Eva Zatkova profiles Blaho Uhlar, the outcast theatre director taking on the Bratislava bureaucrats 
 

  I'm a little nervous when knocking on the door to the Stoka theatre. Its name - which when translated into English means Sewer - doesn't promise an elevation of the soul. It's provocative. 
  I am nervous because I've heard some things about its director, the man I'm coming to profile. "He'll kick your ass if he doesn't like you," my friends had warned me. "How do you know?" I asked. "I don´t know, I imagine, I´ve just heard some things about him." 
  We've arranged to meet in his theatre-pub-sewer. Who wants to do anything in a sewer? But then again, where else? Stoka is just right to host an interview with a man sometimes described as a "touchy egotist" or a "drunken iconoclast".  
  I finally knock. A shining blond with a boyish haircut, actress Lucia Piussi, opens. Sara, a white coffee greyhound, is lying on the floor. I step over her, she lifts her wet nose and crosses her legs theatrically. She might soon become a member of the theatre group since its human resources are getting thinner and thinner. 
  Then he comes out of his back stage office. Tall and slim, the 50 year-old father of four is wearing a pink shirt and black corduroy jeans. He guides me to a big room lined with photographs from performances, paintings by a friend, posters and drawings, with piles of papers and books all around. He sits in an old, huge, unfashionable but comfortable armchair and pulls out a box of Marlboro cigarettes. 
  He smiles a little shyly when I put a dictaphone on the table. I pass on a greeting from a friend. "Matt says hello." He smiles immediately. "Yeah? Where is that madman, still in New York?" The ice has been broken. 
  From the moment the director of an outcast theatre starts talking, he smokes heavily as if he wants to emphasize every word he says with an exhalation of blue smoke. 
  Often described in controversial word pairings such as the "touchy egotist", the "vulgar genius" or the "absurd revolutionary" Blaho Uhlar is a WyWHYa theatre director who holds his theatre together, literally, in his bony fingers. He walks the place with the calm confidence of a cat who knows the stage at the theatre is his territory. 
  For eleven years c has been trying, as he says," to dig the authenticity out" of a collective of actors at Stoka. For eleven years he has desperately wanted to give people plays that would uncover the magic instances of their everyday reality, the irrational flow of encounters, and the events and experiences which build their lives day by day, he says. 
  His rebellious visions have often provoked controversial reactions. "Some people even say that they don´t feel like they are in the theatre anymore. They say they feel like they are watching a reality show. And they don´t seem to like it," he says with a somewhat resigned smile, talking about the last performance of a new play, Komisia. Only 15 tickets were sold. 
  I sit with Piussi and Uhlar walks away, knowing he is most probably going to be the subject of the conversation. He leaves with a pleasant nonchalance of a man who has nothing to hide and who trusts the people who work with him. Before the door shuts I see him walk behind the bar counter to check whether the pub needs anything. 
  His philosophy is simple, but controversial for some. Piussi explains that first of all the actors have to learn to love each other, that there cannot be just professional or artificial relationships between them. His plays show a moment of reality frozen on the stage in an impossibly banal dialogue. No ends, no beginnings, no links, no whys and becauses. 
  Uhlar presents drama as if a person were traveling on a bus and overhearing fragments of someone's conversation and then allowing the audience to use its imagination to make the story complete. Using its imagination the audience creates the piece together with the theatre staff. 
  The first play staged by Stoka in 1991 was "Kolaps", which paradoxically didn't mean a break down of the group, as Uhlar predicted ten years later in his "untimely obituary" - "Breakdown of the Stoka Experiment" (2001).  
  The second, "Impasse", put together a group of people who until very recently formed a union of people fighting for independent theatre with independent actors and independent audiences. 
  "I knew it was exactly what I was looking for. You could feel the atmosphere as if it was hanging around Blaho. And I liked it all at first sight," says Piussi about her first encounter with Uhlar and Stoka when in the audience at a performance of Kolaps. 
  "Blaho is a man who doesn´t have even the smallest portion of aggression in him. He is impulsive and gets annoyed quite often, but he is very sensitive," she adds, her voice echoing through the large room. 
  "He leaves everybody to do his thing the way he or she wants. We do terribly boring things and he suffers quietly, watching us. Sometimes it lasts for months. But he lets us create our own stories and when there is something he thinks is better than good he senses it. It's as if he had some special senses. And then he tells you: 'This, this, exactly like this.' And it gives you an enormous shot of motivation." 
  As a boy Uhlar wanted to be a football player and a teacher. Despite people trying to persuade him to work in local mines he intuitively felt that the job would not be an easy one for him. He wasn't taken as a miner but he did later manage to expend just as much energy in dealing with the troubles at his theatre and bar which was originally meant to provide a living for the stage crew and actors. 
  Since the opening of the building that hosts the Stoka bar and theatre Stoka itself has always been on the brink of extinction. With worn down walls it contrasts with the new three billion Slovak crown new National Theatre that it stands opposite in Bratislava, and it, literally, has its back turned to the Malá scéna theatre. 
  It is fighting with municipal and state authorities. 
  After the fall of communism in 1989 the financial resources to feed a theatre like Uhlar's were limited and after he made enemies during the last government [1994 - 1998] they became even thinner. 
  In 1999 the Ministry of Culture granted Stoka two million Slovak crowns - the first money for four years. In 2000 they carried out an audit and demanded 1.8 million crowns back. Uhlar called it the "liquidation of the theatre". 
  Uhlar has built Krcma - the bar - to support the theatre. However, as a vendor of alcohol and cigarettes, he returns 10 per cent of the profit to the state in taxes. "The very same amount I had returned to the city last year was paradoxically granted to the city-funded A.H.A theatre. It seems I not only don't get back at least what I earn in my pub but I also support another theatre from my own profits. Isn't it ridiculous?" he asks. 
  He becomes more animated, more passionate when he begins to talk about the "spider webs of bureaucracy sponging on the bodies of the creators of wealth" as Uhlar categorizes small businessmen, who he says "create wealth, and contribute the majority of their work's results to the state, towns and fire raisers". 
  He is deeply disappointed and disillusioned. While speaking he is constantly looking away as if towards some distant, more merciful future in a country where people would respect his work. He speaks about these institutions as "lawless people, slaves and vassals" and gets angry when he talks about his relationship with city and state authorities. He says he is mad because he feels like one of those "vassals" himself when he talks about his own experience. 
  "I had some idea and vision. But I am either a complete idiot or, and I think this is more accurate, the state with its bureaucratic mafia is very consistent and systematic in extinguishing everything independent." 
  At the beginning the vision of a fresh graduate from the Academy of Musical Arts in Bratislava seemed simple. After graduation he went to Trnava and co-founded and worked in a Youth Theatre.  
  His first attempts as a director, however, already came in the seventh grade of elementary school. Inspired by vaudevilles and pantomimes shown on state TV, he started to produce small programs in the school club-room. But in Trnava his directing began to take off. 
  He recalls with slightly ironic smile one of the first plays he directed - "some play about the Slovak National Uprising". But there was still something, he says, that he unconsciously wanted, and knew would form his future dramatic style. No script - the secret formula. 
  "In 1987 I finally found enough courage to say it aloud. I wanted to produce my own plays with no written script. All produced by a director and actors together. We did some pieces with amateurs at workshops, with Disk theatre in Trnava and I found out that it could work when a theatre is ruled by the soul of drama and not purely by indifferent bureaucrats. But that was always the problem with state funded bodies," he says. 
  In 1988 Uhlar co-founded Stoka with his friend, designer Milos Karasek, based on basic principles which have become the keys to his creative process and which Stoka actors have accepted as their own: the complete freedom of all artists, the complete liberation of the actor from the dictate of a director, and the complete liberation of a spectator from the dictate of an actor. 
  They are principles which go against all the rules governing state funded theatres in Slovakia. 
  When asked what he himself thinks makes him an original director, he looks in the corner of the room at a table with a computer and piles of paper: "You will not find what I do anywhere else in the world, " he says with a smile suggesting exaggeration 
  "I mean I've heard of some similar techniques and, OK, there are probably some theatres that do it similarly, but not exactly this way. I want the actor to be as authentic as possible. I want him to be real. He cannot lie. 
  "A friend of mine who works in a state-funded theatre in Kosice stopped me one time I was there and complained that he couldn't dig out such an authenticity among the actors as I could. I told him he had probably already dug it out all." 
  Some people say that the problems Uhlar has had with his theatre he has brought upon himself because he likes conflicts and tries to solve them radically. His personality attracts attention like a rock among watermellons. 
  But people that know Uhlar and work with him talk about him with an obvious respect, others with understanding, some with admiration. 
  Ctibor Bachratý, the resident photographer at Stoka performances, and author of several publications on the theatre, says he admires Blaho. "I've never seen his spine bent," he says. 
  An American friend described his first meeting with him. "He's a funny guy and a serious artist. When I first met him, I didn't know Slovak very well. And he didn't speak English. But he had an excellent accent. So he used phrases and sentences he memorized from movies and from one of his plays translated into English: 'Do you want some whiskey? Whiskey with ice: We´ve got a pub, you´ve got ice, maybe we can work together..." At first I didn't know he didn't actually speak English." 
  As our interview approaches an end Uhlar sinks deeper and deeper into a brown armchair soaked with cigarette fumes. He looks like a man who had a dream but decided to keep the remains of that dream in his pocket as he dedicated his life to the fight against the windmills of Slovak bureaucracy. 
  Cursing openly and angrily he keeps repeating he is going to give up what he's doing "because it has no sense at all". 
  It is hard to believe he really means it, though. But then again, maybe he does. After all, that is why the absurd and odd pairs of words are put together in an attempt to encapsulate this strange personality. 
  He was here, but he ceased to exist, he was ceasing to exist painfully, with difficulty, in several ways, in several variations, in beautiful uncommon periodically appearing curves, again and again, annually symptomatic in tragicomic moments of self-preservationist fiction, whipped up to some truly remarkable affects of significant shapes. Sprouts and buds. Romantically self-destructive in difficult humiliating clichéd situations. Long and patient, long and patient, patient and long, it is not important, or it is important that it is not important. Either or. From Lucia Piussi's monologue from the Stoka Theatre play "Bottom".