The Prague Quadrennial has been held every four years since 1967 and is the world’s largest event in the field of scenography presenting contemporary work in a variety of performance design disciplines and genres including costume, stage, lighting, sound design, and theatre architecture for dance, opera, drama, site-specific, multi-media performances, and performance art.
The Next Four Years sees designers – Ciaran Bagnall, Lian Bell, Katie Davenport, Mel Mercier, Rob Moloney, Eimer Murphy, Jack Phelan and Sinéad Wallace – collaborate with curator Tom Creed to imagine the theatre of tomorrow under the guise of the quadrennial’s theme of ‘rare’. A film, publication and daily conversations will also emerge as part of their work which is dedicated to the memory of Monica Frawley.
A brief perusal of other countries approaches throws up a range of interpretations from Finland’s Bee Company looking at how a “multidisciplinary collective (can) learn from non-human ways of living, working and being creative” to Chile creating a ‘mortuary pavilion’ housing ‘animitas’ – small traditional constructions that house the spirit of a deceased person at the site of their tragic death.
