FOR MY COUNTRY
Motto I – Prologue
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
George Orwell
Even though my latest production comprises two parts that are different and mutually contrasting, and they seem to share little in common, the opposite is true.
Over the last few years, humanity has been facing a sharp rise in harmful and dangerous phenomena, literal venoms, that are bringing us material and moral poisoning and destruction. Under a mask of false humanism, one can find here a thoroughly inhumane system and trend. In fact, they work against humans, their individuality, their rights and freedoms – against life itself.
Even though this performance largely reflects my personal response to certain such “venoms,” in the sense of confrontation and drawing lines, my aim is definitely not to present a sermon or demonstration.
What’s presented here is theater, and thus the symbolic and metaphorical level. What’s presented are allusions and images, and thus a work that speaks its own distinctive language – which can perhaps make its testimony all the more intense.
Premiere: October 20, 2024, Vinohrady Theatre
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 minutes
“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.”
Fragment 24
Music: Bedřich Smetana
Choreography: Petr Zuska
Stage design and costumes: Pavel Knolle and Petr Zuska
Lighting design: Petr Zuska and Tomáš Průcha
Projection: Viktor Svidró
Performing: Ten soloists of the Prague Chamber Ballet and the Ballet Prague Junior
Length: 30 minutes
My Country is a cycle of six symphonic poems by the renowned Czech composer Bedřich Smetana, rooted in his love for his homeland. It is a celebration of the beauties of Czech nature, major national legends, and in part actual historical events as well.
But as is hinted by my production’s name itself, the aim here is not to go through Smetana’s entire work. My dramaturgy here only presents the parts for Vyšehrad (The High Castle), Vltava (The Moldau), and, presented in a small combination, Tábor and Blaník. In other words, 2 complete movements and 2 more largely compressed, i.e., 4. This brings us back to “24,” which is also a reference to the composer’s year of birth – 1824 – precisely two centuries ago.
Smetana’s work was composed during the Czech National Revival: in an era that brought, among other things, efforts to increase national consciousness and self-determination. And Smetana felt this deep in his heart.
In our current age of advancing and all-pervading globalism, when many of these values are forgotten or relativized, when there is a clearly evident effort to fundamentally constrain national identities and states’ sovereignties in order to erase individual cultures’ historical memory, it is all the more necessary to return to these roots.
And to do so through more than just commemorating anniversaries and bowing to stone busts. This performance is all about tying in, about the principles and inner motivation of Smetana and other great names of the era, with whom we should come face to face through the artistic language of today, thereby keeping them alive…
My Country was composed almost in its entirety in the period in which Smetana was already entirely deaf. During the several preceding years, as the head of the Provisional Theater, he faced severe societal criticism, and often personal attacks as well. As he was pushed to his mental and physical limits, the last vestiges of his hearing abandoned him as well. Smetana withdrew from public life into his internal, quiet, yet creative world. It was there that the notes and tones of one of the most significant opuses in Czech musical history arose…
Smetana was given by the people of “his fatherland” several bitter chalices to drink. But behind the dignified pomposity of The High Castle along with that wise oracle, the princess Libuše, her sacred wedding with Přemysl the Ploughman, all the pagan rituals connected with this, the playfulness of the sources flowing together into the mighty River Moldau…, the choral music ringing through Hussite Tábor, and St. Wenceslas’ army riding out from Blaník to aid the nation… behind all of these stories, perhaps ineffable or even unbelievable today, there stands on the one hand the powerful archetype of national consciousness that is the Czech symbolic DNA, yet on the other also the “negligible” and fully authentic personal story of the artist – a man of flesh and blood.
All this is symbolism informing us that we need to perceive our roots, our culture, and our distinctiveness, without regard to our internal contentions, enmities, and all kinds of contemporary social “consensuses” and the horrors they often bring. And that from time to time in history, we all have to speak our words loudly enough, and if necessary, fight for them too…
We can find many examples among historical figures. We owe a debt to them that reaches both into the past and, above all, into the future, for our descendants and future generations.
Motto II – Epilogue
“Why hate one another? We stand together, carried along by the same planet, the crew of a single ship. If it is good that civilisations compete to promote new syntheses, it is monstrous that they devour one another.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
In Prague, June 19, 2024
Petr Zuska