Photo CreWcollective
Performer, dramaturge, teacher and researcher
In her work, Mish Rais combines dance, text and voice with visual arts and music and creates interdisciplinary performances that accentuate role of language and participation of the viewer.
Mish holds a master’s degree in linguistics from the Philosophical Faculty at Charles University (English and American Studies/Chinese Studies—2011) and in Authorial Creation and Pedagogy from Theatre Faculty at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (2015), as well as a Ph.D. in Authorial Acting and its Theory and Psychosomatics from the same institution (2020). She completed her habilitation at DAMU with a lecture titled “The Performer as Both Actor and Spectator” in 2025. She has participated in numerous workshops abroad and completed two six-month internships in Nanjing, China (2007) and London (2013), as well as a number of international conferences and symposia, mostly as an assistant for dialogical acting with an inner partner (an original discipline founded by Professor Ivan Vyskočil) and as an instructor for movement and theater workshops. She is a member of the international platform Performing Arts in Contexts (PAC).
As an educator (course guarant for movement disciplines, theorietical seminars, dialogical acting with an internal partner, and speech), she has been working since 2016 at the Department of Authorial Creation and Pedagogy at DAMU, where she co-founded the English-language BA/MA program Authorial Acting, which she headed from 2021 to 2025. In 2025, she took over as head of the Department of Authorial Creation and Pedagogy, and as an instructor, she also collaborates with the Department of Drama in Education and the Department of Dance at HAMU. As an instructor and judge, she has collaborated with the amateur and stage dance festivals Tanec, tanec, tanec (Jablonec nad Nisou) and the amateur theater festivals Přemostění (Most) and Nanečisto (Liberec), Mladá scéna (Ústí nad Orlicí), and Cooltour (Ostrava); as an instructor and performer, she has collaborated with the acting studio at the Švanda Theater (2016–2020), the Tanec Praha Festival, SE.S.TA (“The Gallery Dances,” “Marine Archeology” choreographed by Martha Moore), Temporary Collective (“Insectum”), and others.
Since 2014, she has been creating her own performances with the group Částečné znejistění (Partial Uncertainty) which she founded with dancer Jana Novorytová. Together, they created over forty performances in various theatrical and non-theatrical spaces (Částečné znejistění (2017), %& 3-5-8- @# and Dawn Is Breaking in Alaska (2019), Send a Postcard From Somewhere You Won’t Go (2024, with Václav Kalivoda and Pavel Havrda), as well as the production Here I might, just a bit (2025, with Anna Línová and Veronika Knytlová).
Since 2016, she has been collaborating as a dramaturg and performer with choreographer Mirka Eliášová (Refresh, Boxinbox, Tabula Rasa, …to be continued?!, Spaces In Between, and Escape from/of reality).
As a performer—dancer/actress/singer—she has collaborated, for example, with Miloš Orson Štědroň (Nora, or What Happened When She Left Her Husband and Hus(quem) ad fini), Přemysl Rut and others (Okolostolalala) and other.
Since 2017, he has held various roles at CreWcollective on projects such as Moving Orchestra, Lab4tools, Dreaming of a Brightly Lit Future, and Waist Deep, and has taken the role of a co-director and producer since 2021.
Since 2014, she has been engaged in research on dance improvisation and spontaneous composition and maintains a friendly creative dialogue and collaboration with prominent figures in the international improvisation scene, such as Julyen Hamilton, Rosalinda Crisp, Eva Karczag, Bettina Neuhaus, Daniel Lepkoff, Sakura Shimada, and Lisa Nelson. She was also significantly influenced by her own experience with dialogic acting under the guidance of Professor Ivan Vyskočil (since 2011), a Czech actor, author and psychologist and „father of the Czech postmodern theatre“. Mish is involved in both academic and popularizing non-academic publishing.
