Pavel Cisovský

* 1943

  • “Suddenly AMU graduates came here with Jan Kačer and his wife. It was the whole year ensemble, also Mr. Rosťa Volf with his wife, then Husák and others. And they started to play a little different theater at the Petr Bezruč Theater than we were used to. It was more dynamic and quite interesting. And especially here they brought the cabaret. While Prague had more such scenes, it wasn't there at the time.”

  • “Suddenly, there were a lot of Soviet movies we went to with school, especially to the Space Cinema. For example, we screened Timur and his crew, Chuk and Gek, and then war films such as The Defense of Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin. They were all sorts of agitation films. Before we began to take a little reason, we did not know at all that there was a second, the Western front. Only the Soviets were heroes and they totally won the war. We did not know that there was a fight in the Pacific. It wasn't until later, when one matured and got access to more literature.”

  • “In winter we played hockey on the street in front of the Evangelical church. Today it sounds incredible, but one, two cars per day drove there and on the adjacent streets of Chelčického or Miličov. We smoothed it, created goals and kept playing. In the summer we used to go swimming in the so-called troughs. That place doesn't exist anymore. It was the water from the cooling towers. It was approximately at the site of today's Karolina shopping center. There was a huge industrial area, which was several times larger than today's Lower Vítkovice. It ranged from the Vítkovice blast furnaces to the Karolina coking plant. And there were wooden troughs, where water circulated to cool the blast furnaces. And there we used to go.”

  • Full recordings
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    v Ostravě, 18.06.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 04:26:21
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Less conformist artists had problems. And maybe that’s why they produced better stuff

Pavel Císovský in Ostrava in June 2019
Pavel Císovský in Ostrava in June 2019
photo: E.D.

Pavel Cisovský was born on 24 October 1943 in Vratimov. He spent his childhood in the center of Ostrava. His father was a clerk in the Vítkovice Ironworks, his mother worked in the town slaughterhouse. He graduated from high school in Ostrava. At the age of seventeen he began to play amateur theater. He wanted to continue his studies, but the school did not provide him recommendations. After two years in operation of Vítkovice Ironworks he was admitted to the Faculty of Pedagogics in Ostrava. He joined the student theater. However, he did not study physical education and Czech due to cadre reasons. After two years of military service with the crew at the airport Mošnov near Ostrava he remained in the army as a civilian employee. He organized the cultural activities of the soldiers at the airport club there. After 1968 he had to leave because he refused to recognize the occupation of Warsaw Pact troops as fraternal assistance. For about fifteen years he worked at the Municipal Cultural Center in Ostrava as a methodologist for theater and literature and at the same time worked as a director in amateur ensembles. Since the mid-1980s he was a dramaturge and director of the Ostrava Theater of Music, where he founded the award-winning drama company Arena Chamber Theater.