SENSUAL Festival: Serving the landscape (2025)

participatory food performance

Can you remember how you felt about food before someone showed you how to hold a fork? When you explored the world with your palms, fingers reaching where they weren't supposed to?
To gather around a table, sink into silence, and make space for textures, colours, scents. To walk through a landscape without outlines, become part of it, leave a trace, play, and create something delicious and fleeting.
Serving the Landscape is a short, shared preparation of a small feast with playful rules.

Photography:  Darja Lukjanenko

Pop Up Store: Spoiling Shelter (2025)

Melting Norms - Tiny Sauna Talk (2025)

The Tiny Sauna Talk is a sharing format that invites participants for a safe sauna session with voluntary discussions guided by a host in a performative manner.

Together, we will gently question what feels authentic about our bodies and what has been imposed upon us as standardized beauty.

Let's talk honestly and unfold what we find attractive or liberating and why. Let's track together what labels such as shaved or grown-out hair, a clenched abdomen and shallow breathing, small male hands, nipples visible through sheer fabric, a half-naked woman versus a half-naked man come from. What shapes these images we have internalized? Can we celebrate our bodies without squeezing them into the boxes that beauty norms dictate?

In a world where our bodies never seem exactly right, the sauna offers a rare, nonjudgmental shelter. A place for immersing in pure sensations, the heat of the skin, the glazing sweat, the surrender of melting muscles. Here, we exist beyond performance, beyond judgment, beyond seeking validation. How can we embrace that liberating "who gives a f***" mode from the sauna and take it out into the outside world? How can we carry the ease of simply being without forcing. Without cool outfits, makeup or deodorant, come and sweat till it washes off the scripts written on our bodies.

Produced by Bazaar festival in Prague.

Created by Magdalena Malinová

Text Alexandra Ratajová

Dramaturgy Anna Schoolz

Together With the Other (2024)

As part of the residency program »Post-Genre«, produced by Schwankhalle and and Stadische Gallerie Bremen (Germany).

In their collaborative artistic research, Magdalena Malinova and Nitish Jain approach the postcolonial concept of "othering" through multisensory and performative encounters between anonymous performers and spectators. They combine their experiences in performance, architecture, and dance to create sensory safe spaces where tenderness, empathy through touch, and togetherness between strangers are possible. In their work, they question how we relate to those marked as "other," particularly in the context of identity, race, gender, queerness, and normative behavior; and how universal elements such as songs, senses, imaginations, and embodied perception transcend the boundaries of otherness and emphasize the essential and human.

Traces of Human presence (2023)

a site-specific project on memory of space

You sit on a chair that is surprisingly warm. Someone has just gotten up from it. You feel the warmth of a body that has already left and there remains nothing but a mystery until you start looking for it.

Our physical environment holds memories of those who shaped it with their lives. How have we been influenced by the people who created spaces we inhabit, and how do we shape others by what we leave behind?

Traces of Human Presence is a meditative encounter. We invite visitors to join us in revealing fragments of the past and the present - a story of the memory of a space. Journey with us to a place once abandoned. Its walls still stand. Touch them. Hear them breathe. Let yourself be swept away.

Concept, direction, set design by Deborah St.

Performers: Marie Anna Václavek Krušinová, Mara Ingea, Debora Štysová

Dramaturgy: Magdalena Malinová and Mara Ingea

Debora Štysová, Trikular z.s. and Studio Alta

Symposium on Performance Art and Intimacy (2023)

The Symposium on Performing Arts and Intimacy is looking for ways of being intimate in the theater. The aim is to discuss specific projects and explore theatrical tools to re - learn how to linger in time, dwell and reset the reality to the realm of tangible, embodied experiences.

In times of modernity, consumption, and digitalization, our minds and bodies become scattered, disconnecting from the physical world. Then, the pandemic worsens this loss of communal physical experience. How do these realities affect theater, which by its very nature undermines the forces of sharing time and space with our minds and bodies? Is closeness necessary for intimacy, or can stage distance emphasize its presence? How can we communicate and experience intimacy in theater? How can performance art critically challenge our disconnection from the physical world and oppose them with touch, tenderness and intimacy? Our goal is not only to explore how to be more intimate for the theater itself, but rather how to use contemporary performance art as a trainer for people to open up and come back to themselves - especially in non-theatrical reality, in everyday life.

Organisation and curation: Magdalena Malinová

Speakers: Ian Mikyska (CZ), Michal Salwinski (PL), Ine Ubben (B), Nitish Jain (I), En Ping Yu (TW)

In All Its Glory (2023)

In All Its Glory is a performative installation. We invite you to a shared space between spectators and performers who don't see each other. We look for togetherness in anonymity to reflect on "what is otherness?" How does it feel to shake hands with someone whose face you cannot see? This is a space where hands, shoulders, voices and feet communicate through touch, movement and presence. Step in, slow down, be curious and spend as much time as you like.

This work explores intimacy and togetherness between strangers to examine our social constructs. It raises the question of how we relate to people and environments that we label "other" at this time when attention to self and identity is emerging globally. What is otherness in the context of race, gender, queerness, heterotopic spaces and hetero-normative behaviour? How does otherness fade with the universality of songs, our senses, our imagination and our embodied perception - all that is visceral and human.

Concept and direction: Nitish Jain and Magdalena Malinová
Performers: Nadezda Nazarova, Nirav Prajapati, Jeries Abu Jaber, Magdalena Malinová and Nitish Jain.
With artistic support from: Petra Hauerová, Ian Mikyska and Sodja Lotker.
Co-produced by: DAMU, Tantehorse, Palac Akropolis, Studio MoreThanThat

Spider turtle we (2023)

Quiet observation of small species can change our perspective. A spider in a bathroom. Everyday reality intersects with an imaginary world where spiders dance to survive, overlooked beings celebrate their existence, and a turtle suddenly appears. Through costumed bodies and a moving installation, the performance leads spectators on a journey in which they cease to be human and imagine life as other kinds of species. Confronted with these creatures, they experience overwhelming and contradictory feelings: curiosity is clouded by fear of the unknown, confusion intersects with empathy and everything comes together in a series of introspective questions: How do we decide to act in the face of the unknown?

The Spider Turtle We project is part of the international research project Foreign Body: Costume Becoming. 

Direction and concept: Ran Jiao
Costumes: Anne-Catherine Kunz
Costume Co-Creation: Mara Ingea
Sound Design: Elia Moretti
Lighting Design: Martin Hamouz
Set design: Susana Botero Santos
Choreography consultation: Petra Hauerová
Dramatic support: Sodja Lotker
Technical support: Josef Malík
Production: Lamija Čehajić
Performing: Magdalena Malinová, Michał Salwiński, Ran Jiao, Tomáš Janypka, Roman Zotov-Mikshin, Jovita Siu Ji Chin, Sai Morikawa

Co  produced: by Ran Jiao and Lovable Humans, co-produced with the National Theatre and Lenka Vagnerova & Company, and Bazaar Festival. It has been supported by Centre for Choreographic Development: S.ES.TA, REZI.DANCE Komařice, Ponec Theatre and Alfred ve Dvoře Theatre.

Agony Aunt (2022)

"It's just neverending. That's the worst part. You're on call every morning. You have to everything. It's just you putting her to bed every afternoon or evening," says Lenka.

"People tell me, "I couldn't do that, I'd rather kill myself." And I say, "But that's the way it is, and I also have to bring up two children on the side." adds Zuzka.

A documentary performance exploring the topic of single-parenting from the perspective of girls, women, daughters and mothers.
The cafe can be a venue for a first date, a location to meet with the divorce lawyer, the site of a breakup, a place where kids drink lemonade while adults sip a flat white, a setting in which friends and strangers can meet. A space where people find the need to confide.
Come and overhear stories from the table next door. Come and see your teenage idol at the bar, the one you placed your faith in and who left you. Come and witness the breakup of a perfect family.

Direction: Klára Vosecká

Dramaturgy: Magdalena Malinová

Performed by: Anastázie Dobrodinská, Klára Lidinská, Štěpán Pospíšil

Supported by: Nova sit, z.s., cultural centre VZLET

 30 DAYS (2022) 

What must a foreigner overcome before obtaining a residence permit in the Czech Republic? What was he looking for when he arrived? How many papers has he already sent to the Ministry of the Interior? And how does he cope with the knowledge that the person deciding his fate is legally not allowed to meet him? You can keep your ticket in your pocket. We require a completed form for entry.

An experiential performance in which the process of applying for a visa is simulated. In the course of their endeavour, they pass through several spaces and encounter snippets of the authentic stories of Nicola, Ping, Sai and Masha. Paper as a symbol of bureaucracy, the extended arm of the state that has lost feeling in its fingers. We move on the border of the real and the fictional absurd.

At a time when travel was fashionable, we were actively building a policy against immigrants. Now, with the fresh experience of closed borders, we can reflect on how open they normally are. And also for whom.

Concept and set design by Debora Štysová

Directed by Tinka Avramova

Performers: Nicola Isakovic, Masha Khositasvili, Meghana AT, Sai Psyn, Yu En-Ping, Marie Anna Krušinová, Klára Lidinská, Magdalena Malinová

Supported by Studio Alta, Johan: Moving Station, DAMU.

Texture of Sensuality (2022)

One spectator experience researching theatrality of touch and taste. The spectator is given a momentary feeling of being able to do what he wants, music and banal activity stimulates brief contemplative, playful state that is so valuable for contemporary everyday life. Performed at the renowned festival 4+4 Days in Movement 2022. 

Process of care (2022)

Created by: Magdalena Malinova, Mara Ingea and Egle Simeante.

Headless Body (2022)

An artistic research connecting yeast dough, baking and femininity. Durational happening exploring slowness and waiting through the actof baking. 

My exploration of intimacy and touch is based on projects related to the tradition of sourdough baking in Czech cuisine and the representation of femininity in the Eastern Bloc. Since childhood, I have spent most of my time baking with the women in my family. I passionately pursued my own narrative of this tradition, yet also found myself yearning for validation, to be perceived as a nurturing and perfect woman. While growing up, I realized that I had never known a relaxed woman.

The work with dough, delicate and tangible, requires love, slowness and patience, like nurturing a newborn. In traditional Czech families, however, women in the kitchen are often rushed and stressed, ruling by force and neglecting to care for themselves. I've witnessed countless family gatherings where women have argued and overwhelmed others with too much food, organizing everyone but themselves. Then they stressfully debate what to do with the excess, blaming each other for cooking too much and refusing to rest. Maybe they can rest, but only if they feel they deserve it. By interviewing women across different generations over the course of the long baking process, I aimed to question this prevailing strong womanhood narrative celebrated in society, how I can become a woman who allows herself to rest without feeling guilty.

Concept and performance: Magdalena Malinova and Mara Ingea

The Box (2021)

Immersion into anarchy, wildness, and the relentless struggle between women in a surrealistic loop. In this captivating journey, identities blur and lose meaning, as we are drawn into the realm of intuitive, primal beings. A imaginery world where the boundaries of reality dissolve, and the essence of humanity is laid bare in all its raw and banal glory.

concept: Alexandra Ratajova, Simona Lewandovska, Magdalena Malinová