CESTY SLOVENSKÉHO HERECTVA

Andrej Maťašík

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The study is a part of a prepared monography on two great generations of Slovak dramatic actors. Founders of the Slovak professional theatre were drawing experience mainly from Czech colleagues who in 1920 had started in Bratislava and in the Slovak countryside performing under the title the Slovak National Theatre. Borodáč was aiming at professionalisation of the Slovak theatre slowly and systemically. Since 1921, when he saw the staging MCHAT, he starts mentioning Stanislavski as his great model, but the reality in a single professional theatre in Slovakia was completely diff erent.The best Slovak amateur actors were reacting with restrain and denial towards off ers placed by the rural Czech theatrical company, and spectacular backround of Slovak stagings was in multinational Bratislava very narrow. That is why not even the most successful pieces did not have a chance to reach a higher number of reruns. He did not have actors at disposal who could have communicated in Slovak without any diffi culty. At the break of fi ft ies and sixties, graduates from the Musical and Dramatic Academy (originated as a iniciative of Borodáč in 1925, since 1941 the State Conservatory) and fi rst graduates from the University of Fine Arts (originated in 1949) formed a basis of the second, in full meaning of the word professional generation of Slovak theatrical artists. Their situation was diametrally else. Above all, the theatre did not need to struggle to achieve acknowledgement as an independent artistic genre. This fi ght for theatre was thanks to struggling and victory of interwar avant-gardes over. Theatre troupes were not performing on the basis of small trade enterprising, but have become art institutions subsidized by the state. In fi ft ies a fi rst massive generation of modern Slovak Bratislavian theatre goers was formed. Stagings were not prepared in haste, enough time and resources were at disposal to properly prepare a production. A new scenographic and costume solution was found for each new staging. Actors´ technical preparation was substantial, they knew the priciples of vocal technique, movement, ortoephics and other specifi c technical disciplines, but their knowledge included also information on aesthetics, development of theatre, or philosophy. And in Slovakia a new medium – television – has been spreading, via which actors could reach the most distant corners of the state. In our theatre-historical sources a contrast view can be found: Borodáč is indicated as a dramatic realist, Jamnický as a creator of a stylized theatre. It would be more precise to say that Borodáč began with desriptive realism in combination with actor´s rutine and cliché. He gradually succeeded to work his way out to aesthetics, which is determined as psychological realism. Ján Jamnický in his early director´s times experimented in spirit of what he knew about discharge of interwar dramatic avant garde and quickly realized that too much of miniature, aids and other „crutches“ are obstructing the actor. Borodáč´s interest was to invoke an illusion of an actual space, as opposed to Jamnicky who is searching for an architecture of the theatrical space, together with Emil Belluš is preparing his stagings not anymore like „animated“ pictures, but in arranging scenes he is looking for a way to support actor´s creativity and earn the most possible strong eff ect on a spectator.