Mask Bureau’s performers have been practicing and performing together for over ten years. Our choreography involves acrobats, jugglers, ballet dancers, break dancers, models, actors, fire performers and snake charmers not only from theatres, dance schools and professional athletics, but also talented party people, teen talents and scientists. During our existence such individuals as a dancing doct
or, a university professor on stilts or a nuclear physicist in a hand-welded allegorical car have appeared amongst us. We’ve performed in churches and casinos, on water, in the middle of the Nevada Desert and on the border of a village with a population of 60 or as a prime time celebs on giant stage for 40,000 people. Linda Mikolášková (* 1984) was born in Prague where she completed her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. She is the co-founder of the contemporary art gallery Berlinskej Model and the performative theatre group Amanitas which, after ten years, has been reborn and innovated under the brand Mask Bureau. Mikolášková is CEO and art director of Mask Bureau, creating events, headpieces, costumes and SFX make-up. The theatre is a prominent inspiration for Mikolášková, first and foremost the theatre’s own tension between the distance of the gaze and the immediate corporeality between the audience and participants. Costumes allow the artist to reincarnate into a different character with every performance. With a certain sense of ceremony, Mikolášková creates a rich, Baroque spectacle referencing the revealed staging of the “living painting”. Here the performer’s body is exhibited while simultaneously “covered” by the role they have undertaken. Mikolášková’s performances are based on cultural symbols and references which can usually be identified but are intentionally left open to interpretation. Gender aspects are consistently present throughout her artistic practice. With her passion for combining seductive and accessible visuals and sophisticated borrowings from the cultural encyclopedia, she specifically refers to the postmodern. Her key sources of inspiration are, among others, her daughter Maya and son Thyme, country tendencies and the specifics of Czech tramping, mycological experiments, disturbing situations and promises of the end of the world, the energy of fire and rave of desertions, folklore, temporary autonomous zones, hobos, bobos, nanotechnology, rituals, mass culture, gold jewelry and golden Czech hands, the third coffee wave and brave men.
