METAPHOR AND IRONY 2 - Divadlo.cz

Jaroslav Malina
Jaroslav Malina was born in Prague in 1937 and is a set and costume designer,
a painter, printmaker and teacher. He studied from 1957-61 in the Faculty of
Education of Charles University in Prague, and from 1961-64 in the department
of stage design of the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in
Prague with Professor František Tröster, later teaching there himself (1990-2000)
and serving as Rector (1996-1999). In 1991, 1999 and 2003 he was the General
Commissioner of the Prague Quadrennial. In 1984 he was awarded the Gold
Medal at the International Triennial of Stage Design in Novy Sad in Serbia, and
in 2003 received an Honorary Doctorate from Nottingham Trent University in
Great Britain. He is the author of the expressively fantastic visual stylization of the
film Magpie in Hand (directed by Juraj Herz, 1982), banned under Communist
totalitarianism. He also designs the posters for his productions, which in a confrontation
between the designs and their realization round off a statement about
the visual appearance of the theme of the play. As a representative of action
scenography of the 1970s and 1980s he excelled in researching and using the
special qualities of a variety of materials, integrating them in both set and
costume designs. He made use especially of moldable and shapable draperies
with whose help he achieved an imaginative variability of the environment,
counting on the audience's powers of imagination. He always let himself be
inspired by the space in which he worked. At first he had his doubts about the
proscenium arch stage but later incorporated its architecture into the play. He had
already in his “action” period used elements of painted and pasteboard scenery,
which by irony and paraphrase upset the stylistic unity and metaphorically drew
attention to the ambiguity of the world. From the end of the 1980s painted and
“artificial” elements appears in his work ever more intensely, as does a visual
concept of composition of the whole picture of the stage (the inspiration of reappraised
Baroque illusionism). The principle of play, ironic quality and paraphrase
does not disappear. Some motifs appear in Malina's stage design through the
whole of his work. For example, the screen/wall: with the patina of life, both disturbed
and snow-white pure (made of different materials, including his legendary
use of drapery). The wall in the design for Per Olof Enquist's A Lynx's Hour (2003)
in itself links the authenticity of the 1970s and the visually aestheticized concept
of 1990s. The earthy - as it were burdened - structure of the wall, and the
harmonically effective outlines of a constellation on a blue base associate the two
basic principles of life - earth and heaven.
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