Jiří Havelka is the guest of this year's Echoes of Ji.hlava IDFF. The discussion with him will take place after the screening of his film Eyewitness on March 10, 2022 in Czech Center New York. Jiří Havelka is film and theatre director, author and actor. This year, he moderated the Czech Film Awards Czech Lion.
Jiří Havelka (1980) is one of the Czech Republic’s most exciting theatre directors, as well as being an actor, playwright and teacher. In addition, Havelka scored a huge critical and commercial success with his debut film Owners (2019), a work that he also performed on stage with the acclaimed theatre company Vosto5.
Born in 1980 in Jihlava. In 2002, he graduated from Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU) in alternative and puppet theatre directing. From the beginning, he has focused his theatre work on collective improvisation as a method of creating original original productions. His plays often lie between drama and alternative, even physical or visual theatre.
It is therefore not surprising that in the first years after graduation he was most closely associated with Prague's Studio Ypsilon, where he and a generationally related part of the ensemble created a number of thematically related original productions, the most notable of which were the original theatre about theatre Drama in a Nutshell (2005, nominated for the Theatre Magazine Award) and Where the Wind Goes the Beach (2008, nominated for the Theatre Magazine Award in the Alternative Theatre category), which brings windsurfing to the stage.
Collaboration with the "big" Ypsilonka ensemble resulted, for example, in the successful collage of Alfred Jarry's life and work Nadsamec Jarry (2006). As part of his doctoral studies and part-time work at DAMU, he created with students their graduate performances, e.g. a kind of reality simulator in the production Člověče, zkus to! (2006, Zlomvaz Festival Award, Reflex magazine Award) or Very Social Dances (2008, nominated for the Theatre Magazine Award in the Alternative Theatre category) and most recently a theatrical documentary reconstruction of the Mašín brothers' deeds, I, Hero. The permutational repetition of a banal situation resulted in Dejvice Theatre in Black Hole (2007, 1st-3rd place in the DN Production of the Year poll) and for HaDivadlo he did theatrical adaptation of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Indian in Peril (2008).
In 2008, he won the Alfred Radok Award in the Talent of the Year category. After leaving his permanent engagement at Ypsilonka, he developed his collaboration with Divadlo Na zábradlí (the devised piece Mr. Ubu amuses himself - 2010 or the non-verbal Madness - 2014), with Divadlo na Vinohradech (Tyl's Fidlovačka - 2010) and with the aforementioned HaDivadlo (The World in Peril - 2012). He has also directed several international projects, such as the Czech-German EXIT 89 (2008) or a concert show with the British The Tiger Lilies Here I am a Man! Here I am Human! for the Archa Theatre or several Czech-Canadian projects involving Indian actors. Exceptionally, he also produces dramatic texts, mostly original and contemporary, e.g. at Dejvické divadlo, he translated K. F. Tománek's text into a comic western on stage, the story of Eskimo Welzl Wanted Welzl (2011) or Kakadu (2014), a biography of an autistic girl written together with Karel Tománek.
Recently, his activity has been closely linked to his "home" ensemble Vosto5, of which he is a member. This group has long brought to Czech theatre pure improvisation, verbal juggling, persiflage and mystification, and a distinctly auteurist approach to Czech national themes.
Apart from the traditional Vosto5 poetics (Left Hook about the Munich betrayal, Clash of the Titans, etc.), it is primarily an acrobatic-fighting-movement production from the Perak Protectorate - The Name Doesn't Matter. Actions Decide (2011) or the critically acclaimed Dechovka (2013 - Divadelní noviny Award in the Alternative Theatre category). With Vosto5, they also carry out an original theatrical invasion of public space called The Second City, a theatrical exercise of the Prague Rescue Corps in simulating the crash of two small planes called MAYDAY, or a technologically innovative site-specific approach in the theatrical sci-fi Colonization - New Beginning!(2016) for the Archa Theatre.
In the field of dance theatre, he collaborates most with Vertedance, with whom he created the site-speficik project Learned Helplessness (2013) about imprisoned women in the 1950s, the meditative Flow (2016) and Correction (2013).
In the field of puppet theatre, he has made his greatest impact with the non-verbal illusionistic film-pioneering George Melies' Last Trick (2013 – theatre Magazine Award in the Puppet Theatre category, Erik Award for Best Puppet Production of the Year) and other awards from international festivals, and Monument (2016) for the Puppet Theatre in Wroclaw, where the most absurd building of the communist era - the Stalin sculpture on Letná Street in Prague - comes to life thanks to a clever combination of actors and puppets.
As a teacher at DAMU, he led his first year of acting to graduation with the production Regulation of Intimacy (2014), where young actors standing in a row openly share their inner world with the audience. For the New Stage of the National Theatre he prepared a theatre conference in the form of a sociological experiment just before the extinction of the mouse race called Experiment Mouse Paradise (2016).
Occasionally he hosts cultural programmes on Czech Television (Letadlo, Hotel Insomnia, Tečka páteční noci), award ceremonies (Magnesia Litera, Czech Film Critics' Awards, Czech Lions), and occasionally acts in films (Theory of the Tiger, Prague Orgy, Exhalation).
The texts of the plays Elites and The Company of Owners are also performed on other stages in Europe. Based on The Company of Owners, he made his film debut The Owners, with which he won the Czech Film Critics Award and three Czech Lions.
From August 2011 to September 2019, he was the head of the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theatre (KALD) Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (DAMU) in Prague.
