The "dancing on nails and breathing fire" that Rahis Barti, founder of the Dhoad Gypsies of Rajasthan, promises in the group's Prague debut performance may not be exactly what the National Theater was originally built for. But the institution's third annual "Open Arms" festival is just that — an opportunity for groups outside the normal scope of classical operas, drama and music to perform on some of the country's most prestigious stages.

This year's lineup includes musicians singing in the endangered Occitan language, a theater piece for the hearing-impaired, a theater troupe from Vienna's centuries-old Czech community and Rajasthan's Dhoad Gypsies. The festival's sliding-scale ticket prices are also intended to reach out to students, the elderly and the disabled as an invitation to see diverse world-class performances.

Opening the festival Feb. 3, the Marseilles, France-based group LoCor de la Plana will stomp and sing in an a cappella polyphony style that Lo Cor's director Manu Théron says "is based on singing from the Alps and Pyrenees, but has lots of things in common with Bulgarian and Corsican polyphony." To spice this up a bit, Théron adds, "Since we live in Marseilles, we use the North African bendir [flat drum]." The songs are sung in the ancient romance language Occitan, which Théron says "was once the preferred language of court poetry — even King Richard the Lion-Hearted wrote love poetry in Occitan." Still spoken in southern France, northern Spain and parts of Italy, Occitan is considered an endangered language whose preservation is disputed by the French government but supported by the European Union.

On Feb. 4, Vienna's Czech-speaking Vlastenecká Omladina theater group will be performing Concert, a romantic comedy dedicated to Richard Strauss. "Vienna was the second-largest Czech [-speaking] city during the [Austro-Hungarian] monarchy days," says company director Petra Pěšková. With piano music and rehearsals proceeding noisily in the background, Pěšková cheerfully boasts, "Our group is one of the oldest ongoing Czech theater groups." In fact, Vlastenecká Omladina was founded only three years after the National Theater opened in Prague in 1881.

The following night, another stage offering: The Czech Republic's Divadlo Nablízko will perform a special version of William Saroyan's Tracy's Tiger, interpreted for the hearing-impaired with deaf actors performing in sign language side by side with their speaking counterparts.

The Dhoad Gypsies ride into town Feb. 8 looking to put smiles on people's faces. "Our aim is to make human hearts happy," says Rahis. "When they are happy, this is our [way of] worship."

The band has experience on Continental stages — "five years of performing in Europe, including performing at the Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, in 2004," according to Rahis, who has found that his group's music is close to that of European Roma. "The rhythmic power is similar to our own. The way of singing, the way of expressing, the point of view, the way of viewing life, songs ... everything."