Music: Antonín Dvořák
Choreography: Pavel Šmok
Staging: Kateřina Dedková – Franková
Staging assistant: Igor Vejsada
Costumes: Petra Lebdušková based on original designs by Věra Mejtová
Set design: Petra Lebdušková based on original designs by Milan Čech
Premiere: 31 May 1992
Performing: 12 dancers
Duration: 20 minutes
The Wild Dove is a famous ballad by Karel Jaromír Erben which inspired Antonín Dvořák to write a symphonic poem bearing the same name. He composed it in 1896 in Žďár. A young woman poisons her husband and marries a new, young suitor shortly afterwards. However, her guilty conscience drives her to suffering so unbearable that she commits suicide in the end.
When The Wild Dove was premiered in 1993, Pavel Šmok commented: “In his Wild Dove, Dvořák does not follow Erben’s ballad in a literal way. And neither does my dancing rendition. It does not narrate the story in a linear manner. I decided for a ‘theatre in theatre’ form and set the story in the environment of a weird carnival procession: the story is kind of changing into the widow’s nightmare and the gentle dove into a death’s-head hawkmoth.”