PERSONAL HISTORY
In 1989 I was five years old… it’s just skin deep for me

The theatre performance “PERSONAL HISTORY In 1989 I was five years old… it’s just skin deep for me” is the work of a creative team whose members were around five years old at the time of the revolution. They had virtually no experience of totalitarianism. However, they spent half a year intensively interviewing their relatives, teachers, historians, and eye witnesses, finding out that the fragmented shards of totalitarianism still linger within them. The director, Petra Tejnorová, set up an extraordinary team comprising the most recent theatre professionals to graduate from DAMU. Drawing on oral history, their own memories and a six-month quest, the producers and actors try to view the recent totalitarian past in an utterly blurred and very open way from various angles. Their goal is not to unearth any truths about the current state of society or form a generational opinion on a time now past, because their encounters with the past have brought surprises rather than conflict.

The performance is based on the direct personal testimonies of the seven actors. These testimonies are composed of fragments of text drawn from interviews conducted with the actors and recorded by a team of experts from the Oral History Centre of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, headed by Miroslav Vaněk. The themes of the interviews encompassed family; everydayness and leisure; work; and politics.


Based on these themes arising from the biographical narratives provided by the actors and, subsequently, by their parents and grandparents (the interviews with the parents were recorded by the actors themselves), a script emerged incorporating authentic childhood memories that were kneaded into a literary form by the translator and writer Bára Gregorová.

The performance is based on seven life stories of people from a single generation (in 1989 they were four to six years old). With no first-hand experience, what they know of the era their parents lived through has been handed down to them. Thanks to their parents and grandparents, they can grasp the mood that prevailed under the previous regime. They have also benefited from a media campaign focusing on the fact that 2009 is the 20th anniversary of the fall of totalitarian regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. Their encounter with the past is not just played out as a conflict, but as a surprise, and this is the source of further questions.

If we want to search for our own identity, we cannot avoid conflict with the past and the questions it engenders. We do not want our assessment of a history we know only indirectly to be superficial; rather, we are keen to provide a platform for questions. Our goal is not to unearth the truth about the current state of society or form a uniform opinion on a time now past. Instead, we want to look at the recent past from different points of view, entirely openly and without any clear-cut opinion.

"In the beginning it was a topic on which we were unable to assume a clear position, like when a fish slips from your hands countless times in succession, and all you can feel is the imprint it left on your palms. So we started to investigate what we might call this elusive fish of ours – the inability to come to grips with it, the highly disquieting confusion surrounding this issue, and our aloofness from it. We started to question various experts and we met several prominent people. Finally, as this phenomenon started taking on sharper contours we tried to place it at the centre of our ‘observations’ and examine it with the help of oral history methods.  We filmed interviews with our parents, and fragments of interviews with the actors became the keystone of the script, with video sequences from the interviews they recorded with their parents appearing directly in the production... Through our families, this theme slowly evolved into more personal matters, enabling us to start focusing, after the phenomenon of the elusive fish, on that imprint that had remained in the palm of our hands and which we can still see everywhere around us today,” explains Petra Tejnorová, the director and person behind the concept of the project, as she describes how the production came into being, and adds: “In this sense, we are continuing the tradition of documentary drama, especially in the construction of the text (text parts). We exploit the oral history method, which is based on the testimonies of those directly involved in selected events seen from the ‘bottom up’, that is, with a focus on grassroots history. In order to maintain the theatricality, and from the perspective of physical theatre, we build on the designation of this style by the DV8 group, which uses the term ‘physical theatre’ to denote a  style which combines dance, theatre and other multimedia elements into a unique performance. By combining these two elements, we are trying to create a plastic, yet genuine, theatrical image that will engage not only the audience’s rationale, but also its internal tactile experience and emotion.”

Petra Tejnorová

Concept, director: Petra Tejnorová

Art director: Martina Musilová
Stage design: Antonín Šilar
Costumes: Marie Černíková
Music and sound design: Jan Burian
Interactive design: Jonáš Strouhal
Light design: Antonín Šilar, Patrik Sedlák, Šimon Kočí
Assistance with movement and choreography: Lucia Kašiarová
Translation and literary assistance: Bára Gregorová

Cast: Maja Danadová (SK), Daria Iwan (PL), Veduna Štíchová (CZ), Ondřej Bauer (CZ), Jakub Gottwald (CZ), Václav Jelínek (CZ), Petr Vančura (CZ)

The project benefited from the cooperation of Ondřej Cihlář, Vratislav Šrámek, Miroslav Vaněk and his team of researchers from the Oral History Centre of the Academy of Science of the Czech Republic, Jaroslav Hrdlička


The theatre project is a co-production with the Roxy/NoD Experimental Stage.


Personal History was created as a part of Totalitarian Circus, one of the projects run by Opona to recall and reflect on the reality of life in a society warped by Communist totalitarianism.