which makes for a more exciting family album than most, and yet it’s lightly worn and beautifully executed.” — Andrew Haydon, The Guardian

In this piece major Central European experimental group Handa Gote Research and Development offers a glimpse into its ongoing work with “little histories“, this time turning to one of its own member‘s personal archives. Veronika Švábová sifts through the history of her family seeking both the fateful moments and seeming trivialities that have survived in family members‘ memories to this day, that are the fabric of family community. Clouds is a subjective study of one’s own family, a series of scenes without causal association, not unlike those fragments of past events that make up our own memories. Actress Veronika Švábová, exploring her family history, opens her personal archive to tell stories of fate and triviality. Who even knows how to bake real «Mraky» anymore? How did our ancestors influence our own lives? What have they told us and what have they kept secret? What happened in their lives and fates that repeats itself in ours? What mistakes do we make again and again without learning from them, just like they did? Which aspects of our personalities are inherited from them? What information from the past do we carry in the body? And just what will this body look like in twenty years, if it is still here at all? What results of what actions or events do we carry on into our lives? What do we really remember and what is just our imagination? What does family actually mean today? And who still knows how to bake “mraky“? Part of an exchange between Chicago performance groups Every House has a Door, ATOM-r and Prague’s Handa Gote, funded by the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Created with the support of: Motus, producers of the Alfred ve dvoře Theatre, Jedefrau.org, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the City of Prague, Theatre 29 / Terra Madoda Pardubice, the Institute of Light Design Prague, and Institute of Intermedia of the Czech Technical University in Prague

Clouds is presented as part of an exchange between Chicago performance groups Every House has a Door, ATOM-r and Prague’s Handa Gote. Performed by Veronika švábová, Jakub Hybler, Tomáš Procházka, Jan Dőrner. Clouds is funded by the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

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Tags: Chicago, CLOUDS, David Hall, Handa Gote Research and Development, Illinois, Jakub Hybler, Jan Dőrner, Julia Pello, Links Hall, Prague, Tomáš Procházka, Veronika Švábová, West Town