A huge beating heartbeat which shook the city. Fireworks over a Town Hall whose windows flamed up and burned with history, changing shape, colour and meaning by the second. A crowd of demonic figures waving flags and dancing over České Budějovice’s mystic Black Tower, the seat of many folkloric city legends.
I have to say I was impressed and satisfied with the ceremony celebrating 750 years of České Budějovice . I felt the same after the show on Tuesday 10th March as after numerous of my own birthdays. They saw it in well. It wasn‘t the best night of my life but they did it justice. The right amount of ceremony, fun and wow. Satisfied.
It is, I think, a good habit to not overly criticise interesting events the town puts on for us. Especially for free. I would, however, have a few suggestions for the next ceremony. Please, please let the most emotional song of the evening be a CZECH one (not Lucie Bilá‘s cover of the classic power ballad„All by Myself“ with altered lyrics. In a ceremony which was supposed to inspire pride in the place we are standing now (or at least the country), using an imported and altered song sort of punctured the whole feeling. The concerts were, as a young artist friend of mine complained „very much for the mainstream crowd“ but presumably that is the point of a public show, to please the main body of the population. It is upto those who disgree to put on shows and make art which speaks more to their individual hearts.
How many people would have thought of the Samson statue as the beating heart of our town before the opening ceremony last night? Not me, but it was cheering and pleasant to see the statue, such a beautiful work of sculpture but also such a part of normal, daily existence, flickering with life under red lights (although not to feel the pumping heartbeat boomed through the square, that was a bloody unpleasant feeling).Especially in a town which somewhat lacks an identity, in which the majority of inhabitants drift back to their better loved villages or livelier cities at weekends.
The beating heart of Samson was carried by dancers to spread over the Town Hall where historical events from the life of the town spread out over the buildings facades in a light and picture show. The voiceover reminded us that Budějovice connects us in time as well as place. The history, though, felt quite dead and distant for me. In such a long past it is natural that things happened: people discovered and invented and built. But what does that mean for us now, what story is that supposed to tell us about Budějovice today?
One fact that stuck out for me, flashed onto the Town Hall and unexplained, before the march of images went on, was that Budějovice stayed loyal to the crown in the Hussite wars, making it a blot of consistency in a sea of radicalism. We were always „Budějovice, the ever loyal“. Maybe that is something real for us to dwell on, that this is not a town of movement, rush and drive but one of contentment, slowness, tradition. These are not neccessarily bad things but different. There is no point in pretending we are a Prague, an Ostrava or a Plzen.
Which is why the 750th anniversary theme of „City of Stories“ with its dramatic operatic music and flashing faces and names failed to ring true for me. It seemed a show for a different, faster more radical city, pasted on to our real one just as Lucie‘s lyrics were pasted onto an English pop song. I would have liked a spectacle that was a celebration of our city as it really is. Many of us would also like Budějovice to be different – more people at concerts, more exciting ideas being discussed and students which venture into town from kolej once in a while. It would be wonderful if we could change our town for the better. But it would also be wonderful if we could, on its 750th birthday, celebrate it as it really is too.
Natalie Czaban 
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