Training on uncertain ground: Farma bez jeskyně/Farm without a cave

Abstract

The recipient of numerous honours including Edinburgh Fringe First, Total Theatre and Herald Angel Awards and the European Prize for New Theatrical Realities (2011), Farma v jeskyni is among the most successful theatre companies to emerge from the Czech new theatre (nové divadlo) scene. Despite, or perhaps because of, its success, Farma's reception domestically is fraught with ambiguity and a suspicion of the company's laboratory-based methodology, which emphasises the daily physical training of company members. This article considers Farma's work and its domestic critical reception and interrogates the disparity between the company's international renown and compromised working conditions in Prague. It demonstrates the extent to which Farma's reception and treatment is shaped by the artistic values and priorities established throughout the historical evolution of Czech theatre as a highly politicised and national art form. Farma's emphasis on training and ensemble practice will be explored as inflecting the company's critical perception and working conditions, with reference to communist-era scepticism concerning Grotowski's actor-training practices, as well as post-communist neo-liberal agendas that emphasise saleable cultural products over artistically rigorous processes.

Keywords::

• training
• laboratory theatre
• cultural policy
• Farma v jeskyni
• Viliam Dočolomanský

Notes

^1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Czech are my own.

^2. See interviews with Dočolomanský (2011) by Martina Černá and Kateřina Kolářová (Dočolomanský 2007b); a review of Divadlo (The Theatre) by Jana Machalická (Dočolomanský 2010); Jana Pilátová's (2010) Hnizdo Grotowského: na prahu divadlení antropologie; and ‘A Tragedy in Movement’, Steffen Silvis's (2008) review of Sclavi for The Prague Post.

^3. ‘Theatre and the Cosmic Man’ was published in the 18 March 1959 edition of Divadelní noviny and was followed by ‘The Theatre of the Thirteen Rows in Opole’ (Acta Scaenographica II, August 1962) and ‘Towards a Poor Theatre’ and ‘He Wasn't Entirely Himself’, both published in the June 1967 edition of Divadlo (Pilátová 2009).

^4. It should be noted that Godovič worked as assistant director on Farma's Čekárna (Waiting Room).