METAPHOR AND IRONY 2 - Divadlo.cz

Jana Zbořilová
Jana Zbořilová was born in Prague in 1952 and is a set and costume designer.
From 1972-74 she studied stage design under Professor Michael Romberg and
Professor Albert Pražák (a pupil of František Tröster) at the Theatre Faculty of the
Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where she has been teaching since 1990.
In 2001 she won the Gold Medal at the Triennial of Stage Design in Nový Sad in
Serbia. She is influenced by the openness, objectivity and variability of action
scenography and the connected imaginative poetics of the Brno Theatre Goose on
a String, with which she worked in the 1970s. She collaborated with the poetic line
of this studio-type theatre (director Eva Tálská), full of tenderness, cruelty, but also
inventive humor (Nosegay, Song of Viktorka, Gallows Songs). When the theme
requires it, her humor has recently become sarcastic to the point of merciless
incrimination (especially in the costume element). A sense for comic and poetic
playfulness also operates on large stages, where at the same time the gesture of
monumental shape and dramatic pathos is important (the National Theatre in
Brno in collaboration with director Zdeněk Kaloč, 1990s). There is in her designs
an inexhaustible sense of humour and play with subjects and meanings, manifested
in diverse nuances. Connected with this is the method of collage in which
some of her set designs are carried out (Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, 1996, Molière's
Misanthrope, 1997, Marivaux's Le Dispute, 2002). A spontaneous linkage with the
line leading from the Poetism of the 1920s (the Czech period of Surrealism), of
captivating film montage, through the material and objective diversity of visual
art of the 1960s to the “clip” aesthetic of Post-Modernism is manifested here. Her
costume creations focus on a crucial point of grotesque parody, chiefly in the
female characters which are captured with a devastating lack of flattery. Her
designs for the play Horse and Death With Me (1999) by Eva Tálská present subtle
clowns, endowed with a nostalgic poetry; the female clown however is presented
as a hyperbolized caricature of a bogus wrestler.
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