SPARTAKIAD WILL BE NICE AND PRETTY (2014)

camera: Marek Petřík

editing, concept, performing: Tereza Adámková

Based on a mass exercise for young female students from the planned Spartakiad 1990 I created two recorded perfromances THEY HAD SKIPPING ROPES and SPARTAKIAD WILL BE NICE AND PRETTY.

The mass exercise was in 1990 (cancelled) Spartakiad performed by less than a tenth of the participants out of the original estimated number of 13,824.

In the video THEY HAD SKIPPING ROPES I practice part of the mass exercise in a short loop. It is an attempt to experience the movement and the joy of the Spartakiad exercise and gatherings with one's own body. At the same time, awkwardness and absurdity is present when attempting to isolate the movement from the synchronous crowd.

In a longer video SPARTAKIAD WILL BE NICE AND PRETTY I perform in the jersey that was intended for cancelled Spartakiad 1990 for the young female students. I perform the postures from the 1990 mass exercise in the winter of 2014 in the streets of Brno and wait for the surrounding pedestrians to react to the jersey and the postures are transferred in the form of rigid poses. It is again a physical experience but also an examination of whether the Spartakiad is still alive in people's minds and whether a mere symbol in the form of a jersey and a posture will provoke a reaction in pedestrians. Both events and their recording were for me the first step on the path of research on the topic of the Spartakiad and mass compositions in general.