The creative duo of Jozef Fruček, a Slovak-born choreographer and performer, and the Greek dancer and choreographer Linda Kapetanea, need no introduction to regular visitors to the TANEC PRAHA festival. The name Rootless Root Company resonates across Europe. Their connection with the Czech landscape has deep roots – as far back as 2007, they collaborated with Lenka Ottová’s DOT504 company on the production Holdin’ Fast, which also featured Lenka Vagnerová, who was only just beginning to form ideas in her mind about her own company. The physically raw, energetic dance created by this Slovak-Greek duo, always seeking to convey a profound message, certainly inspired her on her own journey. Jozef and Linda remain an active, experienced duo who premiered their work Europium at TANCI PRAHA ten years ago. This year, they brought their latest duet from 2025, entitled Mountain.
Rootless Root Company on the borderline between life and death. The raw narrative is underscored by music and screams
The performance Mountain took place at Jatka78 as part of TANEC PRAHA festival. In it, Jozef Fruček and Linda Kapetanea explore the themes of death and the loss of a loved one. What changes, what remains of us? After all, we don’t want to be forgotten…
On a hot June day, the raw space of Jatka78 was consecrated to a ritual. On the dimmed stage, we watch a couple – a man and a woman – at the outset. The woman’s body is limp, rigid. , we witness a rite of passage, in which the woman’s life has run its course and the man accompanies her on her journey from this world. The sombre, deep tones of the pulsating music carry the tension of the entire opening.
The man holds the woman’s body, standing with it on an imaginary catafalque and manoeuvring it, with a recurring urge to cast it aside. The woman slumps limply down the stairs, rolls across the floor, only to gradually come to life and slowly begin her dance of death. Jozef Fruček is the narrator, the driving force behind the action, but he is not the main protagonist. That role belongs to her, Linda Kapetanea, half in a trance, half resigned to the snares of death, and yet still full of energy.
Rootless Root offer us images through which we can fully develop our own thoughts and ideas. It is often said that death is part of life. But let us pause to consider this premise – how can it be part of life when it is its very opposite? How, exactly, do we become aware of our own mortality? Perhaps it is precisely when confronted with a dying person, in that raw, face-to-face encounter with the dying, that we realise our existence is finite.
The narrator gradually leaves the deceased and retreats to the edge of the stage, where he chants a narrative into the microphone that is not always easy to decipher, but which speaks to us through its intensity. We catch only fragments – ‘I will not forget you’. Is this not our greatest fear? Is the fear of death rooted in the fact that nothing will remain of us, that those left behind will forget us? Will the world change when we are gone? What if it doesn’t?
The sound design of the performance is very intense; Vassilis Mantzoukis’s musical arrangement is on a par with the gloomiest visions of ritual music, which clashes further with Jozef Fruček’s cries. His deceased partner responds with the energy of her final dance; her body trembles, shakes and collapses under the weight of excessive energy, only to freeze in a moment of stillness a moment later.
RootlessRoot are adept at working with materials that enhance the raw feel of the production. Yellow sand appears on the floor, dispersing into clouds of dust as the dancers’ feet strike the ground, sending it soaring into the air. The costume reinforces the ritualistic nature of the whole performance – Kapetanea wears a large, ornately embroidered coat like a shroud, from which she eventually breaks free to dance in nothing but a black skirt and a tight-fitting top.
Occasionally, the partnership between the performers comes to the fore, but I do not perceive the emphasis on it as particularly strong. Both characters are already from different worlds; they cannot be connected. Fruček remains on the periphery, both on stage and metaphorically – the departing woman is already elsewhere. We are accustomed to the intensity of the experience and the total commitment of this duo, and both performers are completely immersed in what they are doing.
A powerful image is Fruček’s final manipulation of the thin rods, a large number of which he gathers, sifts through and divides into sections, only to throw them into the centre of the stage at the end. They all stick into the ground in various ways, forming an installation around the dying body of his partner.
The performance offers powerful imagery, and it is entirely up to us whether it sends us on our own introspective journey, prompting us to reflect on whether we have ever truly encountered death on a deep, personal level and how that has affected us. There are many ways to leave this world, and many of them are not ritualistic in this way. On the contrary, they are ordinary, with no drums beating in the background. In our minds, however, they can be, and RootlessRoot offer a way to delve into this subject and perhaps discover something we did not know, whether about ourselves or about death itself.
Written following the performance on 19 June 2026, TANEC PRAHA, Jatka78.
Mountain
Concept, choreography: Linda Kapetanea, Jozef Fruček
Music arrangement: Vassilis Mantzoukis Costumes: Eirini Georgakila
Lighting design: Perikles Mathiellis
Sound technician: Christos Parapagidis
Concept development: Ioanna Nasiopoulou
Video: Blaec Cinematography
Trailer: Albert Vidal / Vertex Comunicacio
Photography: Elina Giounanli
Performers: Linda Kapetanea, Jozef Fruček
Premiere: 19 June 2025, Athens, Greece