Polenblut No. 2, Communism and Alfons Mucha

It's been a busy two days since my last post so I shall jump right in.

Yesterday, we all piled into our van, I have christened it The Mystery Machine, and we drove two hours to the town of Pisek for our second performance of Polenblut. The town is lovely! A river runs through it and it is obvious the city has worked very hard to create a beautiful waterfront of new buildings with shops and restaurants.

The theater is new with beautiful dressing rooms and a nice stage although there isn't really a fly space and, like the last theater, NO backstage space at all. The auditorium is a large, square room that seats about 250 or 300 people. The back half of the seats were raked but were on portable risers. Clearly all of the seats could be removed from the space to make room for large events of all kinds. There was a small orchestra pit but for whatever reason the elevator had been raised to floor level. The orchestra was on the stage with us and the pit wasn't used. Interestingly enough, for a square room the accoustics were very good. Weather by accident or not, the sound actually went out into the room. We couldn't always hear each other well but we could hear our voices resonating out in the hall so we knew we could be heard. It was an odd sensation but once you got used to it it was heavenly!

Before the concert our hosts were nice enough to bring us some trays of open faced sandwiches. On a very good slice of white bread, sort of a french bread, was spread either a cheese spread or a seasoned mayonaise, then a piece of prociutto and then some pickles and raw onion. They were sort of gloppy but tasty. The only draw back was that the onions smelled to high heaven! UGH! It was really gross after a while.

The performance went well. Much smoother than two days with fewer memory slips. Our small but well formed audience gave us a long ovation. Afterward, our intrepid driver, Petr, lead us through a beautiful park to a very traditional Czech restaurant where I have a fantastic wild boar steak and potato wedges! It was like pork but darker and a little gamey-er. It was GOOD, mkay? Afterward, we piled back into the Mystery Machine and headed back to Prague. I listened to a podcast of a very interesting interview with Linda Lavine of t.v. sitcom "Alice" fame. VERY interesting. She's very much a theater actress and the t.v. show was a 9 year hiatus from that. Now she is in a play on The Broadway and she and her husband own a very small community theater in North Carolina where they act in, direct and produce plays. Isn't that cool!?

Today is a day off for me although two of my colleagues hopped a train to go do a recital in another city. I get to do this with Jennifer Ciobanu on June 3rd in Brno at the Sal Alfons Mocha. More about him later.

By the way, the weather here has been overcast and chilly for the most part. I managed to leave my jacket on a park bench my first day here (It was actually Jamie's so now I owe him a jacket.) so today I went looking to buy another jacket but had no luck. I went to a Tesco department store. Oddly enough, they just mix in the mens and womens clothes and you have to go search throughout an entire floor to find the mens and, more specifically, a wind breaker as they are not all kept inone spot. I wonder if this has anything to do with their history with Communism and the lack of consumer goods during that time. More about that later. Anyway, it seems XL and XXL sizes are made for munchkins here. I could find nothing that would even begin to fit (Am I one of those Fat Americans I hear tell about?) so I gave up. I remain slightly chilly as I make my way through the seats of Prague but I'm not complaining. I'm told it's been in the 90's back home so I'm enjoying it while I can.

ANYWAY, I have become intrigued by the Soviet Era and it's impact on the Czech people so I paid a visit to The Museum of Communism.

It is located just off of Wenceslas Square in the middle of a very busy and fashionable shopping district. It is housed in an old Art Neuveau building called the Casino Palais. BIG staircases, BIG moldings, threadbare carpets and dingy walls. You can see where sometime in the past they installed some very ugly wood venier panels. They don't match the rest of the building. VERY utilitarian and, I suspect, VERY Soviet.

The museum is on the second floor at the top of a large, wide staircase. It is AMAZING! It follows the development of Communism in great detail beginning with the writings of Karl Marx and moving through Lenin and on to the present day concentrating, of course, on Czekoslovakia. The exhibits talked about Marx's emphasis on building a base in industry and how everyone should work in factories and be productive for the state and not for personal gains. The exhibit shows the push towards technology, especially in the arms race and space travel, and the way schools were reformed to educate children in ideals of Communism.

I learned about how the government fixed prices to make it seem as though the economy was fine but there were constant shortages of consumer goods and lots of empty shelves in shops. Foreign luxury goods could be acquired but they had to be bought in special shops using special currency which was available "underground" through brokers.

The city fell into horrible disrepair as government money was going to fund factories and build large, ugly monuments to Communist leaders and "The Workers". Then,in the late 1960's came the "Prague Spring": a period of liberalism in which there was more freedom in the press and in the arts. This was quickly crushed by Moscow when Soviet troops came to occupy the city and the country's Premier was replaced. The most moving part of the museum is the 30 minute video that is shown about the "Velvet Revolution". This,as we all remember, was a series of relatively peaceful protests in Wenceslas Square in November of 1989. They happened as a result of Glastnos and lead to the end of communism in Czecoslovakia. I sat there watching footage of the square FILLED with protestors, young and old, as police, both in and out of uniform, tried to apprehend them. Many were being beaten by the police or hoses were being turned on them. It was upsetting to see the looks of frustration on the faces of the protestors. I sat there and cried.

The last part of the museum discusses the fall of the Berlin Wall and the election of the first president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, who was one of the leaders of the protests in 1989.

I left the museum and walked out into Wenceslas Square where these protests actually happened only 20 years ago! I was 19 years old! I remember it! I looked up the beautiful, tree lined boulevard that leads up to the impressive facade of the National Museum and tried to imagine what it all must have looked like only 20 short years ago. Now there are fashionable shops with names lik Escada, Benetton, Chanel, and lots of out door cafes. People shop, eat, drink and have fun. You'd never know that such earth shaking events had happened there only 20 years ago!

After what is probably going to be the highlight of my time in Prague, I walked around the block to the Mucha Museum. Mucha was a pioneer of the Art Nouveax style in the late 19th century. He was a born in a small town in the western Slovakia and came to prominence in Paris when he was commissioned by Sarah Bernhardt to design a poster for her production of Gismonda. For the next six years he designed posters, cosutmes and sets for her theater company and spent many years with his family in New York City. After the turn the century, he returned to his homeland in Slovakia where he continued to design posters but also began work on is Slav Epic, a series of 20 HUGE canvases depicting the history of the Slavic people. It was complete in 1913 and is currently housed in the castle of Morovsky Crumlov. There is the intent to move the series to Prague but it has yet to happen.

EVERYONE has seen his work. It is the embodiment of the Art Nouveux style. Beautiful women with flowing hair, sometimes bare chested, reclining on pillows. His posters for Sarah Bernhardt are particularly famous, especially the dection of Ms. Bernhardt as Hamlet. GORGEOUS is the word du jour! I bought some beautiful posters with the official seal of the museum on them and a carboard poster tube to put them in. The will be a welcome addition to my collection!

I think that's about it. Tomorrow night performance three of Polenblut and the next night my recital with Jennifer. More postings to come!