REVIEW: Hóraček’s songs float in space – News

The program opens with the song Man is born a dancer, as if foreshadowing what awaits the audience. This is followed by a poetic stage concert, in which Horáček’s poems inspired the creator of the project, the director Rostislav Novák Jr., to create impressive images that reflect their content and mission in new contexts.

The lyrics are freely worked with, they are not only sung, but also rapped, they sound in repeated fragments and wholes from the mouths of singers Jan Cina, Vladimír 518, Rozália Havelková, Katarzia, Nadi Válová, Bára Poláková, Ondřej Ruml and many others. And very well.

Together with the bodies of acrobats, dancers, but also singers, they float through the space, shine with movement and colors of costumes and scenic elements, and especially live music performed by the CLPBND band led by Jan Balcar and David Hlaváč, who are also the authors of their sometimes very unusual musical arrangements.

The sound of the band with beautiful saxophone solos is a separate experience of a remarkable evening, but in which all components are connected together and more than thirty actors form one solid unit.

To reveal the details would be to deprive the audience of the surprise arising from the solution of individual songs. They work not only with poetry and movement, but also with irony and humor, as in the case of a special transcription of the hit Levandulová or a paraphrase of an advertisement for the rabbit Azurita, which, however, as a whole, seems a bit long-winded and as if from another world.

The premiere of the Horáček GEN XYZ project, which took place in the presence of the lyricist Michal Horáček, the Minister of Culture Martin Baxa and the Mayor of of the city of Prague Bohuslav Svoboda, was received by the audience with a thunderous ovation and a standing ovation. One of the creators’ goals is to gain the interest of the younger generation in Horáček’s work. Encouragingly, the response to the premiere proves that it could be done.