International project TACE (Theatre Architecture in Central Europe)brought together theatre museums and institutes from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. An international symposium on the topic of experimental theatre was also held within its framework in November 2009. The present collection contains updated papers from the symposium, and also contains documentary-rich visual material.
Contributions:
Ivo Svetina: Introduction
Czech Republic
Tatjana Lazorčáková: Theater in Experimental Space / An Experiment with Theater Space
Vladimir Just: Theater in the Irregular Space (Bohemia and Moravia, 1945-2009)
Tomas Zizka: Recycling the Concept of Site-Specific
Hungary
Judit Csanádi: Experimental Theater Spaces in Hungary after the Change of Regime (1989-2010)
Borbála Szalai: Dance Spaces
István Nánay: Theatre and Spaces
Poland
Joanna Ostrowska: Places and Spaces of Polish Experimental Theater – Theoretical and Historical Context
Joanna Ostrowska: Spaces of Polish Experimental Theatre
Joanna Ostrowska: Places of Polish Experimental Theatres
Julius Tyszka: Acting in Polish Experimental Theater 1950-2000
Slovakia
Oleg Dlouhy: The Architecture of Alternative Theater Spaces in Slovakia
Maja Hriešik: Provisional Space in Slovak Independent Theatre
Juraj Sebesta: Seeking New Form and Space
Anna Grusková: The Nobodies, Nymphomaniacs and Others at the Jelenia Street Theatre
Slovenia
Tomaž Toporišič: Spatial Machines and Slovene (No Longer-)Experimental Theater in the Second Half of the 20th Century
Primož Jesenko: The Edge in the Center (Theatre Experimentation in the Knight's Hall in the Križanke Complex 1955-1972)
Barbara Orel: In the Basement of Block Four (Experimental Theater of the 1970s in the Student Residence Halls of Ljubljana)
The book is the first to comprehensively discuss experimental theatre in Central Europe. The birth of experimental theatre in the countries of the geopolitical space behind the so-called Iron Curtain and its unexpected flourishing also meant (or above all) the democratisation of the political systems of the time, but on the other hand it also involved the conquest, the “occupation” of spaces that had not previously served theatrical art. In this way, these spaces (basements, abandoned factories, breweries, warehouses, bakeries, barns and bourgeois apartments) were socialised. It was in this (“undemocratic”) part of Europe that an experiment was born that, with Tadeusz Kantor and Jerzy Grotowski, to name just two of many, fatally changed the face of world theatre.
In the society of Central European countries, Slovenia gained an important and respectable place precisely through experimental theatre, which was not only tied to the theatre people, their ingenuity and, last but not least, courage, but also depended on political circumstances. In 1958, just two years after Soviet tanks rumbled in Budapest and crushed the uprising, we performed Eugène Ionesco in Ljubljana.
Editor-in-chief: Ivo Svetina
Co-editor: Tomaž Toporišič, Tea Rogelj