Update 24
Music: Indian, Irish, Moroccan, and Israeli ballads, Bob Dylan, Markéta Dobiášová and Petr Zuska
Choreography: Petr Zuska
Costumes and stage design: Pavel Knolle and Petr Zuska
Lighting design: Petr Zuska and Tomáš Průcha
Performing: Two soloists of the Prague Chamber Ballet
Length: 20 minutesPremiere: October 20, 2024, Vinohrady Theatre
“Update” is simply what it says: an update. The number here should be clear. In 2019 I created a twenty-minute female solo entitled Fo(u)r One. It was thus both “For One” and “Four in One,” built upon four ballads from various parts of the world. I don’t even know how I arrived at it back then, but nonetheless this choreographic miniature ended with a metaphor clearly pointing at militancy and thus the ubiquity of the threat of war among nations and cultures. It is therefore surely no mystery why I chose to stage this piece again right now and develop it by enhancing it with another – male – performer and two more songs.
Firstly Bob Dylan’s incredibly eloquent and harsh 1963 anti-war piece Masters of War. Dylan was 22 years old at the time; his impulse was the United States’ military interventions in other countries and, naturally, the overall tension of the Cold War. In our times when sabers are again rattling wildly and, even in places without actual war, peace is becoming a dirty word, I feel like humanity has no memory for history.
The last song, meanwhile, brings us back home from our “trip around the world.” The investigative journalist Markéta Dobiášová wrote the 2022 poem Thieves of Beauty; I later set it to music. Even though this song is essentially an inspiration and an encouragement for the souls of us all, and unlike the Dylan piece, it is not rising up against anything at first sight, it is imbued with the thorns of defamation, labeling, and discrimination towards all who dare to disagree, or even just take issue with, the one sole “truth.”