The Prague Post Online: Tempo: Balous' art center makes a scene

October 12th, 2008

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Balous' art center makes a scene

It might feel like cutting-edge London, but La Fabrika is a Czech-made phenomenon

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
March 12th, 2008 issue

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST

Czech émigré Richard Balous renovated abandoned factory buildings into a trendy performance space. enlarge

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST

Unique La Fabrika in Holešovice is still a work in progress but already features a grassy roof, a café and a newly opened theater. A gallery and a hostel are also planned. enlarge

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The Balous File

Born: 1951 in Prague
Former haunts: London's ICA, the studios of ABC, Alphabet City
Life as a performer: Check out www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s6xBeLTcjA

As he sits at the long bar rolling what might be the 12th cigarette of the morning, Richard Balous could easily be confused with some former star of a Western movie — a Jim Davis or Rory Calhoun, perhaps.

There’s a cragginess to him, as well as a poker-faced coolness. You sense he’s seen his fair share of the world, and has probably had a few adventures in the process, but that’s his business.

“Would you like a coffee?” Balous asks me. He drops his Drum pouch on the countertop, and goes around to the other side to a new gleaming espresso machine. “I’ve taught myself to make a good cup,” he says, as he starts grinding the coffee. Richard Balous has taught himself a lot of things.

The bar is inside La Fabrika, an impressive new arts venue in Holešovice and Balous’ brainchild. What was once a defunct factory has been transformed into a state-of-the-art performance space, which will eventually expand to become an arts center for music, theater, dance, painting and film.

Since its opening in November, La Fabrika has already garnered a lot of attention, primarily for its design. Czech architectural magazines have been falling over each other to get through the center’s doors to admire the stylish interior, as well as the exterior eco-green roof. The space shares a lot with its owner — its brick-and-mortar rough shell houses a passionate dedication to art.

Back in the ČSSR

Balous was born in Prague in 1951, growing up in one of the panelák districts. Before the 1948 communist coup, his father owned buildings in Holešovice, some of the very buildings that are now the backbone of La Fabrika.

Balous married an Englishwoman in 1976, hinting that the idea for escape might have been more potent than love. Once he was out of Czechoslovakia, he wandered through northern Europe until finally landing in London.

“It was a good time to be in London,” he says over the next cigarette. “I studied the language and literature, and lived in different places around the city—Brixton, Little Venice.”

With little in the way of training, Balous found himself making films for London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, one of Britain’s foremost arts centers. Indeed, after touring La Fabrika, someone familiar with the ICA at Carlton House Terrace can see some similarities, both in the new building’s fabric and philosophy.

As satisfying as his life was in London, Balous decided to try his luck next in New York City, and arrived there in 1982. He began working with émigré Czech theater artists, and started his own study of the vibrant downtown art scene erupting in Manhattan.

“I loved going to La Mama when I was there, and meeting Ellen Stewart,” he says of the famed Gotham experimental theater and its founder. “In fact, the ‘La’ in La Fabrika is there as an homage to Stewart and La Mama.”

Even after successfully fleeing his “normalized” homeland, and with no solid evidence that things would soon change in Czechoslovakia, Balous decided to head home after his time in the wider world.

“My timing couldn’t have been better,” he laughs in an exhalation of smoke. “I left the day the Berlin Wall went down.”

Soon Balous’ hometown would be participating in the metaphorical tearing down of the wall.

In Prague, Balous’ contacts hooked him up with the American ABC News, and suddenly, the Bohemian artist was made into a journalist.

“I was very popular with ABC here, as I knew how to make contacts with all the right dissidents,” Balous tells me. “I knew my way around — something I proved when I was able to charter a plane, and fly myself and an ABC news team into Bucharest just before Ceausescu’s fall.”

On the ABC Evening News of Dec. 21, 1989, coverage of the Romanian revolution included an eyewitness account on the street from Balous. He was there as the helicopter swooped down to try and save Ceausescu and his dragon-lady wife, Elena, from one of history’s greatest flash mobs.

“It was a crazy time,” Balous recalls. “ABC was good for me. I ran their Prague office for three years.”

Soon, however, restitution returned him his father’s properties in Holešovice, and Balous opened a café that would become the steppingstone to La Fabrika.

The new Holešovice scene

“The idea to create something like La Fabrika had been germinating in me for years,” Balous explains. He soon purchased an adjoining property, another abandoned factory, and has been working on the center for the past three years.

“The whole place should be finished in two years,” he says.

Even at this point, where the center is only halfway completed, La Fabrika looks like no other place in Prague. While there are great performance venues dotting the city, such as Archa, Ponec and Alfred ve dvoře, none can compete with La Fabrika’s sheer scale and proposed mission.

The first performance space-cum-cinema is a versatile black box that can accommodate up to 220 people. The projection booth is filled with state-of-the-art equipment, including a new 35-millimeter film projector.

Patrons of the recent Malá inventura saw the space used to great effect. It recently served as a performance venue for Sperm fest.

I wander with Balous through the La Fabrika warren: Metal doors slide to expose new hallways, new stairwells, all leading to future spaces for a gallery, a full-time cinema, even a hostel.

“I’m thinking of naming the hostel ‘Actors and Backpackers,’ ” he says laughing. “I like the sound of it in English.”

We somehow make our way back to his high-tech, coolly elegant bar. “How about another coffee,” he says, and is quickly back at his prized espresso-maker. The bar isn’t quite open to the general public yet, in operation only during performances.

“I’m thinking of starting a Sunday brunch series with some live jazz,” he shouts over the machine’s racket. “There’s a lot to do before then.”

As I’m enjoying a second cup of Balous’ coffee-making, I happen to see what looks like wheat growing up around the skylight above.

“That’s my green roof,” he says excitedly. “Come, I’ll show you.”

It’s the perfect rooftop garden, laid out with various grasses, and with a sturdy bunch of bamboo growing next to one of the old factory’s smoke stacks, as future shade for La Fabrika’s offices, which are all perched on the roof.

“Yes, it’s ecologically sound,” Balous says chuckling, “but I like to think of it as a spot where young people can come to sit on the grass and smoke grass, if they like.”

A mini Barrandov

With his interest and background in film, it isn’t surprising that Balous will use La Fabrika for film projects. He’s already thrown his hat into the ring by co-producing director Petr Nikolaev’s film …a bude hůř (It’s Gonna Get Worse), which just won a Český lev film award for editing. Nikolaev also has an office at La Fabrika.

For the premiere of …a bude hůř, Balous turned the factory floor of his second building into something approximating a derelict train station during the dregs of the Husák years.

“I found a lot of really terrible commie junk to decorate the place with,” Balous says, lighting up. A number of period posters still hang on the walls exhorting workers to crack on for a glorious socialist future.

“The hardest thing was finding those awful oil-cloth table covers that used to be in the station cafés,” he recalls. “But, I found them.”

On March 18, Balous will inaugurate La Fabrika’s first film series, which will focus on the work of Jiří Menzel, and will include the participation of Jiří Suchý. Balous’ plan is to have film nights twice a month to begin with before the center’s cinema is completed.

By more twists and turns, we manage to be back in the bar. As much as Balous has loaded on his plate, he seems tireless in establishing an arts center that both Prague and the whole country can be proud of.

“I’m hoping this will be the first Czech arts center that’s part of Trans Europe Halles,” he says, referring to the network of independent European cultural spaces that, like La Fabrika, has commanded old factories in this post-industrial age. “I want us to become a venue for project development, and to exchange work with other art centers here in Europe.”

Leaving Balous at the door to his dream factory, it’s a bit of a shock exiting back out onto grubby Komunardů. Not so much for the street’s cheapjack shops and hang-dog air, but for the fact that I felt I’d just spent the last few hours in a completely different city. Richard Balous might just be on the verge of building more than an arts center.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com

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