Deeper than Thought

“Land of Body”
Laterna magika
The New Stage
Prague, Czech Republic
October 05, 2024

by Ilona Landgraf
Copyright © 2024 by Ilona Landgraf

The sharp sound of wind and a blaze of Arctic white on eleven video screens of various sizes scattered across the stage opened Laterna magika’s 2022 production, Land of Body. Radim Vizváry, artistic director of Laterna magika, was in charge of the theme, choreography, and staging. As the title suggests, Land of Body considers the body as a metaphor for landscapes. Artists of three generations and different genres portrayed a body’s formations and cycles of nature and life.
Some dancers lay motionless on the twilit ground when a senior dancer (Josef Kotěšovský), with an elderly, insecure gait, flipped a mobile phone camera open. Perhaps the solemn voiceover, which seemed to convey a mystical message, belonged to the video he watched on the small camera screen. In any case, a fog of dry ice suddenly wafted across the video screens and seemed to spread onto stage. Drum rolls followed by atmospheric sounds (music by Robert Jíša, sound design by Jan Brambůrek) accompanied a gray-haired man (Matěj Petrák) who moved on old fours like a primordial human. Brawny and nimble, he carried the lifeless bodies of a man and a woman onto the stage.
The bodies came to life when a noise reminiscent of an eternal timeline that was ripped apart screeched through the air. They cleared the stage for a vertical rope acrobat (Alžběta Tichá). Tichá, supported by Petrák, climbed, coiled, and swirled up and down and around the rope as if dancing along the road of her life and unabashedly testing its limits. Her courage and mastery were breathtaking! No less spectacular was the performance of two aerial acrobats (Martina Illichová and Lukáš Macháček) on a cyr wheel hanging center stage. Like a volant version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, Macháček balanced the forces of the rotating cyr wheel (a square version) while Illichová hung headfirst, her feet clasped around his ankles, or held onto his neck, her body flying freely through the air.

Handstand acrobat Jan Jirák folded himself into daring sculptures and was quintessentially aesthetic from head to tip of his toes. He finished by yanking one handstand cane after the other out of their base—as if pulling the ground out from under himself—until only one last cane supported his body’s daring weight shifts and contortions. Jindřich Panský swirled from the left to the right side of the stage while executing multiple flips and other floor gymnastics with the swagger of a pro. He subsequently clashed with another adrenaline-fueled young man, each determined to be the alpha male.
Exploring new dimensions of movement is a way to gain freedom, but being a skilled performer might also incur constricting, outside expectations. Such was the case for Lukáš Macháček’s ring gymnast who found himself tied up in the ropes of his rings. Fetish-like adoration of certain body parts (in this case, a long, blonde braid) turned out to be self-restricting. Other performers used the braid as a string, which was ideal to guide its owner.
The limitations imposed by age were the most poignant, perhaps because they are inescapable. The stage romance that once connected an aged ballerina (Zuzana Hrzalová) and an old dancer (Josef Kotěšovský) wasn’t yet over. Hrzalová hastened toward the wings like a sylph searching for her fellows and was followed by the seventy-four-year-old Kotěšovský, who tried to partner her despite his body’s lack of pliability. Hrzalová finally put on her pointe shoes and relived her ballerina past during a short solo. Kotěšovský, by then unable to move, was later carried to her, and he rested his head in her lap. His career had reached its end. The life of the ten-year-old Josefína Strejčková had yet to unfold. All artists remained motionless when Strejčková walked on stage, picked up the mobile phone camera, and began to record them.
Whereas many scenes emphasized the synergy between body and mind, the (mostly) close-up videos on the screens (directed by Tereza Vejvodová and produced by Jindřich Trčka) created distance. Although the bushes of hair resembling tufts of grass; the wrinkled, sweaty, or mud-caked skin; the staring eyes; and the veins surging with blood were highly aesthetic and underscored the landscape motif, they were too artificial to identify with.

While the audience cheered the performance and gave a standing ovation, Kotěšovský had already gone to the neighboring National Theatre where he was presented the Thalia Award of the Czech Actors’ Association for his lifetime achievement. Upon learning this, the applause only intensified.

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