Program and tickets for BAZAAR 2026 are now available!

Community as a Bodily Experience

For many years, the Bazaar Festival has presented innovative (and often provocative) theatre and dance from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, creating a space where art, critical thinking, and social reflection can meet. This year’s programme explores how communities are formed, how they function, and how they fall apart – not only within human society, but also in a broader, more-than-human context. Artists do not approach the theme from a distance; instead, they investigate it through the body as a fundamental unit of relationships, memory, and responsibility.

“In a time of evident contradictions, it seems that a wider creative scene is concerned with how we come together, how communities collaborate, and also when and how they exclude one another. This exploration goes beyond purely human communities and, with great inventiveness, touches on relationships between bodies, landscapes, plants, microorganisms, or systems we have created ourselves,” says festival dramaturg Ewan McLaren.

From the Collective Body to More-than-Human Communities

The festival opens with Isabelle Schad’s choreography Pieces and Elements, which works with the idea of the collective body as an organism capable of existing only through the whole. A group of dancers creates a constantly shifting structure in which each element affects the entire system – much like in natural environments, where nothing exists in isolation.

A major highlight of the programme is the durational performance Monument of Trust: The Arena by Serbian visual artist Ivana Ivković, presented in collaboration with Y Events at Divadlo X10. The project focuses on trust, power, and corruption, examining how these structures inscribe themselves into bodies, communities, and social systems. Theatre here becomes an arena of collective action, tension, and shared responsibility.

In the international project BLOT – Body Line of Thought by Simona Deaconescu and Vanessa Goodman, the human body is conceived as an ecosystem – a community of microbial, chemical, and physical processes. Combining dance and scientific research, the performance views the body as a fluid system in constant dialogue with its surroundings.

More-than-human communities are also central to the choreography O by Croatian artist Sonja Pregrad, which approaches plant life as a collective body and a source of choreographic thinking. Growth, symbiosis, eroticism, and decay intertwine in a poetic image that disrupts an anthropocentric view of the world.

Bazaar Festival as a Community in Motion and Dialogue

The Bazaar Festival understands community not only as a theme, but also as a way of working. At its heart remains Saturday Bazaar, the festival’s signature programme presenting works-in-progress by contemporary dance and theatre makers from Central and Eastern Europe. Direct dialogue with audiences, the sharing of process, and openness to uncertainty create a communal space without which these emerging works could not continue to grow.

This year’s programme also includes a Mini-symposium on how dance creates community, expanding the festival with discussion and collective reflection. The Saturday meetings within the mini-symposium are open not only to dance artists, educators, researchers, and students, but to anyone interested in contemporary and street/urban dance as a living, shared practice.

“Let the Bazaar Festival be a community you want to belong to – not a finished structure, but a living organism that constantly transforms through the presence of all of us,” says Ewan McLaren, inviting audiences to step inside the festival.

The Bazaar Festival is a space for open dialogue. It welcomes everyone who asks (sometimes seemingly simple) questions, but is not satisfied with ordinary or straightforward answers.
The full programme are available at https://www.bazaarfestival.cz/en/program.