Becka McFadden

Becka McFadden is an artist based between Prague and London. She has collaborated with LegalAliens for over a decade, directing the company’s productions of Closed Lands (VAULT Festival), Poker Face (Voila! Europe Festival, King’s Head London, Italian tour) and The Return (Camden Fringe, St. James Theatre Studio, London). As founder and artistic director of Beautiful Confusion Collective, Becka creates contemporary performance work on the borders of dance, theatre and live and visual art for theatres and non-conventional spaces. Projects include stories of the present war, a live puzzling out of complex matters inspired by an archive of family letters from WWII; Movement/Architecture, series of projects addressing the body’s relationship to built space; and BackStories, a solo for the spine and its secrets. She is currently rehearsing Vertigo Variations, a meditation on physical and existential vertigo inspired by Hitchcock’s 1958 film to premiere at Prague’s Venuše ve Švehlovce later in 2021 and developing Black Dress, a new solo about the construction of gender and the act of getting dressed. 

Becka’s work has been supported by the Czech State Fund for Culture, Artist’s Life Foundation, Arts Council England and the University of London and has appeared at Prague Quadrennial, Being Human Festival, Brighton Fringe – Space to Dance Award Nomination, Living Record Festival, Open Air Program, and Zero Point Festival, as well as venues in the UK, Czech Republic, Italy and Greece. She also collaborates with Depresivní dětí touží pro peníze (Happy End in Hotel Chateau Switzerland), The Counter Institute and Prague’s Pink Bus platform. Becka holds a PhD in Theatre & Performance from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MA in Theatre from Villanova University. She translates from Czech to English and collaborates regularly with the Czech Arts and Theatre Institute on international projects and publications. Her research has been published in The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies, Performance Research and Dance, and Theatre and Performance Training. In a previous life, Becka worked in higher education, where her teaching explored the intersection of movement practices with writing and visual art in the studio, a way of working that she continues to develop and share. Becka’s work is guided by equal amounts of intuition and rigour and a desire to embrace complexity. 

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Texty autora

Columns 19. 6. 2024 – Becka McFadden

Art Isn’t the Olympics

For years, I have made no secret of the fact that I dislike the identification of artists by nation of origin on posters and promotional materials. I get that certain funding applications demand international participation.