New theater for the new age

Václav Havel himself probably could not have envisioned or imagined a performance such as the Laterna Magika adaptation of his Antikódy, or Anticodes, for the National Theater's New Stage.

Havel was a proponent of experimental verse as well as theater and performance. He first began writing Anticodes, a collection of visual poetry in which words shape new meanings out of the images they create, in the 1960s and then again in the 1970s and '80s. It has been decades since the work was first released to the public, but the team of director Braňo Mazúch, multimedia artist Dan Gregor, the internationally acclaimed choreographer Věra Ondrašíková, sound designer Stanislav Abrahám and composer Michal Nejtek are giving it new life. Their technology-heavy take on the work corresponds with the debut of a new, expanded edition of Anticodes, published by the Václav Havel Library in cooperation with the National Theater.

"[The way] I see Laterna Magika, it should be something celebratory for experimentation and a combination of live acting and multimedia," says Štěpán Kubišta, director of the National Theater's New Stage.

Kubišta explains that Laterna Magika, which started nearly six decades ago as a project for Expo 58 in Brussels, has its roots in an experimental theater performance that was originally directed by Alfréd Radok, who worked with the scenographer Josef Svoboda to combine film with live acting. Throughout the years Laterna Magika persisted, seeing many reincarnations with support from the Czechoslovak Film Society and the Culture Ministry. From the beginning of 2013, however, its new home has been the National Theater as part of its New Stage, with a five-year project developed by Kubišta. Anticodes is aiming in quite a different direction than As Far As I See, the relaunched Laterna Magika's debut play, which was targeted at a family audience.

In the Laterna Magika version of Anticodes, the main set piece is a writer's desk, at which an actor sits and writes out Havel's words on paper, while a camera projects them onto a smaller screen for the audience to read in real time. The camera also captures a typewriter, Havel's preferred writing tool, while an actor types out the words making up the nine visual poems, or calligraphs. These are projected directly onto a large translucent screen onto which, when combined with the appropriate sound effects, letters seem to be typed directly by an invisible typewriter. The actors on stage move their bodies in turn, and the text reacts to their motions. The entirety of the performance lasts approximately 55 minutes, but the runtime of the performance can be slightly shorter or longer, depending on how quickly or slowly the actors interact with the text.

According to Kubišta, staging Anticodes in this way was done at least in part to attract younger people involved in theater to interpret and think about new uses for multimedia technology in performances. As he explains it, projections are nothing new to the world of theater - in fact, they have become somewhat ubiquitous. Through the know-how of Dan Gregor, however, Laterna Magika introduces new possibilities in Anticodes for the technology to interact live, onstage and in real time with six dancers, one actor and Václav Havel's word art.

"It's more about what's going on than the story," Kubišta says. "It's poetry about imagination."

Mazúch, the director, is no newcomer to theater: The author of more than 20 shows in the Czech Republic and abroad, in Anticodes he aims to take the focus off the actors, dancers or people onstage while ensuring that the technology remains invisible. Though performers have traditionally been "set" into their settings, in Anticodes the settings created by projections are directly influenced by the movements onstage. Before Anticodes, real-time tracking had not been incorporated into the Laterna Magika stage - as Kubišta explains it, through the interactive technology the dancers build the production live onstage.

"They are dynamic," he says. "They are speed - because normally the poetry is a 2-D picture. We kind of partly illustrated it ... or just played with it. Kind of like Havel in Anticodes, he is playing with the meanings of words. We are interpreting these typograms into theater action. It is not modernization; it is online-ization."

Preparation for Anticodes took nearly a year - Mazúch says that initial planning started last June, with approval obtained in July and dancers added in January. According to Mazúch, the six male interpreters are meant to represent Havel's thoughts.

"[They] move, give motion, dynamics, and so on into the ideas that he is sketching," Mazúch says.

For the future, Kubišta says he would like to see further progression and experimentation in theater, and he plans to continue it on the New Stage with a performance based on the work of Jules Verne, which is currently in its initial planning stages.

Kasia Pilat can be reached at
kpilat@praguepost.com