Brnianske HaDivadlo has a rich history behind it. It was founded in 1974 in Prostějov, in 1985 it moved to Brno, where it became fully professional and such notable directors as Arnošt Goldflam or JA Pitínský passed through it. Compared to classical repertory scenes, the work of HaDivadl is much more based on the author's approach of directors and actors. The current artistic director of the theater is a native of Bratislava, director Ivan Buraj.
The theater is experiencing difficult times during the corona virus pandemic. How does HaDivadlo deal with this situation?
These are difficult times for culture, but it is probably important to add in one breath that not only for culture. As for HaDivadl, we managed the first spring shock quite well. As a stage set up by the city, we have a certain contribution, which, using radical cost-saving measures, was enough to cover the basic running of the theater. But what is more distressing is the autumn decrease in viewers, which we understand in this uncertain situation. After all, even we at HaDivadle did not consider playing in the October increase in the number of sick people to be responsible, not only towards the audience, but also in relation to our older members of the ensemble. That's why we, as the only theater in the republic, stopped playing at our own discretion even before the government measures. The question is how the budgets of cultural institutions will turn out for 2021 and whether, when returning to "normal", pragmatic views that will primarily subsidize the economy and everything else: culture, education, healthcare, the fight against the climate crisis will not prevail. From my point of view, it would be a fatal continuation of the coarsening of our society and all the evils of short-sighted politics that have been present in our country until now.
In 2012, he completed directing studies at Brno's JAMU and in 2015 he became the artistic director of HaDivadl, which, together with the Goose on a String Theater and the Theater at the Table, is one of the three main pillars of the Center for Experimental Theatre. How does a young, relatively recent school graduate manage to make such a significant leap in his theater career?
Just a minor correction, the Center for Experimental Theater underwent restructuring last season, and František Derfler, who ran Divadlo u stolu, was succeeded by Matyáš Dlab, who started the activity of the Terén platform within CED. Terén is not an ensemble theater, but a dramaturgical platform, orienting as a feeler of our institution to cross-border multi-species projects on the border between theater, visual arts, and experimental music. Interesting for the context of your magazine is the scope of this platform, which understands the Czech-Slovak cultural space as its basic field of operation and initiates many projects in cooperation with Slovak creators. Let's mention as an example for all their collaborations with Andrej Kalinka and his group Med a prach. But back to your question, I don't know how it happened, maybe it's a bit of luck. The fact that there is a generational change in cultural institutions. I'm a bit shocked myself that it all worked out.
Which titles did you manage to study in your five years as artistic director at HaDivadl, and do you like one of your productions the most?
For me, I consider the adaptation of Kafka's Castle to be an important title, which opened the way for me to understand theatrical adaptation, not as something passive in the sense of translation, in which the author of the adaptation takes dialogues from the novel, basic situations and that's it, but as an answer to the question of what is the meaning of the work and why this work should take place in the theater, what will it bring new to it. Also important for me was the line of productions of today's classic texts of extreme realism by Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, Ibsen's Eyolf, or Gorky Malomeštiaki, in which I tried to interpret realism differently than just as a state of reality, its description, I tried to see in it a struggle for reality. These texts created at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries have something very contemporary in them, they describe a time when the old no longer applies and the new has not yet arrived. They therefore take place in times of loss of generally shared values, where each of the characters lives as if in their own realism, and the deeper sense of realism thus becomes the collision of realities and not the image of one static reality. Part of such a world is a crisis of communication, the inability to see the other, but also a kind of naked experience of being that is not covered by any ideology or religion that could be referred to without a trace. Such a horizon can have a depressing effect on someone, but I also see in it a certain fragility of what it means to be human and an opportunity for understanding, because we all live in the same uncertainty and fumbling. It is also interesting for me that, figuratively speaking, I inherited the avant-garde theater and I perceive my role in connection with the creation of new impulses for contemporary theater, but also as a generational question, to what extent and in what ways today's theater can and must be new. It has to be loud and honest and relate to the present, but I don't know if it is our duty to constantly innovate and if we should always look for new forms. I am afraid that with such a formalistic approach, where novelty is the highest quality, another quality may be endangered: the belief that theater is a tool of communication and not a tool for fulfilling obligations towards the ideology of growth and progress. And just like in other contemporary art forms, creators are looking for ways to apply ecological tools of reuse, I also find joy in deepening and reinterpreting older forms and texts without the imperative to necessarily be new and fashionable. I believe that greater simplicity and economy will be the provocation of the future.
What new titles can the audience look forward to in the 2020/21 theater season? That is, assuming that the situation allows us to go to the theater at all.
We opened the season in the short interval when it was possible to play with the premiere of the production, which was supposed to take place in March. Its name is Perception and it is a compilation of texts by Georges Perec The sleeping man, László Krásznahorkaia From the North a mountain, from the South a lake, from the West a road, from the East a river, to which we attributed dialogues with Bohdan Karásk (readers may know him as the author of the film Karel, me and you). Our production deals with the idea of a mineral society and explores the character of an actor who has decided to stop going to work and participate in social life and is alone at home. It is ironic that in March, the rehearsal, when we put together the form of the production for the first time and played it, was interrupted by the information that the theaters were closing, and so we began to live the production and its theme. We returned to it at the end of August, premiered it at the beginning of September and returned again to the current isolation... Another premiere of our season exploring the concept of "Adaptation" is the author's interpretation of Rastislav Ballek, who, together with our playwright Matěj Nytra, adapted Herman Melville's famous novel Moby Dick. We are also planning to present an adaptation of Marlen Haushofer's cult novel The Wall directed by Kamila Polívková and the last project should be an author's project by experimenter Jiří Adámek entitled The performance is in progress throughout the performance.
And what about Slovakia? Do you also cooperate with Slovak theaters?
I don't cooperate. And I would like to add that unfortunately. I have the impression that the cooperation system is very schematic for now. There are well-established creators who function as good export brands, Slovak audiences feel that they are getting an idea of what is happening in the Czech theater, the dramaturgs of the theaters are satisfied and no one has too much need to change or update anything. Contemporary Czech and Slovak theater is, I'm afraid, very conservative. The main criteria for many dramaturgical decisions are attendance and sales tables. Quantitative data and the logic of numbers prevails over real research and the associated risk. Which is understandable in a situation where the founders of many theaters are not even interested in anything other than the mentioned tables. Honor the exceptions.
For the production Prince Homburský, he received the Jury Prize at the International Festival of Theater Schools ISTROPOLITAN, for Uncle Vana he was nominated for the Theater Newspaper Award, and for Námesačník he won the Project of the Year award at the Next Wave festival. For Malomeštiaki, he received the Theater Newspaper Award for directing. How much weight do you attach to these awards?
Of course I appreciate them. All the more so because I created all the mentioned projects in Brno and the mentioned prices are decided by the committees of theater critics in Prague, which may seem like an insignificant detail, but not everyone realizes that even something as cloudy as the price for a theater has its own reality and that is the poor state of culture funding, when even worse than the theaters themselves are the theater critics, who think twice about every trip from Prague to Brno. And considering how financially valued the reviews are, I'm not even surprised. In the theater community, in connection with the awards, there was sometimes talk about a certain Prague-centricism, which is hopefully being dismantled recently, and in that discussion I had the feeling that the critics were wronged when they talked about their lack of interest in theaters outside of Prague as some kind of prejudice. Perceiving the circumstances of their work, I realize more and more that it is rather a desperate state of financing, when even the most prominent reviewers have to consider every trip outside of Prague in relation to the domestic budget. The culture in our region was thrown to the free market after the gentle revolution and what remained publicly funded is cowering in the corner and even in the current situation we exist in a defensive reflex knowing that we are the first sector to be cut. In short, culture has long been understood as a bonus, as something extra, and this can have fatal consequences for the state of democracy and the quality of our society in general. From the outside, it seems that there is a culture, everything is running, but often it is just a kind of Potemkin village, whose main interest is to show external legitimacy. In an effort not to lose even more than we have so far, many segments of culture exist in permanent fear of extinction, and the main purpose of culture - quality reflection of society and the conditions of being, as well as the courage to experiment - is disappearing.
It was a long time ago, but as a student you had the opportunity to complete an internship at the National Theater in Prague, with the famous American director Robert Wilson, during the production of Karel Čapek's Vec Makropulos. How was the collaboration with this world-famous and original director?
My task was to record on camera the course of the tests for internal needs. So I was perhaps the last of the last assistants, in quite a large hierarchy of Robert Wilson's assistants. But trying it was kind of inversely inspiring for me. I realized with him what kind of theater I don't want to do. At that time, Wilson's poetics already represented a very aesthetic approach, when it was mainly about mastering the visual form: scenography, lights, make-up, costumes, in short, it was a very cold theater, even if Robert Wilson's older productions are still defining for me. I realized while trying that I don't want to do theater for a set of photos and a good trailer, but for a strong and deep contact with a person. Theater doesn't have to be beautiful, it has to be honest and consistent.
Does the artistic director have any other interests besides theater? Do you manage to do anything else in your free time?
It is true that this work, if one wants to do it fully, is very absorbing and there is not much time left for other things. I bought a projector about a year ago, so I'm fully into my passion for film and I try to see at least four good films a week. But I still like the days when I close the curtains and see more movies in a row. I love watching movies in broader contexts, like identifying a director and seeing everything they've done chronologically. But I also like to go to the forest. Lately I have a strategy: I like to follow a tourist sign and then turn outside. My friends and I call it intuitive tourism.
How often do you get home to Bratislava? Or do you already consider Brno your home?
I have to admit that I think about this question every time I visit Bratislava, which, unfortunately, since I am the artistic director of HaDivadl, I don't manage to do it as often as I would like. I'm probably more at home in Brno. Bratislava has changed tremendously in the last ten years. An awful lot of administrative buildings have grown up there, Mlynské Nivy, as I remember them, Cvernovka, PKO, where I used to go to LUDUS... have disappeared, but these feelings are difficult to define, they are difficult to represent in full tones, they are more like quarter tones - they tremble sa - and so there is still a kind of inner Bratislava in me, which I understand as my home. And when it's autumn, it's almost dark and I'm somewhere around Kozej, or when spring wakes up and I see the Danube, or I'm standing on Mileticka, it occurs to me that I can make myself at home in Brno as much as I want, but I'll be a Bratislava resident for the rest of my life .
Why does one actually decide to become a theater director and what does your work mean to you?
In my opinion, it's ideal when a person doesn't even decide to do it, when he simply knows that he doesn't want to do anything else and can't do anything else, and that's the answer to your question. A bit cheesy, but whatever. My work is my life, it is who I am.
The interview was prepared by: Vladimír Dubeň