The last premiere of the 2024/2025 season at the National Theatre Ballet was the triple bill Sarcasms, named after Hans van Manen's central duet, which in turn was named after Sergei Prokofiev's accompanying composition.
Zuzana Rafajová
Originally from Valašské Meziříčí, she graduated from the Masaryk Grammar School in Vsetín, where she also attended the dance branch of the Primary Art School for thirteen years. After graduating from high school, she entered the HAMU in Prague, where she received her doctorate in dance science in 2019 (dissertation The Revival of Traditional Ballets - starting points, possibilities, procedures; defence in June 2019).
She is mainly interested in the history of 19th century stage dance and the legacy of the Romantic and post-Romantic repertoire, and she also studies dance notation of the same period, especially Vladimir Stepanov's system (first published in L'Alphabet des Mouvements du Corps Humain, Paris 1892) and its application in theatre practice. As part of the preparation of her dissertation and subsequent further research, she spent two months at the Houghton Library of Harvard University in Boston, where she studied the materials of the so-called Sergeyev Collection, containing musical and choreographic notations of ballets in the repertoire of the tsarist Mariinsky Theatre from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
She is a columnist for the websites Taneční aktuality.cz and Opera Plus, and occasionally contributes to the magazines Hudební rozhledy and Živá hudba. She has collaborated on the programme brochures of the Czech National Ballet (e.g. Timeless, Phoenix, Onegin, Forsythe/Clug/McGregor, bpm, Tram to the Station of Desire) and the Moravian-Silesian National Theatre Ballet (e.g. Le Corsaire, Carmen, Coppélia, The Nutcracker - A Christmas Carol), as well as with Czech Radio and Czech Television. She is a teacher at the Duncan Centre Conservatory and lectures at the Department of Dance at HAMU. She regularly participates in professional conferences (e.g. European Association for Dance History, AIRDanza).
