If I get to kingdom come and meet everyone who\u2019s won the Actor\u2019s Mission Award, it\u2019ll be a lovely bash. There are many of them I\u2019d like to meet in person, says Juraj Kukura. He accepts the award himself this afternoon. Allegedly receiving the award is much nicer than not receiving it.<\/b><\/p>\n
Aside from acting, recently onstage for the most part, you\u2019ve run Bratislava\u2019s Arena Theatre for 13 years now. At this point, are you more an actor or a manager?<\/b><\/p>\n
Actor. Kukura is the role of a lifetime. Theatre is my hobby, and it\u2019s thanks to it that I can be independent. I\u2019ve tried to find another pastime, but nothing\u2019s stuck.<\/p>\n
What have you tried?<\/b><\/p>\n
I\u2019ve travelled through over 50 countries for film shoots. I\u2019ve been to Borneo, Iceland, even Greenland. When I was in New Zealand for a shoot, I tried angling for 10 days at the best fishing grounds, but I didn\u2019t catch a thing. When I was filming near a golf resort in Styria, I lost all desire to golf, too. And my car\u2019s so fast that I don\u2019t have to prove anything, so I can drive it nice and slow.<\/p>\n
So that means you\u2019ll stay true to the Actor\u2019s Mission?<\/b><\/p>\n
It\u2019s all I know. What am I supposed to do, start knitting?<\/p>\n
Perhaps you could educate people. Can\u2019t artists influence society that way?<\/b><\/p>\n
In my opinion art should broach issues, break taboos, provoke, oppose power, ask questions\u2026but not educate. We\u2019re about to kick off a new series at Arena Theatre \u2013 every fourth Thursday of the month, we’re going to screen a film as part of a programme called Loveliest Films of Our Life. And as a matter of principle, these screenings are specifically devised not to educate. I want it to be just as powerful a sociocultural event as theatre. I want to screen films that were still the stuff of dreams.<\/p>\n
Is it different today?<\/b><\/p>\n
I don\u2019t like when the grown-up generation gets concerned with stuff like two young people hugging each other on a bench while looking at their mobiles. I don\u2019t judge that. What gets me is that history doesn\u2019t mean much in Slovakia. Our society is used to drawing a line under everything we think someone could reproach us for.<\/p>\n
Why does that bother you?<\/b><\/p>\n
Since what we consider anti-patriotic are things we could learn from. The Germans keep coming back to their role in the Holocaust and the crimes they committed. They don\u2019t distance themselves from that; they want future generations to concern themselves with it, too.<\/p>\n
How could this line-drawing habit be broken?<\/b><\/p>\n
I try to do just that at Arena Theatre with the productions Tiso, Hus\u00e1k, Communism, Capital. And this despite the fact that there are 20 pictures from the socialist-realism era hanging in my office. Even though the Communists sentenced me to three-and-a-half years in prison, I\u2019ve hung pictures from that time in my office, since they were painted by the best artists of the era. I\u2019m against getting rid of such works of art and chucking them into the basement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If I get to kingdom come and meet everyone who\u2019s won the Actor\u2019s Mission Award, it\u2019ll be a lovely bash.","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3245,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n