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Gile Series Presents Stunning Black Light Theater

CONCORD, NH: The William H. Gile Community Concert Series continues on Tuesday, March 8 at 7:30 p.m. with the National Black Light Theatre of Prague’s Fantasy Travellers, a stunning multi-visual show containing live performance with amazing black light theater effects, big screen projections, and fantastic magical tricks.  Fantasy Travellers is inspired loosely by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.  All Gile performances are free.

The principle behind “black light” theatre stage technique relies on an optical ruse, known as the black box trick, which makes use of the imperfection of the human eye, which cannot distinguish black-on-black.  Actors dressed in black, moving against a black background, are invisible to the audience.  In the same way, various mechanical devices are hidden from the spectators using this same principle.

Objects and stage props handled by the “black actors” are then able to seemingly move by themselves, and inanimate objects seem to come to life. Actors can overcome the barriers of the earth’s gravitational pull and are seen to float in the air, even close up to the audience.  The origins of the trick of the black box date back many centuries.  It originated in China, where it was used to entertain the emperor, and from there it was taken to Japan where it was used in the bunrak puppet theatres.  At the turn of the 20th century, George Melies used the black box trick to help produce his film effects, and during the 1950s, avant-garde French puppeteers played tricks with props using actors dressed in black, and one of them, George Lafaye, was seen as the founder of what came to be
known as “black light theatre.”

At the beginning of the 1980s, the National Black Light Theatre of Prague introduced a series of new elements into the black box repertoire.  The careful selection of production themes allowed intensive work on the storyline, the dramatic staging and the actors’ movements.  The company began to use unique, patented stage mechanisms which, when covered in black velvet, enable the actors to fly, shrink or even disappear, in full view of the audience.

The actors’ performances are linked to widescreen projections, oversized puppets, black light animation and computer-generated effects.  Emphasis is placed on the visual and musical elements of the production and the
precision of the special effects.  This perfect union between the artistic and technical aspects, the visual impact of the staging and the emotiveness of the musical accompaniment have created a new and unique stage language, which provides the key to the international success of the National Black Light Theatre of Prague.

Producer and Artistic Director Pavel Marek studied at the Drama Faculty of the Music Academy in Prague, and shortly after graduating he co-founded the avant-garde theatre “Under the Tent,” which after several years was silenced by the communist regime for political reasons.  Censored freedom of speech became the impulse behind the search for a hidden stage speech, so in 1983 Marek founded the black theatre ensemble “Pan Optikum” (“Mr. Opticon”), for which he wrote the screenplays, directed, acted, and invented special stage effects.  The company toured Europe, Asia and other continents.

In 1988 the company was awarded the prestigious Commune di Verona for its performance of Baron Munchhausen.  The following year, Marek co-founded the TaFantastika Theatre in which he was producer, artistic director,
dramatist and director for the next thirteen years.  He has realized many multi-media projects and produced musicals.  His productions of Made by Homo Sapiens, Aspects of Alice, The Magic Flute, and Gulliver have been performed on the most prestigious stages in Paris, Madrid, Rome, Athens, Barcelona, Brussels, Luxembourg, Zurich, as well as Tokyo, Osaka, Taipei, Bombay, new Delhi and Calcutta.  His production of the musical Joan of Ark received a special award at the prestigious International Festival of Musical Theatre in Cardiff.  In August 2002 his multi-media show Gulliver was ranked among the best performances of the 52nd International Edinburgh Festival by a commission of renowned critics put together by The Scotsman newspaper, and won the award for Best Political Fantasy.