Fame versus moral conviction. Divadlo Vosto5 explore story of forgotten Ostrava band
The Prague theatre company Divadlo Vosto5 are bringing their production PROTON!!! to the Prix Bohemia Radio festival. In the form of an on-stage radio report, it relates the discovery of a forgotten Ostrava band who influenced lots of famous names but themselves never found fame.
The fates of many contemporary musicians, from Karel Gott to the band Olypmic, are tied to this forgotten group. The performance takes place on 21 March at Divadlo hudba. Ondřej Cihlář answered our questions on behalf of Divadlo Vosto5.
Proton!!! is an on-stage report on the discovery of a forgotten Ostrava band who were silenced before they could become famous. What do you want to say with this production today?
There are several reasons this show came about. Though today we are dealing with lots of contemporary issues, we oughtn’t to forget the roots that link us to the past. I think that it’s actually these connections that greatly determine our behaviour today. And also the behaviour of the whole society. That’s why we launched ourselves into this apparently bizarre search for a forgotten band who were so morally strong that, despite being on the verge of major success, they banned themselves in protest at the Soviet occupation in 1968. And resisting Russia’s present-day constant disinformation invasion is an extraordinarily topical subject at the moment.
VOSTO5: PROTON !!! - trailer from Vosto5 on Vimeo.
Why did you set PROTON!!! in Ostrava?
We go to Ostrava every year for Colours of Ostrava and we’ve met lots of wonderful people and musicians there. We learned about a legendary group from them and began our search.
What led to you conceiving of Proton!!! as a radio play?
The musician Petr Marek came across recordings by the band Proton!!! when he was looking into the musical beginnings of Marie Rottrová for a planned CD of her early hits. And because it was a music recording, so a medium without an image, the choice of radio play was an obvious one.
Though PROTON!!! is a sound-based production, you have also made use of graphic projections. What purpose does this serve in the production?
The resulting genre is “radio play for theatre”. This means that compared to listening to the radio, the audience are looking at something the whole time, unless we were to turn the lights out to ensure it was a “pure genre”. But if we have invited them to a joint listening session and we’re not in the past, when all there was in village pubs was a radio, the creators always have to address the question of how much to enrich the sound with visuals. Incidentally, radio itself does the same thing – when it also broadcasts camera studio feeds via the internet then radio is approaching television. With the projections referred to we don’t want to make Proton!!! less like radio, but to bring it closer to viewers. And the difference between listeners and viewers is obvious.
What can a stage performance of a radio play deliver that a radio broadcast can’t?
As a passionate radio listener and lover of radio plays, I’ve always terribly enjoyed creating a picture in my mind. That’s definitely the beauty of radio. But I also enjoy imagining how a radio play has been created. The listener hears a wonderfully produced result that leads them for instance to a ship that is sinking in a storm at sea, while actually the actors are around a table in their slippers and soundmen are using microphones to record splashing their hands into a bucket of water, creaking doors and banging splinters into stone. That contrast is just wonderful.
Are you hoping to introduce the young generation to the normalisation era and its music scene via the production?
If that were the case, we would have failed in that aim for a simple reason: not one song from that period is heard in the production. Admittedly there are several fragments lasting a few second from the songs of Marie Rottrová, but their purpose is as dividing jingles. The aim was to explore the dilemma of a band who were willing to sacrifice fame and security for their moral convictions. And it’s a question as to whether we would be capable of something similar today. Many things suggest such dilemmas could arise again.
Proton!!!
Director: Ondřej Cihlář
Story idea and script: Ondřej Cihlář and Petr Marek
Featuring: Ondřej Bauer, Ondřej Cihlář, Jiří Havelka/Robert Mikluš, Tomina Jeřábek, Petr Marek, Petr Prokop and Bára Mišíková
Divadlo hudby Olomouc: March 21st, 2017 (TUESDAY)
