NO MORE HEROES by Matej Matejka

What do you see that others don’t see? I see joy and pain coursing through the lives of people, sensing there is more to each moment than meets the eye. I see human bodies as membranes, imprinting their feelings into the spaces they occupy. I wish to unwrap them: to expose and explore the depths within. I long to lay bare the human heart, for what better canvas than the body itself—which lives and breathes the experiences of the soul?

I began to use a camera to zoom into the details which were too easy to overlook in the theatre. I tried to place them into least expected contexts, to play with a montage between the performer and the environment, to create tensions or contradictions. I revealed fragments of these unseen stories. Movement research shaped details of the body, the body in turn has shaped my perception, and this perception shaped my understanding and fed me with inspiration to reveal stories through these film essays.    

I’m currently exploring the broader scope, pondering how to organise cinematic images to convey the story most effectively. I’m also considering what other narratives might lie undiscovered within the material I’ve already created. No More Heroes is an unfinished short film project challenging notion of traditional perspective on masculinity. It expresses desires and obsessions hidden within every one of us through a dream world. The idea behind the film is that a man might try to appear ‘straight’ and strong to cover up his weak spots, his desires and fears. Demystifying heroic idealism of masculinity is an avenue of repair for our society.  By accepting and embracing these desires as inherent aspects of myself, I attempt to demystify an idealised that is masculinity often perpetuated by societal norms.

MATEJ MATEJKA a multi-award winning movement and theatre practitioner and movement therapist who specializes in opening up the creative potentials of the body, and this comes out in his teaching and directing.

Most recently, he was movement director for Flabbergast Theatre’s Macbeth (Assembly Roxy – Edinburgh Fringe) and co-director of Saksi Bisou’s ‘Prayers for a Hungry Ghost’ (Barbican Centre) and ‘Promised Land’ (Bloomsbury Festival) UK. Born and raised in Czecho-Slovakia, curently living in Poland, he was an actor and movement co-trainer with Farm in the Cave studio in Prague from 2000-2005 and Teatr ZAR, Wroclaw, Poland from 2005-2018, where he performed in ‘Dark Love Sonnets’, ‘SCLAVI: Song of an Emigrant’, ‘Anhelli: The Calling’ and ‘Caesarean Section: Essays on Suicide’, winnning Herald Angel and Total Theatre awards in Edinburgh in 2006 and 2012. He is the founder and leader of Studio Matejka, a performance research studio and company under the auspices of the Grotowski Institute, in which he directed and created multiple theatre productions, short films and interactive performances among others ‘Awkward Happiness or Everything I Don’t Remember About Meeting You’, ‘Charmolypi’, site-specific projects including ‘Angry Man: Variations in Defense of Anger’ nominated for The Best OFF 2018/2019 in Poland. Matej directed seven short films, including ‘Pearadise’, which won the Best Foreign Film award at the Los Angeles International Underground Film Festival in 2013 and ‘Conflict of Apathy’ in NUDANCE Festival, Bratislava 2014.