Waking up at STANICA seems never easy.
This year's Kiosk festival was, unlike last year, not plagued by rain - although it was as much an omnipresent threat as the overpass that dominates the tent-laden field at the back of the cultural centre.
Last night was the usual kick-ass local DJs, led by DJ TRANSmisia who
played a stirling set and led revellers through a wide range of
re-mastered and almost unrecognisable queer-influenced pop tunes from
the 90s, from the Backstreet Boys to Aqua. I wake up still feeling like I
haven't recovered from the train ride, (and D'Epog's bulldozing Handsfree certainly didn't help) and wondering if I even will before disappearing back to Berlin tomorrow.
The final day of Kiosk is a few shows with a quiet resonance to them - the perfect way to end the festival, together with some public discussion with Festival Directors Michaela Pastekova and Martin Krištof. Congratulations on another hearty Kiosk!
Medař
Walking into the stage of Medař - a work from Czech puppetry group FRAS - is walking into a familiar magical world of puppetry. In a world that flattens everything out into the same categorizable screen-surfaces, puppetry is refreshingly 3-dimensional in its approach: we can zoom, slide, transform, and destroy using only our imaginations. The scope for puppetry is limited only by our capacity to give in to its illusions, which are never forced on us, but remain a strong and beautiful invitation to discover once again a love of life.
Photo: Mariia Hryhorenko
That invitation is dripping with pleasure in Medař - its recycled materials, soft lighting, and painstakingly-decorated red temple proudly framing the action of the microscopic drama. Paper dangles from the structure, as the puppeteers draw from their toolkit of instruments to slowly agitate the world into life - marked by an ingenious use of a map drawn onto an old piece of corregated iron, also used as a type of rusty backgdrop to the play.
The narrative itself follows a Nepalese man Joshi whose sister falls ill, and who has to go and fetch a special medicine from a mountain-top. The gongs and chimes of the atmospheric soundtrack (credited as FRAS) slip shapes and transform as flexibly as the stage itself, moving through a list of imaginative concepts, lovingly-designed to delight. There are various set-pieces - sort of dead-end jokes - that mark the narrative, such as repeated dousing of a candle, or flies leaving only to return, moments which perhaps make up the true diversionary delight of the work.
Photo: Mariia Hryhorenko
