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Lively Fringe gigs put Jolly Jumps on the fast track

A promising young Czech performance troupe picks up steam

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
September 5th, 2007 issue

Jolly Jumps

No ... At the Train Station
When: Sunday, Sept. 9, at 7:30
Where: Divadlo V Celetné (Celetná 17, Prague 1–Old Town)
Tickets: 120–180 Kč, available at the venue

The vaudevillian sketch-dance work of Veselé skoky (or the Jolly Jumps, as they call themselves in English), has been winning over non-Czech audiences for the past two years at the Prague Fringe Festival. The comic Skoky hoofers packed the Fringe tent nightly with their small-scale, high-powered performances.
Though the company has been getting some attention in the surrounding countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the Fringe gigs have brought them to the attention of the United Kingdom. On the heels of this year’s Prague Fringe, Veselé skoky was invited to perform at the Brighton Fringe Festival in May, where they made a very nice splash in two different venues, as well as on various streets and squares of the seaside city. So successful were they, in fact, that they will be embarking upon a larger UK tour next year, complete with a stop at the Mecca of fringes — Edinburgh.
This Sunday, the troupe is back on home ground at Theater Celetná with a performance of their No … At the Train Station, the piece that’s won them the most acclaim. It is a lighthearted riff on Anna Karenina, where the tragic heroine arrives at the fated train station only to find herself dancing instead of diving under trains.
Veselé skoky was formed in 2003 by choreographer and instructor Martin Pacek and two of his DAMU colleagues, Jana Vašáková and Miroslav Hanuš. After casting a young, enthusiastic group of performers, the company set about creating two performance pieces: No … At the Train Station and Flathead!
The two attempts I made to see Veselé skoky at the Prague Fringe were defeated by canceled performances due to injuries, so it was only last week that I was finally able to catch the troupe at Theater Celetná, where they were staging Flathead!
The word-of-mouth proved to be fairly accurate. Veselé skoky is an undeniably talented group of young performers who know how to burn up a stage with wit, charm and wild physicality. Flathead! was very youthful, in all senses of the word — natural physical plasticity and invention occasionally packaged in moments of high-schoolish skit.
Flathead!, interestingly, is also located in a train station, where strangers meet up to wait for their train. It’s the flimsiest of narrative devices, but it serves as a good jumping-off point for the company to flaunt its talents.
Four men and four women collide in the station’s waiting room: a wealthy woman, a salesman, a camera-mad tourist, a vagabond guitarist, a seductive flirt, a hip-hopper, a maidenly shy young woman and a very average man. They will singly and collectively erupt into movement, only freezing when attempting to discern what it is the station’s tannoy is periodically screeching at them.
Though a few portions of Flathead! fail (an amateurish lip-synch number goes nowhere fast), the piece’s strong physical score served as a marvelous showcase for the troupe’s interest in mime, commedia dell’arte, ballet and jazz dance. Undoubtedly, the most exciting moment in the show is the terrific tap-dance number that caps the first act.
There are also streaks of surrealism veining the work, which was most apparent at the top of the second half, where the Skoky band reimagines a balletic divertissement with straitjackets. Madness was never so graceful. A folk dance demanding slaps to hips and knees becomes an invitation to more varied violence.
After establishing its track record with the two different performance pieces, Veselé skoky will be premiering a new show titled Childhood at Celetná Nov. 18. In what promises to be a borderless fantasy with toys, these jolly jumpers seem on the verge of discovering even larger audiences.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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