Theater theorist, critic, historian and pedagogue Jan Císař died this Wednesday at the age of 89. The Theater Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts, with which it has been associated for seven decades, informed about it on Facebook. After studying theater science at the school in the early 1950s, he began working as a teacher and was briefly dean. He led some regional theaters and was the dramaturg of the National Theater.
“I’m very polite, I’m not complaining. I’m sitting at home in Unhošť, I won’t be stressed by covid, I’ve been vaccinated twice and I have to say that it went wonderfully in the Motol hospital,” said the Emperor. in the February newsletter Kladno Author’s Theater VAD He also mentioned that he is going to describe and analyze the birth of a modern production in a play. “I started from afar, now I’m in the 19th century. It’s also about our theatrical avant-garde, but I understand it differently than usual,” he announced.
Jan Císař was born on January 28, 1932 in Hradec Králové. In 1951 he graduated from high school and after graduating from DAMU and graduating he went to the Village Theater, where he worked as a dramaturg until 1960. He began to teach externally – the aesthetics and history of Czech theater, which was a subject to which, in addition to dramaturgy and theater theory, he remained faithful until the autumn of 2019.
In the following years he worked in the editorial office of the magazine Divadlo and in 1963 he became the editor-in-chief of Divadelní noviny, which under his leadership expanded to Divadelní a filmové noviny. He began publishing his articles on theater theory and theater criticism elsewhere.
Jan Císař was the author of almost two dozen theoretical publications. “His historical-theoretical research came to a real conclusion only with the activity of a generally recognized pedagogue. A pedagogue to whom people with respectable grays and recent graduates of the AMU Theater Faculty apply as their teacher,” the faculty recalls his colleague.
In the years of normalization, the Emperor also began to devote himself intensively to a significant part of Czech theater, namely amateur theater, of which he became a generally recognized patron.
“Professor Jan Císař’s work in Czech theater was many meritorious. In many respects he represented the continuity of Czech theater culture and also the continuity of Czech higher theater education. And also represented the best educational traditions of this continuity, which even in difficult times they maintained their activities and still maintain them today, “adds the management of the faculty.
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