Ten years ago I quit my regular job to become a full-time theatre artist. I thought I'd give it a year or two and see what would happen. Every project felt like it could be the last, so I treated it that way, putting everything I had into it. Somehow, ten years went by, and one “last” project followed another. Some were successful, some divided audiences, one almost broke me. This autumn, we are bringing a few of them back to Prague to celebrate a decade of making theatre in Prague’s independent scene. There is quite a lot to see, so come see us at Alfred in the Yard theatre! In the meantime, here is a short essay about the work, the life around it, and everything in between.

The oldest piece we are presenting is Shadow Meadow (2017), our first project created specifically for Alfred in the Yard. We started working on it ten years ago, after being selected through the theatre's open call. The invitation to make a performance inside the theatre felt like a small breakthrough for us. Before that, we performed wherever we could: parking lots, housing estates, churches, even an ice hockey stadium… Found spaces have one obvious advantage: you don't have to spend anything on set design, and we didn't have any funding anyway.

When I say “we”, I mean producer and dramaturg Táňa Švehlová, myself, and the artists we invited to work with us on each project. For Shadow Meadow, we reconnected with the wonderfully eccentric Irina Andreeva, whom we had met through earlier projects, and began rehearsing in her crumbling studio in Bubeneč, Prague.

Back then, my artistic method was simply to put everything I loved on stage, and looking back, that approach still makes sense to me. Strobes, smoke, styrofoam, black metal, Irina… you can love all of that and still hold it together. We made the piece very intuitively, without thinking too much about what we were actually doing or where it might lead. The response at the premiere was mixed; the audience split in two, though those who liked it were a tiny minority. But that small, loyal crowd gave us the impression that we weren't alone.

The performance carries a certain rawness and darkness, along with the energy we had at the time: the urge to make something unmistakable and to find our place. We are bringing it back mainly because Irina passed away two years ago, and we want to make her present again through the performance itself and through a discussion titled after one of the last words I heard her say: “Why… why theatre?”

The following years were existentially difficult, but at least we trusted what we were doing. So the next "last" project was Virtual Ritual (2019) at the Archa Theatre. It has become our most successful work so far, with 51 performances in more than 20 cities across Europe. We performed everywhere from underground events such as the Trať festival, held at an unused railway station, to the United Nations COP 17 Conference in Yerevan this October. This was the first time I felt that it was possible to speak to a broader audience through our “avant-garde” aesthetics. It gave us the confidence to keep going.

By that point, most of the work I had made, including several pieces that are not part of this retrospective, was to some extent satirical. But the pandemic, followed by the military invasion 1,400 km away from our theatre, was such a brutal interruption of everything that it made me reconsider this approach and start looking for something else. That search led to a performance with the most romantic title I've ever come up with: Landscape with a Pheasant, a Hare and a Doe (2022). In a way, working again with image, space and material was a desire to return to the beginning, but that was no longer fully possible. Landscape already shows the change I had undergone along the way. If my first performance was chaotic, unpolished, devised intuitively, the later works became more refined. I also became more conscious of what I was doing and started to label my pieces as performative essays.

Having a home scene to return to at Alfred in the Yard allowed us to experiment further and try out silly ideas that sometimes led to unexpected results, but more often ended in catastrophe. Happy Hour (2023) is a good example of that. We had first experimented with low-frequency sound in Shadow Meadow, and ever since, the urge to push that idea to its limit kept returning. During one rehearsal, we built an architectural structure out of styrofoam blocks and brought it down using sub-bass frequencies. The effect was overwhelming. Unfortunately, it also rattled the windows of the surrounding buildings. We were banned from using sub-bass speakers, but the styrofoam stayed. A lot of styrofoam.

With my latest productions I have returned to a more direct engagement with these “interesting times”. In Wandervogel (2024), for the first time in my artistic career, I found a specific history, a concrete story, in Mark Cornwall’s book The Devil’s Wall. It made me question my belief that devised theatre was the only way for me to make theatre. Given the body of work that came before it, the attempt to simply tell a story felt like a fucking radical gesture.

Wandervogel was a really lucky one. It was one of those rare times when the creative process actually felt like the colourful adventure it is often portrayed as. Things came together almost effortlessly, and for once, the audience seemed to agree.

The same can't be said for Ochlos, Ochlos, Ochlos (2025–26). Here's the thing: the success of Wandervogel meant more touring, less rehearsal time and, on top of that, some health problems. Together, they created a situation we failed to escape in time. We had to premiere the piece while it was still very much a work in progress. The energy was gone. So was my enthusiasm for making theatre.

But perhaps this is also what independence means. You can fail, but you can also spend another year getting the work to where you want it to be. We rebuilt the whole piece over and over again until we felt it had found the right shape, and this is the version we are presenting here. I don't think we could have done this in a state theatre.

So… what is the next “last” project? 

That is what we are trying to figure out now, and that may be the point of looking back. Reading this text back, it feels less like a retrospective of performances than of decisions to keep going. Which is perhaps one and the same thing.

Being independent doesn't mean being alone. So this is the moment to say thank you to everyone we have depended on along the way:  Irina Andreeva, Tinka Avramova, Matouš Hekela, Sodja Zupanc Lotker, Adéla Vosičková, Ondřej Růžička, Arseniy Mikhailov, Matthias Hesselbacher, David Prokopic, Philipp Schenker, Halka Třešňáková, Wayne Jordan, Václav Hruška, Osamu Okamura, Ondřej Pokorný, Ondřej Husar, Robin Seidl, Tomáš Janypka, Erika Čičmanová, Martin Vala, Matěj Šumbera, Václav Němec, Ellen Pávková, Jan Hofman, Lucia Škandíková, Ondřej Kyncl, Tomáš Procházka, Maria Cavina, Ewan McLaren, Martin Špetlík, Bára Švehlová, Ladislav Švehla, Jan Mocek st.…