On Sunday November 17, we will light a candle to remember the Velvet Revolution. It took place 35 years ago and was initiated by students at the DAMU - the theatre faculty of the Prague Academy of Performing Arts. Among them was Puppets in Prague artistic director Mirek Trejtnar in his final year in the puppet design department.
Mirek laying a candle at the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. Photo by Leah Gaffen
Students Spark a Revolution
It started with a peaceful student demonstration on November 17, 1989 that was commemorating a Czech student who had been killed by the Nazis in 1939. When the demonstrators marched towards Wenceslas Square, a cordon of communist police brutally attacked them. In the following days DAMU theatre students launched a strike, soon joined by universities across Czechoslovakia. They drafted a proclamation for a nationwide general strike.
Riot police stopping peaceful student protesters. Photo by AFP
Within days, protests grew to hundreds of thousands. DAMU became a hub of revolutionary activity, with students printing proclamations, organizing protests, and hand-printing posters in the theatre workshops. Mirek and his fellow students took the posters and plastered them all over the city. Citizens came to the school to find out what was going on. They brought cakes, tea, and whatever they thought might help the students' courageous efforts.
Professional theaters got on board. They canceled performances, and actors read student proclamations to their audiences. They knew that the regime would put their own spin on events in the state-controlled media, so actors and students traveled to factories throughout the country to rally support and to inform people about what was happening in Prague.
Soon after, student leaders teamed up with dissidents including Václav Havel to negotiate with the communist regime.
Classes didn't resume until a few months later when the playwright and former prisoner Václav Havel was president and society had transformed.
New Paths for the Puppeteer
By the time Mirek graduated a few months later, the restrictions on art and life had disappeared. He and his peers had little interest in following the limited paths that, a year earlier, would have been their only options. They wanted to taste the freedom they had fought for.
Like many young Czechs, Mirek headed west to see places that had been almost impossible to visit when the iron curtain separated the border. With $150 hidden in his shoe (officially Czechs were still not allowed to take more than about $80 out of the country), he got a plane ticket to New York and made his way to Vermont to work with the Bread and Puppet Theater, whom he had met at a festival in Charleville-Mézières the year before.
Spirit of independence
When Mirek returned to Prague at the end of the summer, he wanted to do something on his own. He founded the company KID Praha, and started producing wooden toys and puppets that he exported around the world.
Puppets and toys designed by Mirek and in the collection of KID company
The Rise of Independent Czech Puppet companies
Mirek was not the only one to forge an independent path. Many of his classmates founded puppet companies, transforming the Czech theatre world with their new, fresh approaches.
One of the best known is Buchty a loutky (Buns and Puppets), started in 1991 by 10 recent DAMU graduates, including many who have taught puppet acting and directing for Puppets in Prague (Zuzana Bruknerova, Marek Becka, Radek Beran, Vit Brukner). to create their own original puppet shows for children and adults. One of their successful early shows was a parody of a sentimental Russian war film that had been forced on Czechs during Soviet times. Their absurd, provacative retelling used broken family theatre puppets and grotesque hand puppets, eviscerating any idea of Soviet heroism. We are very good friends with the members of the group (and they often teach puppet performance and manipulation for us) which is celebrating its 35th anniversary next year. They recently won the Czech Thalia Award (the equivalent of the Tony awards) in the category of puppet theatre for their parody of the Sylvester Stallone film The Expendables, part of a series of shows inspired by American pop culture.
Rocky IX by Buchty a loutky. Photo by Michal Drtina
The Forman Brothers were started by the twin sons of filmmaker Miloš Forman and their cousin Hugo. This trio had already been performing their own shows unofficially - they created a puppet show called the Baroque Opera when Petr Forman was a student at DAMU, for which Mirek made the puppets. After the Revolution they toured the show all over the world (they were at the Jim Henson Festival in New York in 1998). They also started producing larger shows and collaborating extensively with performing artists in France.
The Continuo Theatre was also founded by a group of DAMU students. In the early 1990s, they moved to a farm in a small village in southern Bohemia, and are known for their site-specific shows that incorporate puppets, dance, acrobatics, masks, live music etc.
The Lisen Theatre was started by students from Brno in the late 1990s. Many of their shows focus on human rights and political issies, including Putin is Skiing, based on a book by Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was murdered in 2006. Their most recent production is about homelessness in the Czech Republic.
Several Czech puppet festivals were started in the 1990s (One Flew Over a Puppeteer's Nest, Spectaculo Interesse, the Letni Letna Circus and New Theatre Festival), often with the aim of getting inspiration and bringing together artists from around the world.
And then the students grew up
Ten years ago, Mirek and his friend Tana Marková, also a student in 1989, made a short animated documentary film called What To Tell The Kids? about the events of November 17. The film shows parents talking to their kids about their experiences, and how they perceived the events of the demonstration at the time, which no one realized would lead to a revolution.
Thank you that we can
Thanks to the Velvet Revolution and all of the events in the region in 1989, the world opened up for the Czechs. It led to an explosion of creativity, hope, and exploration. And of course also disappointment and reminders that the fight for freedom and justice is never over.
And so on Sunday, we will go to Národni trida, where it all started, and be part of Thank You That We Can , an annual festival remembering the courages acts of the students and dissidents with exhibitions, podcasts, concerts, and even a parade of giant puppets to remember the events of 1987.
Because 35 years later, it is more important than ever to remind ourselves of the values of democracy.
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