Solo for Three

• Scenario, choreography and stage direction: Petr Zuska
• Music and lyrics: Jacques Brel, Vladimir Vysotsky, Karel Kryl
• Sets: Jan Dušek
• Costumes: Lucie Loosová
• Light design: Petr Zuska, Pavel Kremlík
• Sound design: Zbyněk Perla
• Duration: 115 min.
• Number of dancers: 26
• World premiere: 19. 5. 2007 - Czech National Ballet

Three poets and singers, three great artists, three humans. Three distinct personalities with different fates, representing three different cultures. Yet notwithstanding their different languages, music and poetics of their lyrics, they had a great deal in common. Today considered classics, even though they did not long to become classics, they seem to speak a similar language. Their words, spurting from the very core of their hearts, are as true as truth can be. Words relentlessly grappling with violence, falsehood and betrayal, always emphasising the value of truth, tenderness and love. Three uncompromising fighters for humanity, all of them having died young, before reaching the age of 50. The dance production, bearing the subtitle Solo for Three, is not sheer narration, rather presenting images blending together into a mosaic, a “flashback” of someone who might have been named Jacques, or Vladimir or Karel … But is does not matter. The “someone” bears within shreds of all the three men, to a certain degree actually speaking for them today. By means of epic and lyric images, in the vein of the vehement protest, ranging from specific humour, gentle pathos, infinite sorrow, to the cognizance of the inevitability of solitude and death. Yet the unfettered inner energy, giving rise to something novel and singular, also exhausts and kills.

Foto: Pavel Hejný, Martin Divíšek