hotel europa







performance description

Hotel Europa, it is a collaborative experimental interdisciplinary performance that explores issues of Europe, European-ness and how personal history and political systems intersect and affect each other. Hotel Europa uses autobiographical material and the biographies of the performer’s families, as well as the histories and cultures of the countries of origin of the performers – Portugal, Czech Republic and England – to build a work that is fragmented, diverse and conflicted, yet inherently linked and bound together, as is Europe.  The work uses a combination of text, movement, song, recorded sound and image, and scenography to convey a sense of the exploration into Europe which has been made by the performers. It is a personal and political portrait of Europe; a postmodern examination that accepts that there is no objective truth. The audience can reflect on what they see, hear and feel and interweave or interpret their own narrative into or onto the work.

company process

The process that led to Hotel Europe was three-fold. The first part saw the performers interview their parents and create a timeline of their personal histories. This led to further research about the histories, mythologies and cultures of the three countries represented, with particular note of the fascist, communist and democratic systems that they respectively represent.  In the third part of the process each country was ‘lived’ for a day in London – with presenters guiding the others around the city either as if it were their country (Trafalgar Square became Wenceslas Square, an urban Lido, the Portuguese beach) and also in order to experience those communities and cultures as they exist in the city.  All members of the group could respond at any moment of the tour, with a performative response and at the end of each of the three days a group response was devised and performed. The documentation of these three days combined with the other material, was used in the devising of the work and in some cases, performative responses led to actual movement or textual motifs that remained in the work.