Don’t Be Afraid!

Fear isn’t something we should be embarrassed by. Nor is it a tool? Fear is one of the four basic human emotions, along with happiness, sadness and anger. What if we tried to get to know fear a little better? Maybe then, we wouldn’t be afraid of it, and we could talk about it with people we love.

We encounter fear throughout our entire lives. It doesn’t matter how old you are, if you’re a boy or a girl, or if you were born in Europe or maybe in Asia. King Charles IV was afraid. So was Jan Hus. And Superman. Sometimes firemen are afraid, and so is your dad, and so is the school custodian. And since that’s just the way it is, it would be good to know something about fear. That’s the only way to stop being worried. Our exhibition, Don’t be Afraid!, is a journey into the world of fear. But there’s nothing to be afraid of! We will look at fear from different angles, examine it, play with it, and maybe even become friends. Whether you are big or small, you’ll find some kinds of fear that you know, and others that you’ve never met before.

This exhibition was inspired by a book of the same name. It was written by Milada Rezková, Lukáš Urbánek and Jakub Kaše, and it has delighted many readers. Just like the book, this exhibition is about fears we encounter all the time – in our family, at school, in cities, in the countryside – and all of these fears, which might seem a little strange to us, are part of our lives.

The exhibition Don’t be Afraid! was first made for the Atrium Žižkov museum in Prague and curated by Ondřej Horák. Its creators worked with the Drak Theatre workshop to create this expanded version for Labyrinth.

The exhibition also includes an educational program for schools and other groups, plus worksheets for the public. So come, discover the world of fear and learn how to come to terms with it. This new, interactive exhibition Don’t be Afraid! will convince every visitor, young or old, that you don’t need to fear fear!

Design Playground

This interactive exhibition teaches concepts and methods of design in a playful way. Step by step, children learn how a designer thinks and comes up with ideas. 

The exhibition takes visitors from the first idea to the final product. A simple guide leads them through five phases: empathy, definition, shaping ideas, prototypes, and testing. The participants discover new, creative approaches to their own work and everyday life as they go through numerous creative adventures. 

Exploring concepts of design teaches visitors how to generate ideas and evaluate them, finding creative solutions to problems. It develops communication and presentation skills, supports teamwork and inclusion, and is playful, fun and educational. 

What will you experience at The Design Playground? How does it work? 

• An interactive exhibition suitable for visitors aged 6 and over. Children should be accompanied by an adult and we count on the active participation of all parties!
• The exhibition is made up of 5 stations. You will learn about one aspect of design at each station.
• Please go through the stations in order.
• You will find a worksheet at each station that will let you experience how a designer thinks and designs.
• At the end, you will have your very own personally-designed diary/notebook/scrapbook, or maybe something else entirely
• We recommend that you spend 1.5 – 2 hours at the exhibition.
• The exhibition is accessible to English-speaking visitors.  Most of the texts in the exhibition are in Czech and English. The worksheets are bilingual.

We offer programs for school groups which take students through the entire creative process. They learn how to gather, sort, analyze, and evaluate information and see how it can be applied to new contexts and situations. In five steps, they get from first idea to its final implementation. 

The exhibition fosters many important skills: teamwork, communication, public speaking, visual presentation of ideas, discussion and debate. 

The process of exploring design concepts brings visitors together, breaking barriers in a group and contributing to individuals’ sense of fulfillment.  

Our educational programs are designed for a range of age groups, from elementary to high school students. 

The creators of the exhibition are from the PROTEBE cultural association in Karlovy Vary. They are design activists, artists, and passionate locals who have been promoting culture and civil society in the town of Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad) since 2005. DIZAJNPARK is the name of their creative center, which was previously called the Supermarket WC Gallery. They are now located in an industrial building that once housed the Tuhnice heat exchanger, and the space has a strong influence on their work.  

DRAK IN ANIMATION AND FOUR VOICES

From October 2022, the entire second floor of Drak Theatre’s Labyrinth will once again, for the second time, be open to all who want to uncover the magic of animated film and special effects.

The theatre’s new interactive exhibit, entitled Drak in Animation and Four Voices, is a sequel to the Three Voices and Drak Animation Playroom exhibit, which arose in cooperation between Drak Theatre and the MAUR film production company. This time it lent to Labyrinth its new travelling exhibit Four Voices, which follows the two-year-old project and once again combines the animated work of students of film universities in the Czech Republic. Visitors will be presented with the short animated films Whatman by Nika Zinoveva (FMK UTB Zlín), Forgive by Alžbeta Mačáková Mišejková (FAMU), Weeds by Polina Kazak (FAMO Písek) and Mum is Always Right by Marie Urbánková (UMPRUM). 

The main part of the exhibit is comprised of the Drak in Animation incubator, which was created especially for Drak Theatre’s Labyrinth space as part of the long-term programme conception, which is the connection of art and education. The authors of the project are once again the artist Martina Marková together with the scenographer Tereza Vašíčková. 

Utopia Factory

Accept our invitation to the original interactive exhibition “Utopia Factory”, which consists of six unique installations by six different authors. Their work was inspired by the utopian motifs in the literary works of Karel Čapek. The individual installations are the author’s reactions to Čapek’s novels The Absolute at Large, Krakatit, War with the Newts and the plays R.U.R. and The Makropulos Affair. They use diverse means of expression, find different themes in the literary inspirations and count on different ways of getting the viewer to actively participate. At the same time, however, they are connected by their background as authors who are all involved in puppet and alternative theatre. They therefore have a common desire to tell stories, as well as a sense of theatricality, playfulness and metaphor.

Six original stops await you; six stops in which you can recall the ancient primitive game from the time people still ruled the world instead of robots in Kamil Bělohlávek’s installation Lūsus pilāris mēchanicus, visit Karel Czech’s Space for Immortality, or create a little divine energy in Paddleboat at Large by Tereza Vašíčková. War with the Newts inspired both Robert Smolík in his military-historical exhibition Peace with the Newts and Antonín Šilar with his short film Conversation in a Rowboat. A purely aural adventure awaits the players of Jan Čtvrtník’s audio game Krakataudio. And the six installations are complemented by a seventh, bearing the name Future Factory. It creates a space for each visitor to the exhibition, regardless of his or her age, for his/her own creativity and it was prepared by the instructors of Drak Theater, Anna Hrnečková, Jana Nechvátalová and Klára Svobodová.