"I was approached by a friend of mine who is a prison chaplain and she said she was doing a movement project with prisoners and if I would say something to them. So I went over there and fixed something for them and they were so excited about it that they wanted to do something else. So the chaplain and I agreed that a good title would be West Side Story, it's about racial intolerance, about hate, about love and about some freedom and the desire for freedom. Well, I started trying it in January, thinking it was very difficult to birth. For a while I wanted to give up, for a while they wanted to give up, but because I'm a tenacious and patient person, I said, I've got to get this into some kind of shape."
"I thought the same thing I always thought, but I naively had the idea that I could make a difference if I was in that position. It's a fact that I was constantly being blasted by the district committee for something. I was always having problems, whatever happened in the theatre, I was the first buffer. I won't forget the meeting when November 17th started and we went on strike in Karlín and they did these evenings there and I was in the strike committee and I went to announce it to the district committee and there was the whole of the CKD there, and the other chairmen came at me: 'What do you think, you artists? This is treason' Even though I said I was resigning and I stepped down."
"Well, we experienced it very intensely because we lived in an ambulance house. The horns would go off at night and I'd wake up and we'd run around all day. They had just reopened Dukelských hrdinů Street after a big reconstruction and the tanks started to come in and start destroying it again. It was a crazy shock, we thought it was war. My parents were terrified, it was a terrible situation. When I think about it now, the tanks, the foreign army... Of course, the ambulance kept coming out with white flags all day on the 21st. All day I've been watching outside the house and suddenly I hear some Italians trying to talk to someone about what's going on. I'd been taking Italian at the institute since I was fifteen, so I started talking to them. I told them there was going to be a war, we were being invaded by the Russians. They came from Munich, then left, took my address and we were visiting each other for years."
Zdeněk Prokeš was born on 15 July 1952 in Prague into the Jewish family of Felix and Ella Porges. They met in Terezín and, thanks to amateur theatre, survived the horrors of the ghetto. After the war they moved to Prague and changed their surname to Prokeš. Zdeněk inherited his parents’ artistic talents, and from a young age he devoted himself to the theatre and dubbed children’s films with his two older brothers. In 1971 he graduated from the Prague Conservatory with a degree in dance, then in 1979 he studied choreography at the Academy of Performing Arts. His studies allowed him to travel abroad, where he saw the free world. He was secretly monitored by State Security (StB), which he only learned about after the revolution. In the 1980s, StB registered him as a so-called person under investigation (PO) under the code name “Ballet”. At the same time, StB also followed his brother Jan and his wife, who were both born in the United States and were both active in the artistic underground. During his career he achieved high management positions in theatres, yet he hesitated for a long time to join the Party. Eventually, after pressure in his family, he joined the party, hoping to change it. He resigned his post shortly before the fall of communism and became actively involved in the November demonstrations in the artistic milieu. He was instrumental in founding the Civic Forum. After the revolution, he was director of the National Theatre in Brno from 2003 to 2007. Since 2007 he has been an advisor to the director at the National Theatre in Prague and since 2009 he has been the head of the External Relations Department. In 2010 he became the artistic director of the multimedia theatre Laterna Magika. In 2024 Zdeněk Prokeš lived in Prague.
