Name: Scheherazade
Start: 2027-04-17T14:00:00
Location: National Theatre Prague

Johannes Witt

Haruka Iguchi

Alina Nanu

Aya Okumura

Paul Irmatov

Danilo Lo Monaco

Federico Ievoli

Francesco Scarpato

Patrik Holeček

Matěj Šust

Giovanni Rotolo

Nina Fernandes

Nana Nakagawa

Aya Watanabe

Kristýna Němečková

Chihiro Sudo

Anna Novotná

Kenyo Suzuki

Alexandra Pera

Marco Piraino

Evgeniya Victory Gonzalez

Robert Jerjen

Elena Dombrowski

Václav Zahradník

Marta Monesi

Carlo Cerri

Anna Biagiotti

Mauro Bigonzetti

Národní divadlo

Carmen is actually one of the first verismo operas that preceded the “manifesto” of the Italian artistic movement. Its style, and the death of the title heroine, which were at variance with the established opéra comique conventions, seem to have been the reason why the work did not give rise to much public enthusiasm at and in the wake of the world premiere in Paris in 1875. Yet Carmen soon triumphed in other European cities.

Carmen

National Theatre Prague

The first has been conceived by Robert Bondara, a Polish choreographer, stage director and teacher, formerly a dancer with the Polish National Ballet and since 2018 director of the Poznan Grand Theatre Ballet.

Avant-Garde

Thomas S. Eliot wrote his poem – an opus magnum of the 20th century – as a reflection of the horrors of WWI and situated it in a landscape woven from the historical consciousness of humanity and voices of European literature. Through this open barren land, where town meets sea and desert and the state has collapsed, rambles don Quixote, the wandering knight who upholds the values of chivalry and never loses his faith in the power of love. Is he obsolete, foolish? While don Quixote’s acts are incomprehensible by reason, our hearts root for him. The production searches for the fundamental values in a country swept by the war. It is also a tribute to the naive adoration of Dulcinea del Toboso and to the thousands of heroes conceived by human imagination, the great spirits shining as a still point of the turning world.

Don Quixote. The Waste Land

State Opera

Bílá Voda, or White Water, a remote village hidden in the mountains... Two young girls consecrated to God – Tobie and Evarista – arrive in the village the last September night of 1950, when the communist regime interned all Czechoslovak nuns in concentration convents. They are forced to labour in the local factory together with all other nuns. Tobie is crippled forever by the hard work, while Evarista has her vow of chastity forcibly broken and suffers humiliation in a communist prison. Yet the wardens cannot deprive her of her faith and loyalty to the order. Can a nun rebel against the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, stand against the regime and the collaborating church? The hardest battle must be fought within one’s own soul...

Bílá Voda (White Water)

The Estates Theatre

Composed by one of the major figures of 20th-century musical theatre – the creator of 16 musicals and hundreds of songs, who launched his career writing the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story – it is an iconic work of its genre. SWEENEY TODD: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a riveting synthesis of dark humour, horror and melodrama, imbued with brilliant musical irony.

SWEENEY TODD: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

The ballet treats Franz Kafka’s feted novel, revealing the absurdity and cruelty of the bureaucratic apparatus the protagonist grapples with to no avail. Bigonzetti masterfully combines dance, music and imaginative scenery, created by Carlo Cerri. Owing to its black-and-white visual concept and video projections, the production evokes the film noir aesthetics, thus paying tribute to Orson Welles’s seminal cinematic adaptation.

Kafka: The Trial

The Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich set Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk to a libretto he wrote together with Alexander Preis after the eponymous novella by Nikolai Leskov. He himself referred to the opera as a satirical tragedy. The main character, Katerina, is a murderess haunted by qualms of conscience. Yet, with a touch of bitter humour, Shostakovich also focuses on the moral decay of the inhabitants of a Russian village, revealing the omnipresent torpidity and recklessness. Life without hope and love is the very reason for the heroine’s downfall.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Hedda, the proud daughter of General Gabler, loves horse riding, playing the piano, and pistol shooting. To everyone’s surprise, the reserved, steely-eyed beauty marries the aspiring historian and soon-to-be professor Jörgen Tesman; returning from a long honeymoon, the couple move into a mansion fully satisfying Hedda’s wishes. Yet the ghosts of the past come forth. Tea Elvsted, a mutual acquaintance, comes to the town, joined by Eilert Løvborg, Tesman’s more handsome and talented rival and Hedda’s old flame. Back then, the demons of alcohol and drugs had destroyed Løvborg’s brilliant intellect, and his dubious reputation made him an unsuitable match for Hedda, both financially and socially. However, Løvborg has overcome his addictions with the loving care of Tea and even has a new book published. As Tesman’s prospects of the professorship seems uncertain and Hedda watches her dream life crumble, darkness, anger, and harshness take over her and she is ready to reckon with the world and those around her.

Hedda Gabler

During a single week, a girl grows into a woman and her dreams turn into a dark nightmare. The world is no longer as Valerie has imagined it. This initiation rite reveals the secrets of the passage to adulthood and social hypocrisy through hyperbole and sarcasm borrowed from Vítězslav Nezval. The production is a poetic adaptation of the bizarre dark novel, which still evokes emotions, passion and fear.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

The councillors of Honice are to elect a bellman, the person responsible for security in the village. The task is formidable, with two strong candidates running for office – the veteran soldier Valentin Bláha and the tailor František Fiala. What is more, the mayor, Filip Dubský, and the first councillor, Jakub Bušek, obstinately sit tight, neither of them willing to compromise. The fraught situation is further aggravated by the municipal council receiving an anonymous letter threatening arson. A plethora of human types is presented on the stage – the “important persons” and their wives, old-timers, young lovers, lowlifes, pig-headed dimwits, tenacious truth-seekers and enthusiastic dupes. All of them live their little lives and great dreams, all of them desire, fight and argue, while the Red Rooster hovers above their roofs … Some 135 years after it was written, Our Uppish and Defiant Fellows is still a fascinating Czech play, a play about ourselves across generations and eras, a play in which the contest for the post of bellman becomes a gigantic struggle for truth and honesty.

Our Uppish and Defiant Fellows

Imagine you could create a new world from absolute nothingness. The kind of world you may dream about, safe, yet abounding in surprises and adventures. Our hero stands at the very beginning – with imagination and lily-white paper that can become anything. A new world arises from imagination, creativity and playfulness. Truly strange things happen in the paper world, and when its frolicsome inhabitants appear, rest assured that adventure will soon follow. But a boy who likes seeking new discoveries is sometimes somewhat impetuous, and he has to learn how to behave in the world of fragile paper so as not to harm it. There is, however, much more in store – you will see, for instance, the great power of kindness and good-willingness, and the boy’s paper pals will also help to find him the path to true friendship.

Paper Story

Mary W. Shelley wrote her first and most famous novel in 1818. Though it has turned a literary classic, it is mostly known from pop culture references, film adaptations, and variations emphasizing the image of a horrific monster stitched together from various body parts by the insane professor Frankenstein. The (in)human creature secretly brought to life in the ambitious scientist’s laboratory has no name in Mary Shelley’s iconic horror novel. The creator dismisses his creation upon its ‘birth’ as a failed experiment, throwing it on a solitary desperate journey where the only thing it longs for is a compassion.

Frankenstein

The renowned Italian choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti created Scheherazade for the Czech National Ballet, in tandem with Carlo Cerri, his long-term collaborator. Based on the famous Middle Eastern story, the full-length ballet features a mesmerising, diverse dance idiom, and overwhelming visual dimensions. Mauro Bigonzetti, long-standing artistic director of the Aterballetto, Reggio Emilia, is a great modern dance innovator, one of the world’s most feted ballet creators and a sensitive storyteller. Blending contemporary and classical elements, he reveals and depicts the beauty of the human body almost like a sculptor, yet his works are far from academic. Bigonzetti has previously worked with the Czech National Ballet on three occasions. In 2016, Prague staged to great acclaim his Vertigo; in 2019, the Estates Theatre hosted the world premiere of Kafka: The Trial; and in the 2023/24 season, the State Opera presented his choreography to Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden within the unique project Holo Harmonies.