Theater Concrète /work-in-progress/: Pasi Mäkelä and Ferst Dadler: Norma 2026 - Rebirth

Ferst Dadler - Elia Moretti (IT/CZ) and Inga Zotova-Mikshina (RU/CZ) - is a Prague-based experimental performance group working at the intersection of art and ecology. They explore relational structures and the politics of intimacy; their work encompasses installations, performances, sound work, and community facilitation. The group creates spaces for shared intimacy and confrontation as ways of knowing and honoring mutual interdependence - performative environments for hybrid, pluralistic approaches where meaning emerges through shared presence.

For their upcoming project, they have invited Pasi Mäkelä (FI/CZ) to collaborate, an artist recently nominated for the Thalia Prize. This Finnish performer, musician, director, and conceptual artist studied theatre direction at Turku Arts Academy and is connected to the Finnish experimental theatre scene, including the Reality Research Center and Circus Maximus ensembles.

"We emphasize consciousness itself and the transformation of theatrical space to create a unified whole - particularly as a realm of consciousness at the moment of falling asleep (hypnagogia) and waking (hypnopompia). So-called bardo states of mind.

We attempt to apply personal study of waking and falling asleep to the performance and musical process. These states can be found simply, for example, when the audience enters the theatre and the performance begins, or when it ends and the audience leaves, and also when the artist takes the stage or exits - altered states of consciousness in everyday life. Here, the apparatus of theatre is the apparatus of consciousness.

We seek to question the conventions of our performative practice, to reconstruct and dismantle the structures of our artistic constructions, to compose and decompose.

As a theatrical compositional approach, we create the idea of theatre concrète based on the musical term musique concrète, which Pierre Schaeffer developed in 1948 at the Studio d'Essai in Paris. Musique concrète works with raw materials - environmental recordings, train whistles, human voices, and machine sounds - instead of the standard musical scale. We find similar materials in theatre: basic gestures and positions,