Milan Sládek, World-Famous Slovak Director, Actor and Mime

As a young artist, Sládek was more interesting in visual art than theatre. He presented his first mime performance when he was a high school student and later in a university student theatre. He studied theatre at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava.

Then he further developed his mime art in Prague, where he studied with the Czech avant-garde director E. F. Burian. 
In 1959, together with Czech director Eduard Žlábek, Sládek founded his first mime ensemble that worked on the stage of the D 34 theatre in Prague. 

On 10 March 1960, he performed his first work in Prague – a jazz mime comedy titled The Bump. In it, Milan Sládek performed the character of a young waiter apprentice called Kefka (Little Brush) who would become Sládek’s alter ego. 

 The dreamy waiter Kefka lives in his fantasy world only to wake up from his dream one day and start perceiving the world around him with a new pair of eyes. 

 After the departure from Prague in the 1960s, the Mime Theatre resided in several spaces in Bratislava, for example, in the Horizont Theatre, or in the Small Stage of the Slovak National Theatre.

The character Kefka, and many others, accompanied Milan Sládek all his life and became a magnet for audiences worldwide, from Japan through New Zealand, India, Kenya, and France, all the way to the United States, Chile or Argentina.

Milan Sládek and Eduard Žlábek taught at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. Sládek taught mime, while Žlábek focused on dance. In 1965, they won the prestigious Grand Prix award at the International festival of student theatres in Nancy for their original staging of The Czech Comedy About the Rich Man and Lazarus by Slovak Renaissance playwright Pavel Kyrmezer.

After Milan Sládek left the Small Stage of the Slovak National Theatre, he and his company did a brief stint at the legendary Bratislava The Theatre Studio – Theatre on the Promenade (1967–1971). During its existence, the Theatre on the Promenade took patronage over the Lasica and Satinský Theatre, the big-beat band Prúdy, the Poetic Ensemble, and Milan Sládek’s Mime Theatre.

After the events in August 1968, when armies of the Warsaw Pact occupied the territory of Czechoslovakia, Sládek, as well as a few other members of his Mime Theatre company, stayed in Sweden at the end of a tour.  In 1970, he emigrated to West Germany, where he sought political asylum. He settled down in Cologne. It was there he found new opportunities to continue his artistic work.

The first production Sládek presented in front of a German audience was the slapstick mime called The Gift. It premiered in 1972 at the Cologne Kammerspiele.  In 1974, he opened his own Kefka Theatre in Cologne – at the time, it was the only mime theatre in Western Europe. In 1976, Sládek established an international mime festival called Gaukler.

The fall of the Iron Curtain in November 1989 offered him new opportunities once again. He was one of the first artists who came to greet the demonstrating crowd at the SNP Square in Bratislava – thousands of people who desired freedom.  When he returned to Slovakia, Sládek became the director of the Aréna Theatre. He opened the house with a renewed premiere of The Gift. In 1994, he founded the International Institute of Movement Theatre.

In 1995, as the director of the Aréna Theatre, Sládek initiated its renovation. The building of the former summer theatre situated on the right bank of the Danube is a place enjoying a unique history. Its connected with the theatre beginnings of Max Reinhardt (1873–1943), theatre director and reformer who worked there as a young actor for several seasons.   

Several of his world-famous works were staged again in Bratislava with the new generation of aspiring mime artists. In this period, he created wholly new productions as well. In the Aréna Theatre, Sládek organized the international mime festival known as Kaukliar. 

Sládek found inspiration not only in devised theatre, but also in literature, for example in Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi.