Encounters with Czechs on the Move
Matti Linnavuori*
HI PerformanCZ Visitors’ Programme in Prague and Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic, 11 to 16 October, 2025.
In existence since 2018, HI PerformanCZ is a programme for theatre professionals to gain insights and acquaintances in Czech performing arts. Czech artists give open-minded talks and engage in discussions with the less-than-festival-size group of foreigners. Ten visitors travel easily both in a metro train and a minibus, and do not stray during guided walks, not even in the grand staircases of the State Opera.
Most of the selected eight productions favoured movement over word. The shows employed a choreographer or were directed by one. This meant that performers, be they actors, dancers, musicians, acrobats or circus artists, were able to interchange tasks. Movement was their natural-like characteristic, something that the body just produces, and no matter what their original job description was, Czech performers executed all tasks with grace.
Nature Lovers
Wandervogel presents scenes from the life of Heinz Rutha (1897-1937). One hundred years ago, the “wandering birds” was a nationalistic movement meant to encourage an outdoors lifestyle, aimed at Sudeten-German youths. Rutha was passionate about the mountains, about recitations of poetry around the bonfire, and about the company of young men He committed suicide in a Czech prison, suspected of having had sex with men.
Jan Mocek directed Wandervogel (2024) for SixHouses production platform. He co-created it with the actors Tomáš Janypka, Philipp Schenker, Matĕj Šumbera, Arseniy Mikhaylov and Václav Nĕmec. The factual basis comes from historian Mark Cornwall’s book The Devil’s Wall (2012).
The piece tells two stories and ties them together with a modern sensibility, which actually grows into the show’s third storyline. The show looks back on history with a charming oblique ambiguity, to underline the fact that history fluctuates as its interpretations keep varying. Rutha’s posthumous reputation is a prime example: he is perceived as a German Nazi, when in fact he was a Sudeten-nationalist. Much of this delicious ambiguity comes from Philipp Schenker’s acting, first as a leader of young boys, and later as the mature Rutha.
Homosexuality captured the airspace in the post-show discussion, perhaps because the foreigners present were less familiar with Sudeten issues. Sexual relations amongst men were illegal in Rutha’s time, and now discrimination against sexual and other minorities appears to be on the rise. There are improvised sequences in the show, where the actors reveal occurrences from their private lives: this eliminates the distance between history and today to make past fates and fortunes tangible.
The four younger actors are naked or semi-naked much of their stage time, but act as if they were not aware of this. The paradisiac innocence is contrasted by Jan Mocek’s set design, which more than hints that Nature has not benefitted from the advances of its lovers. The actors carry leafless and needleless trees around the stage; they hear birdsong, but in their hands they hold stuffed non-migratory birds.
The ending with the looming trial is a bit hasty and straightforwardly grim.
Gulliver’s Intellectualism
Miřenka Čechová directed with Petr Boháč the latter’s adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels for their Spitfire Company as a co-production with Prague ABC City Theatre (2025). There are seven actors/puppeteers and three live musicians on the stage. A father sits in a wheelchair, most probably because of a war injury. He reads a bedtime story to his impatient son, a puppet, about Gulliver, and scenes from the story come alive. The absent mother is working at the frontline.
The set by Lucia Škandíková and Kateřina Jirmanová looks like brown cardboard boxes. In the real world this is ecological, and within the play it expresses life’s fragility: the second half takes place in a bomb shelter. The shelter is situated as far back on the stage as possible, which distances viewers from the characters, but is necessary to make room for the floating island of Laputa, a constantly tilting platform, where masked mathematicians try to maintain their balance.
The first half in the land of the Lilliput is truly inventive theatre, the second may just stretch its intellectual level too high, at least for me—the hundreds of schoolchildren watching may well disagree. In the first half, the father in cardboard-colour clothes keeps breaking into song (music by Jan Kučera). The Lilliput in their militaristic fervour are made to look comical in their earnestness; in the second half, the show itself takes on features of an earnest statement.
Frankenstein’s Camera
Jakub Maksymov, Lenka Dombrovská and Marta Hermannová adapted Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for three actors and two live musicians. Maksymov also directed the piece, which premiered in 2024 at Komedie Theatre in Prague.
Luboš Hrabec supervised the camera work and vow-how: instead of the much too fashionable close-ups to milk actors’ emotions, the camera focused on the objects, which the scientist Frankenstein employed to stop his wife from having repeated miscarriages, and after this failed, to create an ersatz family member. Paradoxically, the camera’s close-ups of surgical instruments translated Frankenstein’s despair into a palpable reality.
Soul Haze
Mystical Self (2024) is a one-hour dance piece for six dancers/performers, choreographed and directed by Mozambique-born, Berlin-based Edivaldo Ernesto as a co-production for Lenka Vagnerová & Company and Prague City Theatre.
Bodies jerking, convulsing and cramping on the floor. Not spasmodically, but in repeated series of movement, as if possessed by a conscious spirit, and theatre smoke rising from their very bodies—how do they manage it technically! More importantly, is it their soul-haze taking leave of the body? Jan Hugo Hejzlar’s lighting design never reaches their faces in the beginning, until one man walks with stiff steps on the stage holding a book: is this a history of civilization triumphing over spirit?
Plenty of diagonal running follows, on one’s own and in groups of varying size, as well as combat gestures. Occasionally they cast a glance upwards, perhaps defying a god or the world spirit, which toward the end returns in the shape of theatre smoke and descends on the dancers, forcing them from standing positions to lying on the floor. All the time Ivan Acher’s metallic, jarring music resembles human breathing and suggests that the Creation has been tilted out of its balance, like there’s grease missing from the Earth’s axial.
But this is not the end of the world. After everything else has disappeared, in complete darkness, there still are wildly spinning cords, red as the colour of intestines. Or are they sparks, which could create the world anew, in the minds of us spectators, after the show is over? A very physically depicted history of mankind, which serves us our share of responsibility.
As visiting critics, we benefitted from artists giving pre-show talks: understanding the local context may save from naïve misinterpretations, but it may also tempt to a sympathetic understanding of intentions, even when we do not see them realized on the stage. It takes a courageous artist to engage in post-show discussions, where the artist may become exposed to criticism, sometimes unwanted or irrelevant from their viewpoint; on all three occasions given to us we suggested cutting the show’s duration.
HI PerformanCZ was organised by the Czech Cultural Institute and its PerformCzech Department, KULT Festival, Public Hall Hraničář in Ústí nad Labem, DOX Centre and Cultural Station Galaxie.
*Matti Linnavuori wrote theatre criticism between 1978 and 2013 for various newspapers and weeklies in his native Finland. In 1985, he worked for the BBC World Service in London. Since 1998, he has presented papers at numerous IATC events. In the 2000s, he wrote for Teatra Vestnesis in Latvia. Since 1992, he has written and directed several radio plays for YLE the Finnish Broadcasting Company. In 2016, his play Ta mig till er ledare (Take me to your Leader) ran at Lilla Teatern in Helsinki.
Copyright © 2025 Matti Linnavuori
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #32, December 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
