Iveta Dušková: People focus on what doesn’t work and then don’t see what has real value

I think I’m mainly a human being, but I enjoy being a grandmother or a storyteller. That’s why I also create stories for children in the theater. About three years ago, Markéta Nekolová from the Albatros publishing house came to me with a proposal to write a book for children. I didn’t promise anything from the beginning, I just tried it.

We met with Markétka, I read my experiments to her and she supported me so warmly that a book was created after three years. It’s nine fairy tales. I wrote them for my grandchildren, I dedicated one to each of them – I have eight of them – and the last ninth is kind of a bonus, in case someone was just about to join our family.

Grandma Little called me our first three oldest grandchildren. She had another grandmother who was bigger and stronger than me, so she distinguished us in this way. Even when the children called me, they inflected it. They called me grandma little one. It was funny.

And how has my role changed since then? The oldest are adults, they have their own interests, they don’t need to read fairy tales anymore. Then I have the boy group of the five younger ones. My daughter watches the boys a lot, so I enjoy them a lot. I enjoy watching how each grandchild is different, how the characters of our grandparents and parents combine in them. It is simply wonderful to watch your life continue in your grandchildren. It touches me.

Because otherwise there can be no catharsis, no reconciliation. I start from the idea that all beings are created and contained in one consciousness. Therefore, no one can be excluded from this unity. Everything is a game that has certain rules. For something to happen, energy is needed and it arises from polarity, such as good and evil, male and female. But all these polarities can help each other or create unity. Well, most of all, I like it when the world changes into a loving, desirous and cooperative one.

I won’t deny that all the moving was difficult. At first, I was angry with the management of Tyrš House, the Sokol Village, in whose lease we operated as the Kampa Theater for almost ten years. Then suddenly something changed and we were supposed to start paying three times the rent we were paying until now. However, it could not be generated from this space during our non-commercial activity.

Practically on our knees and out of nothing, we created a functioning space where quality theater was created for children, for various social groups, for the deaf, the mentally disabled, we also had performances there with mothers whose children had passed away. We were something truly unique.

But then I told myself that I would leave the judgment to someone higher up and we would go our separate ways. Perhaps it is to test us whether our idea of theater for pleasure makes sense. And believe me, he has. The audience remained loyal to us. The management of the Great Mill in Libni, where we have now settled, like our work, they are happy that we are there.

This multi-purpose space is not yet fully occupied by us, but we believe that in time, an intimate theater scene will grow in the attic, where we will play with joy and for joy.

You know, people change, and I realized over time on my acting journey that if I have to stand behind my acting performance, I have to understand it and, above all, trust it. And I am most capable of that if I do everything myself from the beginning. I am not an analytical being, but rather an emotional one, so everything I create has a basis in deep experience.

I am trying to write a screenplay, the main character of which is Bozena Němcová. I would like to try to probe how she would look at her life if she grew old and if she lived to the present day, for example. That would be my view of Božena. I would like it if the viewer had the feeling that Bozena is alive, that she is already my grandmother’s age and tells about her difficult life with insight, affection, acceptance and gentle humor.

I like this woman, an excellent writer, very much. Precisely for her sincerity, genuineness, passion for love and for life, for her romantic, one might even say naive nature. Moreover, I also see a parallel to the contemporary world, which, although it appears to be free, is also full of lies, hypocrisy, superficiality and greed, meaningless commands and prohibitions. It’s as if that inner joy has disappeared, that silent throbbing and looking forward to everything to come.

And that is exactly what I would like to create in the theater through Němcová, her letters, her life, her work. A world full of hope that everything will turn out well in the end.

Precisely in these mentioned situations. And you know which picture fills me with well-being, security and a feeling that everything is fine, the most? I imagine myself sitting by the fire, looking into it, with my man, whom I love, sitting next to me and holding me by the shoulders. We have a mug of hot tea in our hands. And even if there is a storm around us, a gale or rockets flying, I know that as long as I feel warmth next to me, in front of me and inside, I am alive.

Yes, I have. Last summer I went to the island of Lošinj in Croatia, where we have a house, and I stayed there for almost two months and rested. I really needed it. Then I can create.

Craniosacral Therapy (a method of removing energetic and physical blockages in the body by means of harmonizing the flow of cerebrospinal fluid) is about listening, but not so much with the ears, but rather with the hands, with the whole body. And then you can get through all the hustle and bustle of the body to the very essence of everything, to the dynamic calm, from where, thanks to the breath of life, everything originates and comes.

This method, we can even say philosophy, teaches me patience to listen, not to hurry, not to make hasty conclusions, to wait for something to come, for it to appeal to me. When we calm down and believe that there is nothing here that wants to harm us, we can see without fear and panic. It is the same as in creation and actually in life.

We are a civilization used to not waiting, wanting everything as quickly as possible, preferably right away. And then we are frustrated, we suffer from depression. I would recommend everyone to watch the Japanese film The Island from 1960, directed by Kaneto Shindó. I saw it forty years ago, when Evald Schorm screened it for us, when I started rehearsing his Noisy Solitude at the Theater on the Railings. I played a little gypsy there.

For me, it is one of the most powerful films I have ever seen. Perhaps the most powerful. I love the inner minimalism and the deep dive into ordinary humanity. The film exuded incredible power and lightness at the same time!

Yes, last August it was exactly forty years since our wedding. I don’t have a recipe for a happy marriage, everyone has to find it themselves. It is important not to give up on the relationship at the first failure. I like the sentence: To love means to thank the other for being.

People tend to focus on what doesn’t work and then they don’t see what has real value. My colleague Petr Herold and I are performing the play Whisper it to me again, Harold!, where one of the heroines realizes, after her husband goes on a journey to save another woman, that she was not with him because of the children or because she felt sorry for him, but because life would be much sadder without him. Life without love is simply not life.

I think we inspire each other. I admire his sense of humor, his inner strength and courage. I know that what he contains with his memory and his activity, I would not be able to handle. And he knows that I watch over the family hearth. Taking care of children and grandchildren, being with them, patiently answering their questions, playing hide and seek with them, climbing rocks, teaching them to ski. That’s my gift again.

And what else should they do? Argue, fight, measure, compete, be forever dissatisfied? For me, dance is an expression of interplay, harmony. Everything around us is dancing, if you look at the treetops, at the river, at the clouds, at the whole nature, everything is in wonderful motion and I call it dance.

In the joint dance of a man and a woman, it is necessary to coordinate the steps, the rhythm, to connect with each other, to feel the other, to perceive him. And that is also needed in a relationship. And nodding to life for me is understanding that constant cycle of birth and death. The understanding that my life continues in my children, in my grandchildren and perhaps even in my great-grandchildren.

And agree to that and give it priority. When I see mothers who have a child in a stroller or on their lap who demands their attention and they devote it to the crazy virtuality on their mobile phone, it makes me very sad. Children deserve and need our attention, but not the edge, the monkey kind, but the real one, because they are the life that goes on and on. I once said in an interview that everything I created and wrote will disappear one day, but what I hope will not disappear is the life that my children and grandchildren carry.

To be honest, I don’t really understand it. I find it as sick as all of today’s society. In the desire to be interesting, to get someone’s attention, we create a deranged structure in which we create unnatural rules. Perhaps, just as all previous civilizations fell into chaos, confusion and morbid decadence before their demise, something similar has now befallen ours.

I understand when a man falls in love with a man, when a woman falls in love with a woman, but everything else that came out of it is really beyond my understanding. Dozens of genders, slowly legalizing pedophilia, changing genders just based on the arbitrary decision that I feel like a woman or a man today. Imposing this idea of mine on others, I really don’t understand. I believe that people will recover and that our instinct for self-preservation will stop this life-denying path.

So that they don’t let anyone and anything turn them against men. Let us love them, both our husbands, brothers, and our sons, grandsons. And maybe we can help them become real men. Because they are our protectors, the guardians of us women, givers of life. You know, the moment they become our protectors, they stop messing with our craft, inventing nonsense. They will be proud to be men. So let’s not humiliate them, but on the contrary, let’s appreciate their strength, their courage, their love, because without them the world would be much sadder.