Dramaturgical council for Season 49: End of Illusions

Adam Borzič

We first met poet, essayist and therapist Adam Borzič through his texts and several interviews which can be found in the Czech Radio archive. Adam combines his poetic talent and psychotherapeutic skills to capture unconscious flow of the present day. We are inspired by his emphasis on spirituality in literature and his knowledge of Eastern religious traditions and texts.

He is the editor-in-chief of fortnightly literary magazine Tvar. He co-founded poetry group Fantasía and with the group they co-published a book called Fantasía (Dauphin, 2008). He published poetry collections such as Rozevírání (Dauphin, 2011), Počasí v Evropě (Malvern, 2013) for which he was nominated for Magnesia Litera Award in 2014, Orfické linie (Malvern, 2015) and Západo-východní zrcadla (Malvern, 2018). Together with Ondřej Slačálek and Olga Pavlová, he published monograph Prophets of post-utopian radicalism: Alexandr Dugin and Hakim Bey (Vyšehrad, 2018). His poems were translated into many foreign languages.

Bohdan Karásek

Screenwriter, director and author, Bohdan Karásek has worked with HaDivadlo since 2020, when he was involved as an author in the creation of Ours and Perception. He also co-authored Humanism 22. His informal poetics, minimalism and everyday dialogues resonate with our dramaturgy. Building on his literary research, he has always suggested surprising and bold works that helped us expand our own literary horizons such as the works of Polish writer Edward Stachura.

Born in 1978, he studied at Film School Zlín and later at the Department of Screenwriting and Dramaturgy of the Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague where he worked afterwards as a teaching assistant for 2 years. He is a screenwriter and filmmaker, he made independently produced “apartment films”: Lucie (2011), Milostné písně (2013), Karel, já a ty (2019), his feature film debut that was in cinemas and received several awards, for example the Innogy Award for the Discovery of the Year at the Czech Film Critics’ Awards and was nominated for the best screenplay at Czech Lion Awards. He produced his own authorial play Noční scéna (2019) for Czech Radio. Since 2001, he has occasionally published articles, interviews and theoretical texts in specialist magazines. He has also had a long-term interest in music.

Tereza Marečková

Ivan Buraj met Tereza Marečková while working in the Drama Studio in Ústí and Labem. When searching for texts, Tereza goes wide and deep and often takes an archeological approach. We spoke about contemporary German fiction, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education or Gerhart Hauptmann’s play Lonely Lives.

Tereza was born in 1980 and comes from Ústí and Labem and Liberec. During her dramaturgy studies at the Academy of Performing Arts she collaborated with a theatre company of homeless people called Ježek a Čížek. Later, she co-founded theater company Masopust where she worked as an artistic director and currently as a dramaturge. As an independent dramaturge, she collaborated with directors Štěpán Pácl, Jan Frič, Anna Davidová, David Šiktanc, Jan Nebeský, Anna Klimešová and Ivan Buraj. Since 2020, she has been the in-house dramaturge of the Drama Studio. She also works as an external teacher at the Department of Scenography of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. She has three children.

Tereza Semotamová

Translator, editor and author Tereza Semotamová is, just like us, interested in German literature – she will share her thoughts on The Wall, adaptation of a novel of the same name recently directed in HaDivadlo by Kamila Polívková in HaDivadlo’s podcast The Future of Theatre in an episode recorded in spring 2021. Back then, Tereza recommended Gianna Molinari’s book Everything Is Still Possible here, later directed by Ivan Buraj in the Drama Studio in Ústí nad Labem. Interviews with Tereza are inspiring not only thanks to her authoring experience and a great literary knowledge but also because of their deeply contemplative nature reflecting on today’s world and our everydayness.

She studied dramaturgy and screenwriting at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts and German language and literature at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University. She got her PhD degree with a thesis about German radio plays of the 1950s at JAMU. She works as an editor of a Czech-German-Slovak online magazine called jádu published by Goethe Institute Prague. She wrote a dozen of radio plays and a number of literary programmes for Czech Radio, an audio drama Rozeznění about Lidice, she is an active journalist and translator of contemporary German literature. With Jakub Vítek, she co-wrote a book called Pochong or On the Drudgery of Human Existence (Větrné mlýny, 2015). Her fiction book In the Wardrobe (Argo, 2019) was nominated for Magnesia Litera and has so far been translated into German, Italian and Polish.