About the festival

Dear audience, 

The 8th Prague Crossroads Festival will take place in autumn, but this time outside its traditional venue at the NT New Stage, which has just closed for reconstruction. This has posed a major challenge for the festival; despite the wear and tear caused by over 40 years of operation, the New Stage has been an item on Prague theatre map that is hard to replace. Its premises were designed to accommodate a wide range of theatre productions and only in rare cases technical issues prevented us from bringing a must-see piece into Prague. Of course, the exquisite festival technical and production team played a crucial role in making all this possible.

The New Stage was virtually the exclusive venue for the festival from its beginning in 2016. We thus faced a difficult task of finding a temporary home for the Prague Crossroads during its reconstruction, which we eventually found at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art. We greatly appreciate their co-operation and willingness to host two of the festival productions as well as the accompanying meetings with the creators. The opening production of this year’s festival will be presented in the unique space of the deconsecrated Church of St. Anne, also known as the Prague Crossroads Centre. We thus seized this opportune moment to unite, at least for a while, the two eminent cultural “crossroads”: the festival and the exceptional cultural space.

Here comes the heart of the festival – the programme. This year we bring three exceptional productions: La vie secrète des vieux by Mohamed El Khatib, which will be performed at the Prague Crossroads Centre, and Haribo Kimchi by Jaha Koo and Beyond Caring by Alexander Zeldin, both to be seen at DOX. All three theatre pieces explore the sensitive topics of human relationships, care, and identity. The opening production of this year’s festival is La vie secrète des vieux directed by Mohamed El Khatib, who is visiting the Czech Republic for the very first time. El Khatib is a renowned French contemporary theatre director known for his distinctive style, which is characterized by focus on humanity, simple form, and the ability to view major issues through the lenses of seemingly mundane stories. Each performance of his is an encounter – with the authentic people on stage, as well as the world they come from. El Khatib weaves powerful stories with subtle political undercurrent out of the small details of our common lives. His peculiar approach builds on empathy, humour and pure trust in his protagonists, whether they are children, football players or, as in this production, elderly people living in nursing homes. El Khatib’s latest production breaks one of the social taboos, namely the sexual life of the elderly. He tackles the topics of intimacy and desire in older age with sensitivity, adding a spark of humour. 

South Korean performer and director Jaha Koo is the second artist who will present his latest production to the festival. Known for his original style combining visual humour, movement and personal narration, he is both the creator and protagonist of his productions, where he mingles his personal life with the imaginative and visual world of theatre. The Czech audience may remember him from previous Prague Crossroads, where he presented to great acclaim his brilliant performance Cuckoo, featuring talking Korean rice cookers. In his new project Haribo Kimchi, Jaha Koo comes to Prague with a street-food stall, where he will cook for the audience while narrating his personal and intimate story about an immigrant’s feelings.

Director Alexander Zeldin — also a first-time visitor to Prague, like Mohamed El Khatib — will present the third festival production, a French adaptation of his famous play Beyond Caring. Zeldin’s specific quality is that he is both a director and an award-winning playwright, so he writes the scripts for his productions himself. Zeldin employs realistic style in his works to tackle social issues with great empathy for the fates of common people. Beyond Caring tells the story of several temporary workers who meet during night shifts at a meat packing factory. The realistic setting of the play uncovers the true life of precarious workers-cleaners, who share their personal and professional worries during the short, just ten-minute-long breaks they are entitled to during their shifts.

Listening to others’ stories and creating a common space, safe and human, through mutual empathy — these are the moments of closeness that make us stronger together. The emphasis on powerful personal stories as a form of confession instigating new sensibility permeates contemporary European theatre. The Prague Crossroads Festival is no exception in this respect. This year’s program focuses on human relationships as the cornerstone that keeps us going in our everyday life. Indeed, our behaviour to each other, whom we helped and who helped us, is ultimately what matters most. Humanity, listening to others, and empathy are the focal themes of the selected productions.

We wish you all an intense and memorable theatre experience.

On behalf of the festival team,
Nina Jacques
Programmer of the Prague Crossroads Festival