Pet­rus Paulus, Hana & Thomasbegins as a guided tour, a lec­ture on a single work: The Mar­tyr­dom of Saint Thomasby the Flem­ish paint­er Pet­rus Paulus Rubens, a paint­ing cur­rently on dis­play at the Schwar­zen­berg Palace in the Nation­al Gal­lery Prague.

Little by little, the lec­turer is absorbed by the flow of her own words and trans­formed by the images she names, until she her­self becomes spir­als, curves, ecstas­ies and affects. This is Deleuze’s The Fold, which defines the Baroque not as a style or an era but as a func­tion that folds, one that “car­ries the fold to infinity.”

The soul is insep­ar­able from the organ­ic body. It is caught in the body’s folds: it rises as a ration­al spir­it, or grows heavy, dazed with­in mat­ter, and falls back, sink­ing down.

Music­ally, the text wraps around itself to cre­ate a dynam­ic vortex.

Pet­rus Paulus, Hana & Thomasis a cho­reo­graph­ic piece that can go any­where. It settles into museums, gal­ler­ies, parks, school­yards, gym­nas­i­ums and her­it­age sites, and it speaks to all audi­ences. Its short run­ning time allows it to be per­formed twice a day.

Invited in 2025 by SE.S.TA and the Nation­al Gal­lery Prague to cre­ate A Fancy, a series of per­form­ances for three cho­reo­graph­ers and a com­munity of Prague res­id­ents, Alban Richard met Hana Polanska.

Togeth­er they stud­ied Rubens’s The Mar­tyr­dom of Saint Thomasand, work­ing around the fun­da­ment­als of the Baroque with the invalu­able help of cur­at­or Andrea Steck­er­ova, they cre­ated a fif­teen-minute per­form­ance. The desire to take this encounter and this research fur­ther has now giv­en rise to Pet­rus Paulus, Hana & Thomas.