Looking Back at the Theatre Production of a Scenographer, Musician and Film Architect Tomáš Berka

Tomáš Berka graduated from Department of scenography at Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava under the professor Ladislav Vychodil in 1974, lived a parallel life as a visual artist and rocker, author of incidental and later also film music, as well as co-creator of music albums with the group called Fermata for decades. He was tempted away from the theatre by the illusion of film and the collaboration with international production teams and established film directors when creating large-scale films and constructing film sets. As a representative of action scenography, he had the opportunity to work with various directors on many, but predominantly on the Bratislava stages during the 1970-80s. He did not use the curtain or horizon on small stages; he worked with acronyms, movement of parts of the set and stage props, as well as metaphor. Tomáš Berka connected the auditorium with the stage on several occasions. He made a distinctive mark in graphic design; his theatre posters are typical for their characteristic outlines and colouring (regardless of the linocut or offset technique). Based on selected productions from a total of over a hundred works, the study presents Berka’s contribution to Slovak scenography from the 1970s to 2005, when his last theatre work was recorded. Tomáš Berka (together with Jozef Ciller, who is older than him and his classmates Ján Zavarský and Rasťo Bohuš) is one of the leading representatives of Slovak scenography that fundamentally influenced the direction of Slovak theatre development. Tomáš Berka is the only one among the stage designers who have also penetrated the world of music and, in recent decades, the international film industry. The study of his scenography completes the portrait of the stage designer’s work in Bratislava companies as it was unjustly marginalised also by foreign critics. While at the same time, several productions that he was engaged in which made an impact by their use of action scenography were produced in confined spaces of the petit stage of the former Divadlo na korze (Theatre on the Promenade), as well as in alternative non-theatre spaces. Tomáš Berka’s production of posters reflects the artist’s vision of society from the beginning of Normalisation, i.e. from the 1970s to the search for a path towards democracy in the first half of the 1990s.