See what’s coming up on on the BCSA’s Events Calendar.
Session I: From Normalization to Loss of Norms: Václav Havel and the Forms of Democratic Backsliding The decades following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 were dubbed the period of ‘Normalization’: a chilling term intended to designate a return to the efficient social controls that had been the norm across the Soviet Bloc prior... Read more »
Session III: The Spectre of Dissent Still Haunts Europe In his essay The Power of the Powerless, Havel famously asked: What role does dissent play in society? What are its hopes? Can dissidents actually change anything? Though focusing on the power and the powerless in communist Europe in the 1970s, Havel's distinction between the forces of... Read more »
To celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Emmy Destinn Foundation. Featuring young artists, the winners of the biennial competition The Emmy Destinn Young Singers Awards performing arias by Janáček, Dvořák, Smetana, Mozart and Puccini. Caroline Taylor soprano ... Read more »
Czech author Anna Fodorova will be in discussion with writer and literary critic Jude Cook plus readings by actress Lisa Rose. In the Blood is an unforgettable twentieth century family saga set in 1980s London, Prague and Munich against the backdrop of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. It explores the impact of history... Read more »
Jana Varga is a Slovak-born singer songwriter now based in London, having trained and worked musically in France, the United States and elsewhere. Her well crafted songs are at home in the broad Americana genre but their roots run much deeper. Jana’s natural musicianship is founded in her classical music training, and further influenced by... Read more »
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra performs ‘Vltava’ from Smetana’s Má Vlast – an evocative orchestral picture of the river that flows through Prague, filled with ebbing and flowing woodwind and strings. Dvořák was staying at his summer resort when he wrote his Eighth Symphony, and you can hear the bird song and thunderstorms of a summer’s day in Bohemia in the... Read more »
Karel Šejnoha (Zdeněk Svěrák’s alter ego), a well-known, aging writer, faces a writer‘s block. He has a head full of unfinished stories whose fictional characters start to appear in real life lobbying for their stories to be finally completed. Each and every one of them demands something. The photographer Matěj wants the beautiful but unapproachable... Read more »
HGO, North London’s leading opera company, presents a fully staged production, with orchestra and fabulous young opera singers and children, of Janáček’s timeless and enchanting opera. Captured when young by the forester, and brought up by him as a pet, sharp-ears escapes back to the wild – but her life continues to interplay with that... Read more »
Voted the Best Czech Film 2021 by the critics, this black comedy thriller fuelled by vodka, cigarettes, and cowardice hilariously investigates Czech-Soviet relations. After a premiere, the theatre group is celebrating in a bar when an uninvited guest crashes the party. A drunken Russian officer has come to sell a can of petrol, but soon... Read more »
The Welsh National Opera is on a UK tour with its new production of Janáček's opera conducted by their Czech music director, Tomáš Hanus. The enigmatic diva Emilia Marty looks younger than her years. The secret of her youth, a magical elixir of life taken centuries ago. For over 300 years she has lived many... Read more »
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