With summer just around the corner, festival-goers should start making plans. The season will be packed with music and art, with some events taking place as soon as this weekend. The annual Smetanova Litomyšl open-air festival of classical music is opening on Friday. On Saturday, Lesní divadlo Řevnice will also host an al fresco music festival, Rockový slunovrat, featuring seven groups and seven styles, from rhythm and blues (Murphy Band) to ska (Sto zvířat) to rock played by cellists from Ostrava (Hyperion). The event will run between 3 and 11pm. Buses back to Prague will run through 1am.
More Czech music is on the list of the beer festival hosted by the Velké Popovice brewery on Saturday. In addition to song and suds, the 17th Days of Kozel will include a presentation of traditional Czech handicrafts, such as glass curving and beer-barrel making, a brewery tour in the renovated Velkopopovický pivovar and an exhibition of the 19th-century railway magnate and brewery founder František Ringhoffer.
Today, American saxophonist Don Menza plays at Reduta (9pm) as part of the Sixth International Festival Jazz Bridge – from Prague to EU celebrating the Czech Republic’s accession to the European Union. Another show is scheduled for 7pm Sunday at Mánes featuring big bands from Prague, Vienna and Munich.
Canada’s Allison Crowe is coming to Prague’s Dobeška on Thursday. Accompanied by a guitarist, bassist and percussionist, Allison will play overtones of Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles and jazz, along with new sounds. “The best live rock band” on the Czech music scene, Tata Bojs, will play acoustically on Friday at Divadlo v Celetné in Old Town as part of a benefit for the Rozmarýna civic organisation which helps children from the crèche. A three-member group from London, Belleruche, will play hip-hop, soul and jazz in a unique style on Thursday at Palác Akropolis.
Contemporary dancers from Bulgaria, Greece and Iceland will perform within the first European Dance Laboratory at the Tanec Praha festival. Go to Prague’s Ponec Theatre on Sunday and Monday (or Olomouc today and Brno on Friday) to see Bulgaria’s dance event of the year, Pinocchio incarnate and Icelandic mentality on stage.
An exhibition featuring works by David Černý is now on show at the Dvorak Sec Contemporary gallery in Dlouhá street. The exhibit includes Černý’s infamous Shark, a lifesize sculpture of Saddam Hussein in his underwear, trussed up in ropes and chains, and suspended in a liquid-filled glass tank. Inspiration for this controversial piece came from the British artist Damien Hirst’s series depicting dead animals in formaldehyde. Hirst’s own Life, Death and Love exhibit is open at Rudolfinum through 30 August. For more of Černý’s work, visit the DOX gallery in Holešovice, where his provocative Entropa piece showcasing EU national stereotypes will be unveiled Friday.
Kino Aero is hosting a four-day festival featuring documentary and feature films from the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary. The Visegrad Battle 2009 festival will open Thursday. Only some screenings will be in English or with English subtitles, including Béla Tarr’s The Man From London (Sunday, 8:30pm) and Vít Pancíř’s Sestra, based on a novel by Jáchym Topol (Saturday, 8:15pm).
Czech movies with English subtitles will be on the screen at the Střelák open-air cinema as of 14 June. Make sure you go to the right place to watch films under the stars. This year’s screenings have been moved to Riegrovy sady in Vinohrady from the traditional venue on Střelecký island due to renovations.
You can win two tickets for a selected performance within the Smetana’s Litomyšl International Opera Festival if you answer a simple question: What is the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana’s date of birth? The shows are Zuzana Lapčíková’s vocal and instrumental project Orbis Pictus performed on Tuesday, 23 June, and Bedřich Smetana’s Dalibor opera on Saturday, 4 July. Go to the festival website for more information. To win the tickets, please, send your answer to [email protected] by 17 June. The winners will be announced the following day.
