"Then they invited me to choreograph Faust. Not directing yet, but choreographing. I thought, if I have the right to choose who choreographs with us, I'll give it a try, it will be better than the horror I saw. So there you have it. When you start working there... Well, of course there was Matěj, all the close and talented guys. We're a bunch of clowns, angry and funny at the same time. And suddenly you start to get into it. And then more choreography. And that's it. That being said, I'm a sad, depressed person, but I'm full of funny stories. Milan Steigerwald - he's a very well-read man - always had a dream, and even made two attempts to do a play on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And it failed twice. Watching the videos of the couples running around - horror, horror, horror. That's how I got started. That's a theme I've been working on for a long time - life after death. I've immersed myself in that study again. Roman Štolpa, who used to direct there, but he didn't have time. So I got all our people together and we started working like crazy on the choreography. And we're working and working, and sometimes he'll come running up, 'Gang, do you need me? No? Okay, I'm out of here.' In the end, it ended up that we were just doing theater. I was doing a play with my people."
"Then I became interested in the subject of manipulation. I am still developing this topic today. When someone who runs a program makes a person do one movement, and then the person starts to do that movement automatically... And then it turns out that there are two groups or pairs - and a war starts because somebody just put it in their heads. I was terribly concerned about that at the time. And for the first time in my life, I started reading political news. I was very depressed afterwards, all the hatred and... Yes, even the dancer Dana Palatová made up her own scenes. There was a lot of collaboration. I just asked, 'What do you think about a situation when they start bombing your town or village, for example?' And there was, for example, a scene of Václav Kovář. Or what happens when you're alone in an enclosed space? And Dana was creating a dance. It's very collaborative."
"When we came up with DEREVO, it was two years after the revolution. At that time there was complete euphoria. Of course, now my friends explain to me that that's when prices started going up, people started going to the theatre less. Well, and we feel it very strongly now, this phenomenon. And at that time it happened, for example, that in the house where the squat was and DEREVO came to play there, the police cut off the electricity. So we gathered wood and lit fires and played around those fires. Then... of course it was unbelievable. My friend took me for a walk in the centre of Prague from Braník, where everything was still grey, for me, completely understandably. And he said to me, 'Prague is a theatre set, which is being built in front of you, and behind you it is being dismantled.' And I looked at it. He was Czech. And then, when we came to Prague, well, first of all, maybe it was the feeling that everything was possible, that success was possible, that we were already starting to travel, that it was possible to realize ourselves, we got spaces quite quickly. We got permission to play on the street. I did tap dancing, Aleš did mime and in the evening we did improvised things with other people. Everything was possible. Lots of people - they actually gave money, everything was allowed. Nobody shut us down. Like the guy from the Roxy - we were playing in Celetná then, near the Roxy: 'Do you like it? Come and play with us.' So we came back to the Czech Republic. Probably a feeling of opportunity. And maybe we were a force."
Irina Andreeva is one of the most prominent representatives of the new theatrical avant-garde after the fall of the USSR and the Velvet Revolution. She was born on 23 August 1965 in Yekaterinburg, then Sverdlovsk, in the Soviet Union, where her Jewish ancestors fled from Ukraine during the Second World War. She began studying at the Chelyabinsk Theatre Institute in the department of directing, but interrupted her studies and lived with a limited residence permit in Leningrad, where she became involved in the underground. After perestroika period, she became an actress at the alternative theatres Do-Teatr and DEREVO. In 1994, she founded the Russian-Czech physical theatre Teatr Novogo Fronta in St. Petersburg with Aleš Janák and moved to the Czech Republic. She has realised a number of international projects, street performances and, for example, four solo performances, which she staged in the Czech Republic and Europe. As a choreographer, she has guest performed at the National Theatre and the Vinohrady Theatre. She has also taught at the Die Etage school of mime in Berlin and collaborated with the Israeli Clipa Theater. After the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation in 2014, she initiated the international project Theatre/Intervention/Tolerance, the main theme of which was the manipulation of the consciousness of the people sharply experiencing the new phase of the war in Ukraine in 2022. For the last few years of her life, she worked as an actress and director at the Prague RockOpera. She spent her formative years in unprecedented poverty and asceticism - living in unheated rehearsal rooms. She believed in the power of deep emotions, inner freedom and human suffering, interpreted by the movement of the human body. Irina Andreeva died on August 13, 2024.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
