The symposium Inner Speech as a Stage Gesture in Instant Composition will take place June 22 – 26th 2026 at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and other venues (Žižkostel and Studio Alta) and is coproduced by CreWcollective and AMU (Department of Authorial Creativity and Pedagogy and Dance Department) and the above mentioned venues.
The symposium is mostly practical, and strong focus is put on sharing experience, asking questions and thinking about the answers together through the work in the studio and in discussions. The symposium is designed as a research situation: to create space in which different experiences, levels and fields can meet; invited dance and movement practitioners (both outside and part of academia), teachers, students, curators, theoreticians from the field of somatic practice, cultural psychology, phenomenology, education, embodied production and other. A crucial notion is “embodiment” of the above mentioned and the topic that ties it all together is “inner speech” as a phenomenon, as an experience that can be reflected in/from all the areas mentioned above. As for dance improvisation, we will be concerned with this question mostly: how can we describe, talk about the process of instantly composing, improvising in front of an audience? How can we share the experience of improvisation and how does this ‘inner speech’ on stage through the body take place?
This project is loosely connected to a previous project ‘Improvisation as a choreographic, authorial and creative principle’ that was led by Mish Rais, Mirka Eliášová and Lizzy Le Quesne and that resulted in a book Secretly Alive: embodied perspectives on dance improvisation.
We have designed the symposium as a program with parallel events so this research situation is not exclusive to the focus group of teams of experienced researchers from the academia but so we can open it also to students, pedagogues outside the research group and colleagues outside the academia as well. This is to create a space in which all levels and environments can come together. Part of the program (the performances Along the Lines and Sometime Now) is also open to the general public, by which we mean to raise awareness about dance improvisation, somatic practice and kindred topics. Those are coproduced by CreWcollective.
Main workshops with: Rosalind Crisp (online, Australia), Eva Karczag, Bettina Neuhaus, Lisa Nelson (online, USA)
Sharing practices in the studio with professionals from and outside academia, i.e. Megan Nicely (University of San Francisco), Lizzy Le Quesne (UK), Mish Rais and Mirka Eliášová (AMU, Prague), Anka Sedlačková (SK), Paula Guzzanti (University of Malta) and others TBS.
Moderated discussions with invited speakers, performances, networking and much more.
Detailed program coming soon.