Art Stories - Theatre Ark

"Art Stories" portrays artistic personalities. The focus of each episode is a person in cultural life and the place where they work. Around this personality, colleagues also have their say - actresses, theater directors, musicians, sculptors. The focus is on the artistic, but private and personal matters may also be included.

The pilot from 2022 is dedicated to the manager and director Jakub Kavin and his "Theater Arche" in Vienna-Mariahilf. Kavin, who fled Czechoslovakia with his parents as a child in 1977, inherited stage fever from both of them. His parents were active in acting, toured at festivals and with traveling theaters: a circus-like life for little Jakub. In 1984, when he started school, his parents decided to settle down. They founded the independent "Theater Brett" in Vienna, also in Münzwardeingasse. "In a former furniture factory," Kavin recounts, "where the pigeons used to live before us." Theatre life hasn't let him go since: "I can't live without the theatre - I can't live without the stage."

The first episode of "Art Stories" shows us daily life at the "Theater Arche." We watch director Kavin develop the performance of "The Odyssey" under the terms of Corona. We listen to singer and actress Manami Okazaki as she develops her lines and tells us about her first impressions of Viennese cultural life, back when she came to Austria from Japan. We watch set designer, sculptor and costume designer Helena May Heber build models, draw sketches and make a sculpture live on stage. For "The Odyssey" she develops a labyrinthine stage set, creates rooms based on Dante's Inferno, or designs the auditorium like a pub in the days of James Joyce, including a station clock and beer mats on the walls. We also meet violinist Eike N. A. Onyambu, who came to Jakub Kavin's "Theater Arche" from the opera, where he now not only plays the violin but also works as an actor, and who says about Vienna: "This city thinks differently about art."

"Art Stories", a series of portraits about a strong artistic personality and their working environment - and about the people who support them.