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Polish choreographer Iza Szostak’s circus is a philosophical system, a choreography of risk, precarity, and collective survival mirroring the contemporary condition. Discover today how her new performance Trapeze, premiering at Studio Hrdinů in Prague, turns the trapeze bar into a narrator, and the clown into an energy valve for a world on the brink of collapse.

Brace yourselves, the cultural highlight of the Prague autumn season is on. The iconic and boundary-smashing Lunchmeat Festival just launched in Prague and, as with every edition, we plan to savour everything it has to offer – and invite you along for the ride. The festival’s entire programming runs between September 22 and 28.

Polish composer Rafał Ryterski creates multimedia "total pieces" that blend classical music approaches with experimental electronics to create a genrebending, political sonic landscape. Read him trace his path from childhood encounters with The Prodigy to abandoning academia, and catch him live at Sanatorium Sonorum 2025.

“Interestingly, when I sing in Bulgarian, I also sound less queer than in English.” We were lucky enough to get ahold of one of the most idiosyncratic and eye-catching acts the Slovak 2025 Pohoda Festival has to offer, just a day before the event kicked off: Bulgarian choreographer, performer, and singer-songwriter Ivo Dimchev. His enthusiastic fandom knows him for a wild and vivid mixture of folklore, catchy pop, cabaret, and opera – and this year’s Pohoda should expect nothing less. With Ivo, we talked “fame”, multudisciplinarity, inspiration, queerness, and questions that haven’t been asked yet.

Katharina Schmitt transforms Kafka’s In the Penal Colony into a dreamlike stage experience, with the execution machine becoming its own character. On the backdrop of minimal dialogue and an experimental singer as the machine's voice, the production explores how humans relate to the sight of suffering. Read today’s interview to find out why you don’t want to miss Studio Hrdinů's latest inscenation and how your own act of watching it will be questioned.

“The dichotomy of PAF is that you want to tell the world about it while jealously wishing to keep it to yourself, lest it becomes touristy.” The umbrella theme of the 2024 PAF, Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art, was “Diaries”. Since autofiction seems to be all the rage for the past five years or so, I’ve decided to toy with the format of an “autofictitious diary” to write my report from the 4-day event. All actual act reviews are genuine but some of the accompanying commentary might be not. Enjoy.

The Norma Festival is a critically acclaimed dance festival taking place on November 16-17 in Prague, Czech Republic, at the Studio Hrdinů theatre. Each year, the festival commissions at least one custom performance – in 2024, it’s a piece called “Bliss” by Czech visual and virtual artist NIVVA and Polish theatre and opera director Magda Szpecht. “Bliss” is a performance that “imagines the possibilities of the relationship between a virtual being and its human creator.” Using motion capture technology, it speculates about a future where digital beings may emerge with a sense of agency beyond human design. The Czech-Polish team created this project in co-production with Æfekt Productions, Komuna Warszawa and Pawiłon Poznan.

“We also played around with the idea of Hell as something that makes you do something involuntary endlessly, some kind of strange punishment.” As a special performance added to this year's Lunchmeat Festival, Canadian artists Louis-Philippe Demers and Bill Vorn introduced their singular project Inferno involving cybernetics, a human-machine performance, questions of relenting control, and “novice” participants from the audience. Enjoy an in-depth interview with the artists below.

This year marks the first year of Sanatorium Sonorum, a unique festival-residency for musicians and sound artists. Featuring site-specific performances, the event aims to not only present some of the most innovative experimental musicians, but also provide them with a space for healing and self-reflection. Read today’s exclusive interview with founder Natálie Pleváková and Thistle, one of the performing acts, to get a taste of what you can expect at the visionary event this August.

Alexmonhart's collection of six distinctive unisex perfumes is inspired by the multiple personalities within each of us. Each represents a different archetype, and each is represented by an ambassador embodying the depth and ambiguity of the perfumes. Learn about the Lexicon in today’s interview with Alexandra and Daniel, and find out what inspired the creative duo to create this sextet of unique scents.

“We have watched many clubs and festivals opening in the Czech Republic and many fitness centres opening in Slovakia.” Nowadays, the Pohoda Festival near Trenčín, Slovakia, is an internationally acclaimed award-winning three-day event but its seeds were sown by the Slovak hardcore scene nearly three decades ago. Michal Kaščák, Pohoda’s original founding father, explains this growth, the deeply rooted activist side of the event, and how the festival has been championing an above-standard ethical, ecological and diversity framework since the first edition.

The aging body does not contain only one body. Rather, it is multiple bodies layered in time and decay, in memories and experiences. Figuring Age, a performance-installation by Boglárka Börcsök & Andreas Bolm interweaves the stories and memories of elderly dancers with their everyday gestures, postures and dance movements, tracing how three women changed their lives and movement practices to survive the sociopolitical shifts of the 20th century.

Adamant Country is the story of a mandorla, guarding an egg. This sacred space is fertile ground for the interplay of archetypes, meanings, and cosmic cycles. Enter the world of Czech artist Petra Janda, the laureate of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award, as she weaves you into her intimate landscape.

In his current exhibition, the Jindřich Chalupecký Award winner Mark Ther re-represents the history of Prostějov. By working with taboo and poignant topics, the visitors are urged to reconsider their stereotypical mental processes. Mark’s works are part of the Prostějov Contemporary Art Festival, which its chief curator Míra Macík introduces in today’s feature.

In exploring movement and transformation, choreographer Paweł Sakowicz delves into the Romantic landscape. In his upcoming Fatamorgana project he exploits the tropes of seeing and gestures in evoking an ambiguous nostalgia. Read today’s interview for an insightful peek into his approach to choreography and contemporary dance, and don’t miss the fast-approaching Prague premiere!

SWARM Mag introduces Ples Sobje by MUMM No. 4. Albeit only four years old, this annual “Vienna ballroom meets Berlin rave” evening, founded by the team behind the Czech fashion brand ODIVI, has already sunk its claws into the awareness of the local fashionista and art scene. This year, a select few attending designers, influencers and other personages donned masks and apparel by seven students of Prague's Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design whom we interviewed below.