Season 50: Horizons

Is it experiencing the hidden perversity of every power that, over time, becomes a regime of control and maintenance of the privileges of a select few? Is it sharing the consciousness of the unknowability and eternal openness of the world? Is it accepting one's own strangeness and strangeness as an opportunity to understand others and the unknown in them? Is it wonder at the uncanny closeness of great history and everyday life, and the hunch that every little act shakes the world? Is it a search for intimacy in a temporary community of people strayed into the theatre with the need to ask without claim to instructive and simplistic answers? Fifty years of turning personal feelings into collective experiences? Fascination with exploring our place in the world? Shared restlessness as the starting point of every existence? Maybe not.

Let's apply oil to the fire of the tongue. Doubt and cronyism. Weirdness as quality. Staying on the margins and questioning hierarchies. Irregular dramaturgy and the awareness that irregular we all are. Humanity and counterculture. For fifty years, there were ways not to go crazy in a crazy world. Community, friendship, family, debates. Avant-garde with an eternal question mark. Cut!

This year, HadiVadlo will have one more look back. The current artistic leadership, which has been active in the theater since 2015, concludes its work this season in order to convey the possibility of forming the next form of HaDivadlo to new creators and creators and their visions. New horizons reveal new beginnings and possibilities, but in order to pursue them, we must abandon some here and know how to move on.

However, with abandonment, it is always paradoxical. Saying goodbye to HaDivadlo is permeated with the knowledge that it is impossible to say goodbye to him completely after some experienced intensity. It is as if in the labyrinth of his mind a corridor with a fold in which he can forever see Simona Peková in the kitchen of the theatre debating wildly after the performance, the pencil-drawn moustache of Tana Malíková in Čevengur, Marina Maruna or how she thinks about how the rehearsal will begin today on the way from the house in tram number 4. Forever a person living in this fold of consciousness will be in the spirit of writing the manifesto of the next season and wondering if he has grasped the whole point of Miloš Černoušek's joke. It's like leaving the family, it's not quite possible. You are always somewhere together, wherever they are.

Therefore, our final season entitled Horizons will be opened by a production of the text Pera Olov Enquista Night of the Tribads directed by Ivan Buraj, which discusses playwright August Strindberg's breakup with his wife Siri von Essen. One of the main theme lines is the inability to leave the past and old wrongs, in which the characters at the end of their marriage still dwell as if in a haunted cave. Motives such as the eternal return of patriarchy, the cyclical discussion of women's emancipation and the gender score written by society resonate here. It is also a play with institutional therapy and an exploration of the phenomenon of good closure of important stages of our lives, and perhaps a relieved abandonment of the illusion that we have full control over our lives and relationships, as well as their endings.

The second premiere, which brings to the stage for the first time one of the most important Czech novels of the second half of the 20th century, Axe Ludvík Vaculík, directed by former HaDivadlo member Břetislav Rychlík, is understood as an exploration of the dissident past of our theatre. The project will deal with the phenomenon of recapitulation of one's life and that of one's generation through descent to the roots.

The third Prime Minister will be Socrates in Pain directed by Anna Klimešová, who in collaboration with Petr Erbes and Boris Jedinák will open the theme of teachers and pupils as an age-old play of learning and unlearning, taking place on every horizon dividing the old from the new.

At the same time, we did not want to slip into overblown self-attention in our theater, although we believe that every interest in the world and society begins with a sincere revision of oneself. Current events, taking place far and near our borders, are unthinkable. The trials of brutal attacks on the democratic character of Slovak society concern us as well. Their germ is hidden in all democracies, and today these populist tendencies are stirring all over the world. We believe that the steps leading to the disintegration of Slovak culture threaten the very core of the free character of society. Therefore, during our 50th season, in addition to the annual events reflecting the fifty years of HaDivadlo, we will also present a series of hosting of Slovak theatre ensembles, and in the accompanying program we will focus on joint reflections on the dilemmas faced by today's actors in the cultural sphere and strategies of resistance to the brutality of power.

In conclusion, we especially thank you, our viewers, who have been creating HaDivadlo together with us for almost ten years. It is the experiences of togetherness, connectedness, inspiring disagreement, debates after performances, new acquaintances and friendships that are the main thing that remains in our memory besides the productions themselves. Theatre is a community. In a digital, consumerist era, with a great epidemic of loneliness, a message radiates into our consciousness: the future is in cooperation and encounter, with ourselves and with others. This has been our main knowledge in the last ten years at HaDivadle.

All of them!

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