Arts | All stories

One of the biggest cultural events of the season in the Czech Republic, the annual Shakespeare Summer Festival, has just begun at the Supreme Burgrave’s House at Prague Castle. Opening the festival on Thursday night was a new production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, starring the great Czech comic actor Bolek Polívka as Falstaff and directed by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Jiří Menzel.

Tens of bands and dozens of djs performed around Prague on Thursday evening to open this year’s United Islands Festival. The event, which is in its fifth year, is promising over 150 hours of free music to those who find themselves down by the banks of the Vltava River between Thursday evening and Saturday night. This year, the festival ties in with the Czech Republic’s EU presidency, which comes to an end in less than two weeks. David Gaydečka is the event’s organizer:

The capital event of the Czech literary calendar began this week with the start of the 19th Prague Writers’ Festival. Each year the festival brings dozens of major personages to the Czech Republic from across the world. This year the theme of “the art of storytelling” is being discussed among the literary greats of, what festival founder Michael March calls, “three ancient civilisations: China, Arabia, and Berkley, California.”

The leading Scottish artist Douglas Gordon has an extensive new exhibition at Prague’s Dox gallery. Blood, Sweat, Tears features photographs, abstract statements printed on the walls and above all video, the medium with which Gordon is most closely associated. Among the works at Dox is a brand new version of perhaps his best known piece, 24 Hour Psycho, a greatly slowed down treatment of Hitchcock’s classic movie.

The Plastic People of the Universe are known around the world for their refusal to comply with the Czechoslovak communist authorities throughout the 1970s and 1980s - and their particular brand of Czech psychedelic rock as well. In recent years, former band member Ivan Bierhanzl and filmmaker Keith Jones have embarked upon an ambitious project to sort through the hours and hours of historic footage of the group to make a series of DVDs dedicated to the ‘Plastici’, but not, necessarily, as you know them.

Amanita Design is a Brno-based, award-winning game development studio whose creations have become a huge hit on the internet. Their games combine elements of the technical world with nature in a way not seen before. Their signature game, Samorost, takes you to a universe composed of rusty parts of old, derelict machines and mossy, gnarled stumps of rotting wood. In this edition of the Arts, we meet the studio’s founder Jakub Dvorský.

Spring has come again to Prague and with it the Prague Spring Festival. For those of you not in the know, think not flowers and spring showers, but rather Mendelssohn, Mozart, and the climax of the classical music calendar in the Czech Republic. Perhaps however classical music’s simply not your thing – in that case this is the classical festival for you. In Arts this week, Christian Falvey reports on the start of the three-week Prague Spring International Music Festival.

The studio Bratři v triku, or “Brothers in T-Shirts”, has been the major producer of Czech animated film since the 1940s. Virtually every talent in Czech cartooning has gone through the studio, and it has won essentially every national and international award available to animators. But most importantly perhaps, the work of the studio has influenced generation after generation of Eastern Europeans and audiences elsewhere in the world as well. In this week’s Arts, Christian Falvey takes a peek into the cradle of Czech animation.

Comic books and graphic novels have increased greatly in popularity in the Czech Republic over the last ten years, which saw release of both mainstream and avant garde titles, both classic as well as lesser-known authors. On the domestic scene artists also began to emerge, writers such as Jaroslav Rudiš and illustrators like Jaroslav 99, who collaborated on the celebrated graphic novel White Brook. In today’s Arts, another Czech duo: screenwriters Džian Baban and Vojtěch Mašek, authors of a phantasmagoric trilogy focusing on the adventures and

Jiří Jírů developed a love for photography from his uncle, the avant-garde Czech photographer Václav Jírů, before studying the discipline in Brussels and working for US publications such as Time and Newsweek. In the course of his career, Jiří Jírů has snapped celebrities ranging from the Bee Gees to Queen Elizabeth II, and spent almost a decade working as President Václav Havel’s official photographer. Jírů divides his time between Prague and Brussels, which is where he found himself on August 21, 1968: