Current Affairs Actress Tatiana Vilhelmová takes dance to drama

Tatiana Vilhelmová, source: ČT24 Star of the stage-cum-star of the dance floor Tatiana Vilhelmová appears with Petr Čadek in Posedlost, which premiered on Monday evening. Based on a short story by Danish writer Peter Høeg, Hommage a Bournonville, the scene drifts between the poetic meditations of two men on an eerily moonlit raft and a tale that plays out in the Royal Danish Ballet. In this, the story presents a novel opportunity to combine dance and stage drama, and it does so in a stylishly unique way that will no doubt make the performance one of the highlights of the Prague theatre scene this spring. Director Peter Butko explained it as being very much a personal endeavour among those involved.

Photo: ČT24 “It was kind of a family project – not only because Tatiana’s husband is the producer – but because we used actors who we know very well and who we’re friends with, because it was very difficult work. We are working with poetry – stage poetry – and if you want to do poetry on the stage – to give form to poetry on the stage – you need people who can understand, who can feel the poetry, inside themselves.”

The tale of how a Turkish dervish and a Danish ballet dancer ended up on a raft floating suicidally into the Atlantic lends itself to innovative theatre. The play is a poem in dance, employing original music and a stylised lighting design that delves into the avant-garde at points. For all its innovation, Posedlost would admittedly be hard pressed to garner the same attention were it not for star-power. Perhaps the most widely-cast actress of the national stage and screen, Tatiana Vilhelmová is universally known in the Czech Republic. Her acting ability has been on display since she was 15 in the early 90s; last year however she betrayed an exceptional talent for dance on the television programme “Star Dance”, and Obsession follows up on her popular performance on that show with dancer and choreographer Petr Čadek. Photo: ČT24

“I was quite taken with the story because it plays out in the world of dance, specifically in the Royal Danish Ballet. And it’s essentially a love story but it’s also about dance itself, so fortunately or not, if you want to make a play of it then the actors have to dance as well. But I was actually doing ballet before I started acting, so I had a special relationship to the story - it’s a tribute to ballet itself and to the dancers, their hard work and their self-abandonment.”

Posedlost, will be performed on select dates in May at the Ponec theatre in Prague’s Žižkov, and around the country through the summer.