Czech project bringing people together

Julia Knippen, SF State drama major, and Lucie Dominikova, a college student in the Czech Republic, developed close feelings for each other without meeting face to face.

They've talked about deaths in their families, and what the losses meant to them, in letters they've exchanged since September.

After a six-month-long correspondence, Knippen and Dominikova met in person for the first time 10 days ago when Dominikova and eight other Czech students arrived in San Francisco.

Knippen and Dominikova were brought together by "The Czech Project," a joint theater project between SF State and the University of West Bohemia. The exchange of letters was a part of the communication process to develop scripts for the project, said Adam Beck, creator and director of the project.

The central European students spent a little more than a week with their American counterparts to learn about the students and their lives here, Beck said.

The main goal of the project is to produce theater pieces about each other. In May, SF State students will perform as Czechs in an on-campus play. .At the same time, the Czech students will perform as the Americans back in their hometown, he said.

Virstyne Henry, a freshman majoring in theater arts, said she was delighted to get to know her partner, Pavla Bouskova, in person.

"I found out that both of us are drawn to boys as friends. We have more boy friends than girl friends," Henry said. "I guess we trust them more. We feel more comfortable around them."

Bouskova, a 21-year-old English major, said "Yeah, I feel very comfortable around men. My mom used to say when I was younger I was always more like a boy than a girl."

Group members were not allowed to exchange photos during the "get to know" communication to keep the first impression fresh. Henry and Bouskova had some wrong ideas about each other before they met.

Henry said she was wrong about Bouskova's hair color. Bouskova has brown hair, not blond as she originally thought.

Henry has short hair, but because Bouskova knew Henry is an African American from their letters, she thought Henry had long, braided hair, she said.

Despite their incorrect impressions, both Henry and Bouskova said they quickly felt connected.

"She is a Czech version of me. She's very open. She likes poems and music. She likes kids, in fact she used to teach English to kids," Henry said. "We have a lot in common."

"She's very friendly. She likes poems and music. I like to listen to Coolio. She listens to rap music, too. I feel like I've known her for years," Bouskova said about Henry.

The original concept of the Czech Project emerged in 1992 when Beck, an SF State theater arts graduate student, was teaching English at the University of West Bohemia as a Peace Corps volunteer.

He said the most important lesson he learned from the experience was that "we all have basic human similarities." He wanted to use his love for theater in a way two different groups of students can learn the common bond.

"Basic things like birth, death, family, love, struggle, joy. We might express feelings in different ways, and we easily get lost in obvious differences. But basic human experiences are exactly the same."

Knippen said she would like to express universal emotions and trials in her play about Dominikova.

"I want to start it with a scene where she's 10, 11 years old and learned her aunt, Suzanne, passed away," she said.

"The saddest thing about it is that she didn't know her aunt was sick until the day before she passed away."

Dominikova said she, too, wants to use a scene to describe Knippen's feelings about the loss of her father who died of kidney and lung cancer last summer.

To make understanding a two-way street, the SF State students plan to travel to the University of West Bohemia in Plzen, about 50 miles southwest of Prague, in mid-March for 10 days, Beck said.

Czech students' travel was funded by the "Open Society Funds," a nonprofit foundation in the Czech Republic.

However, the American group is still trying to raise enough money to get to the Czech Republic, according to Beck. The group needs to raise about $6,000. About half that amount has been raised so far.

[ Golden Gater Online March 12, 1996 ]

[ Top of document ]