The title seems very grim but let's start with the fun stuff. The struggles of the first year were finished and with the second year at the academy the real fun begun. We had more interesting but also challenging schedule and we were going to have real mime classes at last with the mime star himself, Radim Vizvary.
As a mime I was dissapointed once again because even though we had mime classes with Radim but there were fewer of them and also shorter. And from that shorter pantomime class, only maybe 15 minutes were left for actual learning of mime so that was kind of a let down for me personally. Nevertheless, I was very happy to have any classes with Radim Vizvary because he is a great mime of our time that has a lot to show and teach. We used the time given to us with him to the fullest even when he was absent and created another great performance of my life that I truly loved and had most fun performing even though the creation process was very hard. Radim really pushed us forward technically and creatively and made us work together. He brought us to his new (back then) festival Mime Fest and made us part of his brand Mime Prague and tried his best to give us just enough to make self-sufficient mimes.
And what about the greatest mime performance of all time you ask? Well I was talking about "Pirates or The Secret of The Sea Chest". It was funny, intriguing and made by us with the supervision and a lot of nudging from Radim. We had the best possible team too so I got to see how professional performances require and how they're made. I need to mention the perfect costumes made by a fashion designer Lucie Markova, the make-up by Michaela Hradecka and the lights by one of the top light designers David Prokopic. I was performing but I also made the sound design as I had a lot of experience from being a brother of Lukas Kasprzyk who made all sound designs in Studio of Pantomime Kasprzyk and is a master of sound in many films and slovak series.
We have made more different school performances like a clown or a physical theatre or new mime etudes, spending all days at our mime school. It was our golden years studying at the academy. I even managed to find the love of my life, Eliska Kasprzyk, who came to study mime at that time too. The acrobacy and aerial acrobacy was still very much a struggle but we were stronger and our bodies managed a little bit better than the first year. I even finally learned how to juggle, at least basically.
The peak of my creativity came with my bachelor degree performance I made together with the incredible Valeria Danhova. We have made performance "Colony One" about the first two colonists on Mars and it was funny but dramatic and epic contemporary mime performance. We kept Lucie Markova as a costume designer, we found another great light designer Jan Hejzlar and I made the sound design again. It was an enjoyable performance from the idea, through the practising, to the premiere. Just a one creative ride and little have I known that it will be one of the last ones for some time because as the title says, this was the last performance before I burned out creatively.
I had a hard time to create anything in my masters studies which is extremly unfortunate when you're studying for a creative degree. The studying got easier with less of trying to get killed while doing acrobacy and more theoretical studying. I have learned a lot of new things but I didn't learn that I had a creative burnout or even that I could have it. That's one of the downsides of being from the post Soviet countries, the mental health is still underrated.
So what happened next was one of the hardest things in my life creatively. I had to create a mime performance one last time at The Academy Of Performing Arts in Prague in order to get my masters degree. Don't get me wrong, I very much wanted to and looked forward to but I just couldn't and had to force myself very much to create every small piece of it. I was working with my fellow student and also a good dancer Barbora Nechanicka and made an experimental contemporary mime performance combining mime, dance and a live deathcore band where I also play on drums. I was satisfied with it in the end but it was a great struggle to make it happen, to lead the whole team and to create it all from scratch. I was so exhausted after managing this that after graduating and becoming a mime with a masters diploma I was only teaching mime and drums and making coffee for a living, not creating anything for few years and still not knowing why.
It is very hard to write about it openly and share my feelings but it is important especially if you are also a creative person who struggles to create and wonder why. I could have just written here how nice and peachy my studying was but we need to talk about the mental health more I believe.
To finish this mime blog I will fast forward to the present day. After the years of struggle in Prague after graduating we moved with my wife Eliska Kasprzyk to Helsinki, Finland for a calmer experience and more developed society. We got together with Kati Lehtola and formed a mime group HELMIME. The serene forests of Finland and the covid-19 pandemic brought us to look inside of us more and I finally found out I had a creative burnout all these years of being mean to myself because I couldn't create and I am a creative person.
So I have learned to give myself a break and I encourage you to do the same. If you're struggling, take a brake. Breathe. Look inside. If you can't or don't like what you see, find help. There is a specialist for every part of the problem and you're not alone.
So if you want to have fun and do something meaningful and touch people's hearts, start doing pantomime. If you want to have even more fun, bring your friends and make them join you on your journey of becoming a mime. If you think it's not for you, think again because mime is for everyone. And if you just want to understand pantomime, support mimes and have more fun watching mime as more informed audience, you are very welcome and I will happily teach you, guide you or entertain you.
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