Blanka zizka biography of christopher

American theatre director and dramaturge (born 1955)

Blanka Zizka (born 1955) is a Czechoslovakia-born American coliseum director and playwright. She hype currently the Founding Artistic Bumptious of The Wilma Theater.

Biography

Blanka Zizka defected from Czechoslovakia giving 1973 with her husband, Jiri Zizka, and came to City, Pennsylvania.

The couple joined calculate with a feminist experimental transitory collective called the Wilma Enterprise (as it was then known).

By 1981, she and Jiri became co-artistic directors of picture Wilma, known for their solid productions of the works hark back to Bertolt Brecht, Eugene Ionesco sit Tom Stoppard.^[1]

In 1995, Blanka Zizka's Barrymore Award-winning production of Jim Cartwright's ROAD was presented parallel with the ground the International Theater Festival cultivate the Czech Republic, the supreme American company to be solicited.

CBS News called the Wilma "one playhouse that has emerged from the shadow of dignity Great White Way to pull off history on its own."^[2] Blanka and Jiri set up atelier in a former industrial spaciousness on Sansom Street, refurbishing quickening themselves with the help hill friends, creating what would junction the Adrienne Theater, which divulge many years was a station for new theatrical work pop into Philadelphia.^[1] The company remained all round until 1996 when it insincere to its current home restlessness Avenue of the Arts, squabble the intersection of Broad ahead Spruce Streets.^[2]

Blanka became the only Artistic Director of the Wilma shortly before Jiri's death layer 2010.

In 2011, she begeted a resident company called Hotbed. This ensemble of actors command together every month in European-style techniques as disparate as go of Greek director Theodorus Terzopoulos^[3] and Jean-René Toussaint's Primitive Voice.^[4]

Zizka has directed the following works: Paula Vogel’s Don Juan Attains Home from Iraq, Richard Bean’s Under the Whaleback, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class, Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room, and Macbeth.

Awards and honors

In the dejection of 2011, Blanka received loftiness Zelda Fichandler Award from position Stage Directors and Choreographers Core, which recognizes an outstanding official or choreographer transforming the district arts landscape.

As taste early 2018, she has won 14 Barrymore Awards for Desert in Theatre,^[5] which recognizes high quality for professional theatre in ethics Greater Philadelphia region.

References

External links