Rehearsal for Truth 2024: Dark Dreams
Image: NOON, from Continuo Theater
The next Rehearsal For Truth International Theater Festival (theme: Perseverance) will be May - June 2025, with a reading series in April 2025. Thank you to all who came to our 2024 events!
Rehearsal for Truth International Theater Festival is an annual showcase of contemporary Central and Eastern European theater, established in 2017. The festival is a shared endeavor of the Václav Havel Center and the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association in partnership with numerous other cultural and performing arts organizations. The festival honors the artistic and political legacy of the Czech playwright/dissident/president Václav Havel. We support exchanges between American and European theater professionals and celebrate the power of the theater to transform our lives.
The 2024 festival, entitled Dark Dreams, ran June 12 – 23. This year’s festival (including the May reading series) featured work from Austria, Belarus, Estonia, Czechia, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine. Much of the work featured this year was. surreal or dreamlike, finding ways to comment on past and present tragedies, from the legacy of the Nazi and Soviet years to the current war in Ukraine. It explored fascism but also beauty, darkness but also laughter.
We began with one of the oldest authors in the vein of the dark and comically surreal, Franz Kafka, on the 100th anniversary of his death. And we continued on with not only theater but dance and music. This year, for the first time, we also included film in our lineup, specifically film of theater and dance. And most of our programs included discussions with either the authors, experts on some of the subjects addressed, or both.
Thank you for joining. All programs are free, though we do ask for a $10 donation if you can afford it. It makes continuing our work possible.
WATCH ONLINE
A staged reading of four translations of Scene 8 in Vaclav Havel’s play, The Memo (also translated as The Memorandum). An examination of the nuances of translation. Directed by Edward Einhorn, Artistic Director, Rehearsal for Truth Theatre Festival. Performed by Stephanie Litchfield, Eric Oleson, Thomas Shuman.
The reading is followed by a discussion with the translators: - Jennifer Helinek, second-year student in the Master of Arts in Regional Studies - Russia, Eurasia and Eastern Europe (MARS-REERS) program at the Harriman Institute - Josef Nosal, a rising senior student of Radio, Television Dramaturgy and Screenwriting at JAMU and the winner of the Václav Havel Library Foundation’s mini-drama contest. - Lucas Schlesinger, third-year comparative literature major in Columbia College - Paul Wilson, one of Havel’s most prolific translators, having translated multiple plays, books, and essays. Music by William Niederkorn. Moderated by Chris Harwood, Columbia University.
This event is organized by the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation, along with The East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute (both of Columbia University), Untitled Theater Company No. 61, and the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), New York Chapter. Supported by the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association.
REHEARSAL FOR TRUTH THEATER FESTIVAL honors Vaclav Havel, the playwright and human rights activist
