Residencies

• 27.01 > 31.01.2025
• 06.01 > 18.01.2025

In 1968 Katja Dreyer’s mother fled her nati­ve Czechoslovakia. After the Soviet Union sud­den­ly inva­ded her hom­e­land, put­ting an end to the Prague Spring, she sought her for­tu­ne in West Germany. 

In her prac­ti­ce, Katja Dreyer digs into the past to bet­ter under­stand our lay­e­red pre­sent. Now, she ven­tu­res into her mother’s sto­ry for the first time. But rela­ting to her Slovak and Slavic iden­ti­ty turns out to be no easy task. Her mother can­not (or doesn’t want to?) remem­ber eve­ry­thing, and Dreyer never lear­ned her mother’s language. 

Fortunately, she met Peter Savel in her search, a half-Slovak, half-Brussels dan­cer. As a queer boy, his mother sent him to Slovakian folk dan­ce, to ​‘straigh­ten him out’ a bit. Now he is pas­sing his know­led­ge on to Katja. His lan­gu­a­ge, his dan­ce, his hands and feet all form a kind of por­tal to her own his­to­ry. Together they sketch all the paral­lel sto­ry­li­nes taking pla­ce during and after ​‘soci­a­lism with a friend­ly face’. In a col­la­ge-like series of dan­ced and spo­ken poems lies a slum­be­ring ques­ti­on: what do we pass on to the next generation?