JAN MIKULÁŠEK

Director, scenic music composer, teacher (1978). Jan Mikulášek creates impressive stylized images. His aesthetics is characterized by extensive imagination, many metaphors, and play with the meanings of dialogues and contexts, as well as associations with selected topics. He uses theatricality to disrupt the reality and unified genres in staged texts, and he multiplies the characters on the stage, using film editing as well as recent fragmented forms of sketches and gradual resignation regarding the text.

In 2001, he was appointed artistic director of the Polárka Theatre. He did productions of Stevenson’s The Suicide Club and Dario Fo’s Archangels Do Not Play Billiards. He was later invited to the NDM in Ostrava, where he staged Caligula (2003), Hedda Gabler, and Oedipus. In 2005–2008, he was the art director of the Petr Bezruč Theatre in Ostrava; he staged Three Sisters, Wild Duck, and an adaptation of Eugene Onegin, 1984, and Wuthering Heights. As a regular director of the National Theatre in Brno, he staged V+W: The Letters, Golden Sixties, and Hamlets and Hedonists at the Theatre on the Balustrade. He also works with the National Theatre in Prague.

He did not finish his studies at JAMU in Brno. He is currently the regular director of the Theatre on the Balustrade and teaches at the Department of Alternative Theatre at DAMU. He received the Alfréd Radok Award 2013 for his production of Golden Sixties as the Best Production. The production of Eugene Onegin was awarded the Czech Literary Fund Foundation in 2007.