CZECH REPUBLIC
Continuo Theatre is an international independent theatre group led by Pavel Štourač, its director and artistic leader. The founding members of the group – Pavel and Helena Štourač – began to work together in 1990 at the Theatre Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, the Czech Republic. In 1992 they moved from Prague to South Bohemia and gained the professional status with the name Continuo Theatre. In 1995 they settled in a little village called Malovice, and set the premises of the company in a former farmstead, called The Plum Yard, where the group still lives and works.
In 1992 they moved from Prague to South Bohemia and gained the professional status with the name Continuo Theatre. In 1995 they settled in a little village called Malovice, and set the premises of the company in a former farmstead, called The Plum Yard, where the group lives and works. In more than twenty years of its existence, Continuo Theatre has created a great number of performances in which its course of development from puppet theatre and the circus art to the poetics that theatre critics call “the new Central European dreamy imagery” can be observed. Over the course of almost 25 years long existence, Continuo theatre created more than 50 performances and site-specific projects that mark its obvious evolution from puppetry beginnings, through street art and circus inspiration, to original poetics style that merges physical acting, life music, dance and significant visual stylization. Continuo Theatre is usually characterized as movement, physical, sometimes also visual theatre.
Continuo Theatre was founded as the company following the theatre understood as a process, as a need, the way of existence. However, Continuo was founded as an institution, too, that gave a task to itself to be independent politically and financially. An institution that is not meant only to create theatre art but also to secure the conditions necessary for an artistic creation.
Continuo’s production cannot be easily categorized into genres. Movement, live music, puppets (from three-inch puppets to carnival marionettes, masks and larger-than-life figures), physical acting, circus techniques, dance, along with striking visual stylization – all of these create the unmistakable poetics of each individual production. It is not very important for the creators whether their work is defined as visual or physical theatre just as it is not important for the actors to know whether they are dancing or acting. The matters of style or aesthetic are not so important. The group focuses its research on analyzing themes, experimental collective work, being surprised, learning and developing skills and sharing the result of the work with the audience.
Continuo Theatre is the only international professional theatre in Bohemia whose members live and work in a village. In 1995 they bought a former farmstead in the village of Malovice in Southern Bohemia and named it Plum Yard. The vast farmstead, which dates back to the year 1868, became the home of the Continuo Theatre members, the backdrop for their all-year work as well as a place for meetings, workshops and international summer theatre projects. Continuo members’ effort to create, run and develop an art centre outside an urban area is motivated by their desire to make enough free space not only for their own art production, but also for other groups and individuals, for organizing creative workshops for children as well as adults, conferences, seminars, educational programs, residencies for artists, community projects and others.
In 2015 Plum Yard was fundamentally changed because it was completely renovated and a new modern wooden multi – functional space was built in place of the original barn. This meant the important change of the background for the company, residents and the public and it also enabled to open the cultural and educational centre Plum Yard whose program and function are unique all over the Czech Republic. Thanks to these long-time home and foreign teaching experiences, Continuo’s members found out that they are able to develop full featured pedagogical program unavailable in the Czech republic elsewhere. Its goal is upbringing and education in the field of community and physical theatre, theatre performed in the public space and site-specific projects (projects taking place in unconventional, nontheatrical spaces).
