PATHS OF SLOVAK DRAMATIC ART

• Authors: Matasik A.
• Languages of publication: SK

Abstracts

EN

The study is a part of a prepared monography on two great generations of the Slovak dramatic actors. The founders of the Slovak professional theatre were drawing experience mainly from Czech colleagues who in 1920 had started in Bratislava and in the Slovak countryside performing under the title the Slovak National Theatre. Borodac was aiming at professionalisation of the Slovak theatre slowly and systemically. Since 1921, when he saw the staging MCHAT, he starts mentioning Stanislavski as his great model, but the reality in a single professional theatre in Slovakia was completely different. The best Slovak amateur actors were reacting with restrain and denial towards the offers placed by the rural Czech theatrical company, and spectacular background of Slovak stagings was in multinational Bratislava very narrow. That is why not even the most successful pieces did not have a chance to reach a higher number of reruns. He did not have actors at disposal who could have communicated in Slovak without any difficulty. At the break of fifties and sixties, graduates from the Musical and Dramatic Academy (originated as a initiative of Borodac in 1925, since 1941 the State Conservatory) and the first graduates from the University of Fine Arts (originated in 1949) formed a basis of the second, in full meaning of the word professional generation of the Slovak theatrical artists. Their situation was diametrally else. Above all, the theatre did not need to struggle to achieve acknowledgement as an independent artistic genre. This fight for theatre was thanks to struggling and victory of interwar avant-gardes over. Theatre troupes were not performing on the basis of small trade enterprising, but have become art institutions subsidized by the state. In fifties a first massive generation of modern Slovak Bratislavian theatre goers was formed. In the Slovak theatre-historical sources a contrast view can be found: Borodac is indicated as a dramatic realist, Jamnicky as a creator of a stylized theatre. It would be more precise to say that Borodac began with descriptive realism in combination with actor's routine and cliché. He gradually succeeded to work his way out to aesthetics, which is determined as psychological realism. Jan Jamnicky in his early director's times experimented in spirit of what he knew about discharge of interwar dramatic avant garde and quickly realized that too much of miniature, aids and other 'crutches' are obstructing the actor. Borodac's interest was to invoke an illusion of an actual space, as opposed to Jamnicky who is searching for an architecture of the theatrical space, together with Emil Bellus is preparing his stagings not anymore like 'animated' pictures, but in arranging scenes he is looking for a way to support actor's creativity and earn the most possible strong effect on a spectator.

Keywords

EN

BORODAC JAN; JAMNICKY JAN; SLOVAK DRAMATIC ART HISTORY; SLOVAK NATIONAL THEATRE

Discipline

• ARTS_&_ARCHITECTURE: ARTS & ARCHITECTURE

• Publisher: Institute of Theatre and Arts, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Slovenské divadlo (Slovak Theatre)
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 56
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 12-20
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Matasik A.

• A. Matasik, Kabinet divadla a filmu SAV, Dubravska cesta 9, 841 04 Bratislava, Slovak Republic

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

08SKAAAA04658906