Director and scriptwriter JIŘÍ HONZÍREK (* 1979) is a graduate of dramaturgy and directing at the Theatre Faculty of JAMU. His production projects often focus on political topics and current social issues, which he explores through a wide range of artistic means. His directorial work encompasses the whole spectrum of creative approaches, from documentary theatre, site specific projects, improvisational approaches to classical drama. He has directed more than forty theatre productions and has also worked as a scriptwriter on a number of productions. He directed guest productions at the Drama Studio in Ústí nad Labem, the West Bohemian Theatre in Cheb, the Municipal Theatre in Most, the Švanda Theatre in Prague, the Slovácké Theatre in Uherské Hradiště, the HaDivadlo Theatre and the Polárka Theatre in Brno. Jiří Honzírek's social commitment is also reflected in other activities outside the theatre, where he has collaborated with the Nesehnutí organization, Amnesty International and Transparency International. He is active in "co2kolektiv", an open theatre platform focusing on the phenomenon of the ongoing climate change, and is also a journalist.

Jiří Honzírek is most prominently associated with the Feste Theatre, which he founded in 2006. It is a chamber theatre without a permanent ensemble, currently operating in the space of the Industra cultural centre. Under Honzírek's direction, the Feste Theatre focuses on original productions, but its aim is not simply to create theatrical experiences. It defines itself as a social platform, whose aim is to develop discussion and raise pressing and socially sensitive topics, which it expresses through artistic means. It significantly expands the boundaries of the classical theatre.

Feste's productions use the means of documentary theatre, site-specific projects, movement improvisation and elements of immersive theatre. One of its hallmarks is the pursuit of a deep understanding of the subject, which often has almost the character of original research in the field. The theatre artists collaborate with university and academic departments, civil activists, and experts on discrimination, gender and ecology. The aim is a critical reflection on the contemporary societal phenomena ranging from covert and overt racism, debt traps, housing crisis, addictions and national stereotypes, which is an important prerequisite for the development of an open civil society.

I don't think I'm able to say when I first came across the term. Which also has to do with the fact that the definition of the phrase artistic research is rather vague or often used a lot, without any more precise or defined substance of the actual work behind it. As a result of starting my PhD, I'll be encountering it more often and only then will I somehow clarify it myself or learn about it what I don't know yet. There's probably a bit of a difference between the term artistic research and art research. I think I would understand more art research, where art is investigated by some criteria or some discipline. It may be a sociological research on art, or research from the viewpoint of anthropology, or political science, or psychological research on art. For now I can imagine that as something more specific. 

For example, at the Feste Theatre we work with the material that is social-sociological, such as the life of homeless people or the life of people who are facing seizure of their property due to debts. This means that we are exploring a social phenomenon in an artistic way. I'm not sure if this is artistic research, because I think it's only done at the level of PhD students, where they themselves, as part of their reflection, research art, what they do as well as what someone else does. The Feste Theatre may be doing artistic research in a broader sense in some of their documentary productions, but I think it's very different or not as edgy. We always work with an opinion leader in a given field or someone who is an insider on a certain topic. When we're interested in the life of homeless people or in the housing crisis, we find relevant and competent NGOs and work together with them. You might think that we spend for instance a year researching a given sector or homeless people or people in a housing crisis and we do the research ourselves, but in reality it's that we work with a social housing platform or IQ Roma Service and find that the research has already been done. Unless one chooses something really narrow, there is already some research done, often by universities. So we tend to work with someone else's professional research and actually transform it, trying to install it on the stage and communicate it to the general public. I feel that it's very important when you manage to transfer research that is in itself indigestible and unreadable, nobody knows about it and the mainstream media do not care about it, into the mainstream, so that not only the audience that knows the research and would seek it out on their own, but the general audience, too, would come to the performance. Nowadays, perhaps the challenge for the theatre that wants to call itself political - and I'd be careful with that word - is to transfer something into the mainstream because that's where it is necessary to influence. Playing all the time for those who know is no longer quite productive.

This question concerns the very lively environment within the Feste theatre, because the selection of themes is rather intuitive and often individual, as far as I am concerned. I put what seems to me to be an important topic into a dramaturgical mix, from which my colleague Katarína Koišová and I then choose. I have also been thinking for some time whether there should be something like a dramaturgy board that meets once every six months and somehow draws out of the thirty current topics some of which the Feste will actually do. But at the moment, I choose it based on my own feeling of what I think is acute or important. 

I would also add that sometimes it happens that we are invited to some topic, which is the case with the Meeting Brno festival, which is defined dramaturgically every year and we are invited there. It has to be said that the assignment is quite broad, it's not something that is put in front of us as "you have to do this", but the dramaturgical lines are well named and we then choose one of them and work on it. 

Some institutions choose the Feste Theatre because they know that we do themes that are not often dealt with in larger theatres, so they get in touch. This was the case in Ústí nad Labem, where the platform for social housing wanted to do a low-threshold happening in which they could get all the actors in the housing crisis sector into one audience, that is, both people from the city administration and people who are affected, both NGOs and developers who build apartments, and so on. Our task was to come up with a low-threshold performance. And because it had this weird crazy playful promotion, all kinds of people really came out. Some of them were from those mentioned sectors, and so we managed to get them to come to the same table, and they talked to each other afterwards.

I would say the primary interest was human. It was really born out of a deep desire that there should be a publication from which others could learn about theatre, about which not much had been written, and which was almost unknown until then. And yet for me it was something fascinating! The fact that a theatre was founded by two Czechs in exile just because they wanted to do free theatre in a free country! That was the first impulse that I followed. I think that even in the scientific field it makes sense, too. My supervisor, Professor Cejpek, said that this work fills a kind of white space on the map of Czechoslovak theatre abroad in those years. For me, the book remains inspirational and I believe it can be an inspiration for others in their approach to theatre making. 

Probably one of the most important things is that one must have a guide. That can be anybody, and it depends on which view I, as the creator, let in first, because that frames it. The guide that walks with me through a location I don't know is crucial because it leaves the strongest mark on me. I am then greatly influenced by his lens, the structure of his acquaintances, or the words he uses when talking about his location when I am working independently. I feel that the selection of the very first guide happens depending on who commissions the work. Then if I go there without an assignment, I have to have a well-defined idea of I am interested in and what I'm bringing in with me. I guess an artist always enters an environment that he doesn't know with an assumption, a feeling, an impression, a book he's read, a love or a friend, some motivation will always be there. But the guide will offer a web of relationships of the given place. Then I proceed on my own and choose other guides who have a different focus, who look at the space with different eyes, as I need a different focus. And then self-study is added to that. This means identifying the key nodes, which are either neuralgic points, i.e. some kind of trouble spots in the place, or on the other hand, big issues: what will be created in the building gaps, what will be demolished, what will not be demolished, where will be the excluded area, why are the homeless sleeping somewhere and not elsewhere, and so on. And I have an advantage in that I usually have a team. I don't do the fieldwork directly in the locality myself, but I already have with me, for example, an actor, a dramaturg, a musician and so on. Then a dialogue is added, because they feel it too in some way.

After grammar school I didn't know what to do, what to do with myself. The only thing I did with gusto was to write various poems and short stories, so I spent about three quarters of a year at a higher vocational library school in Řečkovice. I was dating a girl whose mother taught at the Janáček Academy, and we got tickets to the Marta Theatre from time to time. So we went to the theatre, which I liked, and then when we went home, I always knew how I would have done it better, of course. Then I applied to the Janáček Academy, where I failed at first, and went on to study sociology and journalism for another year. At the Faculty of Social Studies I was the so-called "extraordinary student", but I had a student's record book, I went to lectures and took exams as other students. But then I failed the entrance exam to the regular first year at the FSS, and in the meantime I got admitted to the JAMU to study dramaturgy - I wanted to go somewhere where you can write. The year I spent at the FSS was crucial for my professional and personal life, because the friends who are important to me today are many from there, not only from the JAMU. We took sociology and journalism courses at the FSS, and the combination of these two disciplines was interesting. I made a lot of friends then among people who are now working in NGOs or at the Sociology Department of the FSS. That's where I realized that I was interested in the life of society and the mechanisms that invisibly marginalize certain groups, or that invisible gaps are being created where people that nobody writes about and nobody really knows are falling into. 

When I started studying at the JAMU, I slowly became aware that hardly anyone was doing theatre that dealt with this. In 2004, I spent a year studying in Germany and I found out that there was a lot more of it being done there, so it all came together. When I came out of school, one of the first things we did, or actually the very first thing, was a production about the lives of Muslim men and women in the Czech Republic, which was probably quite surprising given that it was 2006. We collaborated with Masaryk University, we went to mosques, both in Prague and Brno. We did interviews, it was actually quite research work. 

First and foremost, it's a social interest. That's a very good question! More than once in the past, I talked to an audience member or a theatre critic or a colleague about what our style of theatre was. And I don't think that the Feste theatre has a completely defined artistic style. I don't know if that's a good thing or a completely bad thing, but it's reflected in the fact that first you go around and see that there's a burning issue somewhere. In the preparation of a production, it always works much better for the theatre itself, for the actors, and for my work, if I feel it's a problem. If it touches me in some way, or if it moves me internally in some way, it's something that one doesn't just perceive through intellectual contexts, but through something that resonates in the human body, even physically. The body is often a kind of helper for artists, because then you can quite recognize what is intense and what is not. That initial impulse is very often something that is interesting in society, in politics or perhaps in history. 

Just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. The Feste Theatre has done things that are clearly drama, like Diagnosis: Masaryk, but at the same time things that are, let's say, documentary, docu-dramatic, which is our latest play, Good Luck, which we're performing in a caravan. It's not a pure documentary, but based on documentary materials, a fictional text is created that responds to the documentary materials. And the third genre is a really raw documentary, which was, for example, Debt-barons, which starred two ladies facing seizure of property due to debts. The range of those styles is quite considerable, and that's just made possible by the fact that there's a theme at the beginning that one feels intensely. Then only one looks for the form which is appropriate. That's why the actor is also a significant creator, a co-creator. Often it is not the case that clear finished texts are presented to actors, but they are expected to contribute. I, of course, after a few weeks, can sense how someone is doing with the work and whether it's more or less annoying to someone else, and I act accordingly. This could paradoxically lead to drama, such as Diagnosis: Masaryk, in which dramaturg Katarína Koišová and I thought it would be a good idea to approach an author who would also be close to research and have a fresh perspective on Jan Masaryk. We approached Jakub Macek, who is a media sociologist. When I read about Jan Masaryk, things that are important to me and that are still a great unknown to me began to connect. And at the same time I feel that these personal things, like the relationship between the son and the father, and that's what the production Diagnosis: Masaryk is actually about, are not just about me, and that if I can talk about them to the public through a theatrical metaphor, I can touch other people as well.

At least with things that are currently in repertory, this is the rule. For the production about Petr Kellner we consulted Vojtěch Boháč from Voxpot, who is writing a book on Petr Kellner. The play was written by Roman Sikora, who did quite a lot of research when writing it, because you couldn't find much about Peter Kellner on the Czech internet when he was alive, but you could on the Russian internet. And because Roman Sikora knows Russian, he was able to get it from various Russian websites. Petr Kellner was very keen on getting into the Russian market, which brought him huge problems as he was a big competitor there. Eventually he succeeded and left some traces on the internet, and again these were slightly different than those on the Czech websites. With the production Good Luck, which deals with the housing crisis, it's a platform for social housing and IQ Roma Service. For the production Hour of the Woman, which is a kind of feminist dystopia, the consultant was the playwright herself, Anna Pospěch Durnová.

I've always been close to JAMU. Even ten years after I graduated, I was still working with the alumni, going to the Marta Theatre and knowing about the people there. And I had a relationship with the people who were doing their dissertations there, so the idea of doing a Ph.D. was with me quite a long time. But my relationship with the faculty, with its organization, was not quite good for a long time, there were some prejudices, some unclear things. So sometime in 2010 I applied for the PhD programme in theatre studies at Masaryk University, which I managed to attend for three semesters, but then it got too hard for me, so I gave it up. Now I've recently started to find out from various people that the Theatre Faculty is changing and that younger people are getting in. And that the environment could be more open. 

My self-development through my alma mater is actually kind of obvious, but I guess it will take some time for me to feel safe and comfortable when entering that building. One of the reasons is that it's been a while since I've been working and there's so much that's been built up in my head that I could start talking about it or maybe passing it on to someone. I used to think, what would I actually tell? Offers for PhD studies were coming in after I graduated, but I said to myself, what would I be doing there, I don't have any experience! And now I feel like I have a story to tell. At the same time, it's kind of the last time for me to be a student, which means to be able to read something and remember it. And to talk about it with other students, i.e. to have that student mindset. I felt it was now or never because the practice would overwhelm me if I didn't do it now.

I have the idea of deepening my ability to reflect systematically on my job. In practice, one is overwhelmed by the work and administration because the demands of the different donors are quite large, regardless of what the support is. Even if the support is not the most brilliant one, you still need to maintain some kind of standard, both for yourself and for the field. I feel that to slack off in this practice would be a sin against the whole field, because you pull people around you with an energy that makes other young people feel that since the Feste Theatre is 15 years old, it is possible to make it. Within my PhD studies it might be possible to give some structure to it, to contextualise it somehow on a European scale, to raise one's head a little and to make contacts with similar theatres in Europe: to share experience and to conduct joint research, for example, because they are quite possibly also in some old factories that are changing under their hands. I expect a little bit of head-raising, and also that the school might create a background in which one can calm down and start to really create and write. 

And then there's one more little thing that's maybe a little funny: because I'm a director, the communication with me on a professional level has often one way only, that it's my way. The reaction of the people around me is then yes, sure, well, we'll do it. And I don't know if it is their resignation, but maybe it is, a little bit. I was sitting in the Spolek café consulting my PhD supervisors, having a consultation with Honza Motal and David Drozd, and they let me talk for a while and then they completely ran me over as far as the discipline was concerned. And I knew that what was going on inside me at that moment was terribly fine, because I was like a funnel. Those 90 minutes was exactly what I needed. I was suddenly relieved that I wasn't the manager as usual and that there was someone leading me for a while. That's motivation too, to get out of the stereotype a little bit.

Artistic research can certainly have multiple meanings or multiple uses. Whether it's research with or without an NGO, whether it's done by the director and his team or with an insider in a given field, it's always going to bring depth or awareness or new insights. And when speaking of documentary theatre, it will definitely bring insights for the phenomenon that the documentary is dealing with, let's say the housing crisis, and at the same time for the creative artistic team. 

Now I'll digress a bit and make a little complaint. I think that if I could somehow secure myself and be in a situation where the Feste Theatre would have a guaranteed multi-year operation, a multi-year grant, and could have had a stable space much earlier, the work that we are talking about now as research work could be much further advanced. And even the team that would have done it could have already become significant professionals in the Czech Republic who would already know how to do docu-drama or documentary theatre. If the question was, what is the benefit, it would certainly be a benefit to the artists themselves, because they would expand their skills dramatically. And after all, you know, let's face it, the performers, the actors, are then quite often the ones who can really change the situation, because they become celebrities. If an actor says something somewhere, it's much more relevant to the general public than if it's said by some researcher that nobody knows. It should benefit the performer and the issue itself. Ideally, through artistic work that focuses on a particular issue, you can get those things out there and activate people at the municipal or regional levels who can influence the issue politically.