About
Continuo Theatre is an international independent theatre group led by Pavel Štourač, its director and artistic coordinator. Since 1995 the company has been settled in a little village in South Bohemia called Malovice in a former farmstead called The Plum Yard. Continuo’s productions cannot be easily categorized into genres. Movement, live music, puppets, physical acting, acrobatics, dance, along with striking visual stylization – all of these create the unique poetics of each individual production.
It is not very important for the creators of Continuo whether their work is defined as visual or physical theatre just as it is not important for the actors to know whether they are dancing or acting. The matters of style or aesthetic are not so important. The members of the group focuses their research on analyzing themes, experimenting, being surprised, learning together, developing skills and sharing the result of their work with the audience.
Members of Continuo research an authentic, personal connection between visual artistic knowledge and physical acting, rhythm, voice, and musicality. Everyday work consists of actors’ trainings, workshops in which they get familiar with acting, dancing and voice techniques, in both, collective and individual way of learning and researching.
The founding members of the group – Pavel and Helena Štourač – began to work together in 1990 at the Theatre Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, the Czech Republic. In 1992 they moved from Prague to South Bohemia and gained the professional status with the name Continuo Theatre.
In nearly twenty years of its existence, Continuo Theatre has created a great number of performances in which its course of development from puppet theatre and the circus art to the poetics that theatre critics have called “the new Central European dreamy imagery” can be observed.
Since 1997, the group has systematically dedicated its creative work to street theatre projects and to theatre projects in non-traditional venues such as courtyards, old factories, historic buildings, banks, the surface of lakes, travelling trains, etc. Besides that, Continuo performs at regular theatre premises as well as in their own big red and blue circus tent.
In nearly twenty years of its existence, Continuo Theatre has become a leading Czech theatre company, as it is proved not only by the interest of the audience and the positive reviews of theatre critics, but also by the numerous awards from international festivals in which Continuo regularly participates.