Evald Schorm and Jan Dušek – Harmony of Opposites. Fragments of Creation of Scenographer Jan Dušek with Director Evald Schorm
Евалд Шорм и Ян Душек – Хармония на противоположностите. Фрагменти на творческото сътрудничество на сценографа Ян Душек с режисьора Евалд Шорм

Summary/Abstract: The collaboration between director Evald Schorm and stage designer Jan Dušek dates back to the critical period of the 1970s and 1980s, which in former Czechoslovakia became known as normalization. Normalization meant that the situation after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and the subsequent occupation would return the relaxed atmosphere of the communist regime to an unfree, rigid form. As a result of the purges that took place after 1968, many citizens who did not agree with the occupation could not practice their original profession. One of them was the film director Evald Schorm (1931–1988) who was forbidden to make films for a long time but was able to work in the theatre. In 1976 he began working at the Theatre on the Balustrade in Prague and created a total of 13 productions there until 1987. The vast majority of them were performed in collaboration with the scenographer Jan Dušek (1942), a leading representative of the peak phase of Czechoslovak action scenography. The study will focus mainly on two of them, productions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1978) and Macbeth (1981), which are intrinsically related to each other, in their interpretation, and through which both creators expressed themselves very succinctly on the socio-political situation. The study will describe how the seemingly different personalities of these creators managed to create a harmonious creative duo whose joint works established a distinctive style in their time and resonate in the memories of the audiences and experts of the time to this day for their courage, distinctive poetics, and unity of all production components.

• Details
• Contents