Swing Heil!

The co-production of the Pôtoň Theatre and the Jihlava Horácke Theatre is based on the Petr Koura book Swingers and Grebes in The Power of the Protectorate about the Czech urban subculture of swing kids. The authors of the libretto, Iveta Ditte Jurčová and Michal Ditte, decided to show the absurdity of the times through the stories of two individuals. Nina Jirsíková (real name Anna) was a versatile artist. Inter alia, she was member of the dance group Jenčíkovy Girls that performed in the productions of Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich in their avant-garde Liberated Theatre.
Jirsíková worked closely with the Prague theatre D 34 and the stage director E. F. Burian. Her libretto A Tale of Dance – about a kingdom where dancing was forbidden anticipated the ban on dancing in Bohemia in 1941. It brought Jirsíková to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Paradoxically, she survived the camp precisely because she danced and was artistically active there. Anna Goldsteiner is the less conspicuous character in the production. She lived in the small Austrian town of Pulkau. Young swing and jazz aficionados, including her son, used to in her flat for over a year. The townspeople reported them. Gestapo arrested . She was accused of high treason and anti-state activity. In 1944 she was demonstratively executed by beheading. As a memento of this absurd act, woman’s head appears in the production in several scene in the form of an object or lighting that cuts off the rest of the performer’s body.
The stage director Iveta Ditte Jurčová has a fine sense for gradually building the point of her productions, moving from gentle irony to absurdity of monstrous proportions. The metaphors created on stage amuse at first, only for the light smile to freeze in a monstrous grin. Ditte Jurčová achieves that by using contrasts, such as rapid music and slow movement. Yet these are not randomly created actions. The precise work of the director, makes the actors/dancers methodically gradate the internal tension of the performances to the point where the audience gets chills. (…) Swing Heil! can be described as a classic post-dramatic theatre.

The production is deconstructed into individual elements, sound and image work independently. It is not linear in plot or time: both only exist as a certain narrative boundary, yet we move freely in any direction in the two stories, using documentary material and acting distance. Each scene contains several layers that can be named, while remaining open to individual viewer interpretation.
Dária Fojtíková Fehérová: Art Cannot be Banned [Umenie sa nedá zakázať]. In MLOKi [online]. 15. 6. 2021. Available at: https://mloki.sk/umenie-sa-neda-zakazat/