Asian Inspirations in the Works of Jiří Frejka over Time

Traditional Asian theatre genres have fascinated western audiences since the end of the 19th century. In my thesis, I focused on the means by which Jiří Frejka, a leading representative of Czech avant- garde theatre, dealt with that trend. Through Japanese, Chinese and Indian texts, he verifies new possibilities of all elements of theatre production - the stage, music and, primarily, the actor and his voice and movement. Thanks to prompt books, photographs, reviews and other materials from Frejka's estate stored in the National Museum, the archive of the National Theatre and the Moravian Museum in Brno, I assess these individual elements of theatre production in connection with traditional Asian genres and I seek mutual parallels, sources of inspiration and, primarily, the manner in which Frejka adapted them to his own directorial work. The objective of this work is to confirm the previous thesis that, in the case of Jiří Frejka, deeper study of the topic led to a fundamental shift in the manner of bringing these "foreign" sources of inspiration into the Czech environment, which moved away from a merely decorative function toward an internally linked and well-founded method. Key words Czech theatre avant-garde, Asagao, Modern Studio, Lady Precious Stream, Shakuntala, The Post Offic