Studio Hrdinů theatre: Sjón / Tereza Hofová / Kamila Polívková – Skugga Baldur

when: 11 November 2016
venue: Bauhaus
time: 8 pm
admission:  250 CZK / 150 CZK (students)

Author: Sjón
Translation: Helena Březinová
Script: Kamila Polívková and Tereza Hofová
Direction: Kamila Polívková
Stage and light design: Antonín Šilar
Costumes: Zuzana Formánková
Music: Ryan van Kriedt and Jón Sæmundur Auđarson
Projection: Jón Sæmundur Auđarson and Antonín Šilar
Artistic cooperation: Jón Sæmundur Auđarson and Sindri Ploder
Dramaturgy: Jan Horák

Sjón’s celebrated novel Skugga-Baldur serves as the template for an international project which links two distinct cultural traditions – Central Europe with its deep-rooted theater tradition and Iceland with its strong narrative and myth creating tradition. The aforementioned novel in which three characters meet and elude one another is the ideal material for this link, representing contrasting worlds and approaches to life. The important motto of “omnia mutantur, nihil interit” (everything changes, nothing perishes) in the story of the insidious creature skugga-baldur is a quote taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Skuggi, the eccentric narrator (skuggi is Icelandic for “shadow”), uses metamorphosis as his primary means of expression, through which he performs a somewhat subversive show about a hunter and his shadow, barking foxes, dried cod heads, Mongolian children with Downs syndrome, lotus flower eaters, the scent of Darjeeling and smoking opium, mercy, compassion and contempt, about God and electricity in the rear end of a glacier, a journey through the snow to the underworld and about a pastor who looks like a bulge in the landscape.