In 2009 the International Cooperation Dpt. organized the exhibition project called Theatre and Revolution – First Weeks of the Velvet Revolution in Czech and Moravian Theatres, focusing on presentation of primary research of theatre archives, open sources, and archives of territorial units, in the form of pictures and texts in Czech and English. The exhibition depicted the role and engagement of Czech theatremakers and theatre infrastructures in revolution processes in November and December 1989 in the axis of Plzeň – Ústí nad Labem – Praha – Brno – Olomouc – Ostrava. The exhibition was presented in Prague, Olomouc, Belgium, and Russia, and included a conference, discussion with personalities who participated in the revolutionary events, and an exhibition catalogue We Didn’t Give Up published by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes.
The year 2019 is the 30th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, thus we follow the research and focus on the birth and activities of independent theatres and companies in the new environment of social and political transformation, and decentralization of the theatre network in the context of new tools of cultural policy in the 1990s. The research includes basic research in archives and journals with the goal to create a pre-corpus for the exhibition and publication, but also interviews conducted according to the methods of oral history with more than fifty leading figures of the Czech theatre culture in the 1990s.
Expected project outcomes:
- Publication (2019)
- Exhibition (2019)
- Conference (23-24 October 2019)
