Balletomime

If this were an animated movie, it would not be so surprising. But that is a real man up there on the stage, and that was his bow tie that just came off and is now flying around like a butterfly. Strings? No strings.

It is a matter of lighting. There is actually an invisible performer walking around the stage manipulating the bow tie. The invisibility is achieved through a stage-light trick known to conjurers since the darkest of the Dark Ages. Under properly angled lighting, a black object against a black backdrop cannot be seen by an audience. Developing its material on this simple principle, a Czechoslovak troupe known as the Black Theater of Prague has become internationally famous.

They do about seven sketches in an evening, never saying a word, mixing ballet, pantomime and animated cartoonery. In any given sketch, two or three actors will be visible, and two or three phantoms will be on the stage with them, making brightly colored inanimate objects move about as if by magic.

Rolling Cubes. In Prelude, a man and a woman, sitting at opposite ends of a park bench, are reading. They exchange tentative glances but are too shy to speak. The man's umbrella, however, is not shy at all. It rises and moves toward the girl's umbrella, which responds, and floats up into the air as well. The man and woman move to opposite sides of the stage and stare pensively into the wings.

The bench they were sitting on is actually six big cubes, which now tilt forward to show a mammoth piano keyboard painted on their sides. The umbrellas pick out a waltz, note for precise note, in two-part harmony. This brings the man and woman together. The cubes roll over again and become an automobile with painted wheels. The couple goes for a drive. The wheels spin. The girl's hair blows in the wind. Paper puffs of exhaust smoke head for the wings. The girl loses her scarf. The car backs up to retrieve it. The smoke reverses direction and goes back into the exhaust pipe. Love can do anything. Curtain.

Jiri Srnec thinks these things up, and is the Black Theater's No. 1 performer as well. He is 33, a short, stocky man with a bull neck, a round head, and a freshly scrubbed demeanor. He has a Ph.D. in music, another in theater, and another in art. Sometimes foreigners confuse his Black Theater with Lanterna Magica, another Czech theatrical group, which dazzled visitors to the 1958 Brussels World's Fair with a theatrical hybrid of song, speech, and film bits projected onto odd-shaped screens. But Srnec is swiftly clearing up the confusion the world over. The Black Thea ter was a hit at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival, recently finished a successful stand in West Germany, and is now making a 105-performance tour of Australia. Last week it opened in Hobart, where Tasmanian society treated the group's coming as almost the greatest event since the arrival of Tasman, the Dutch explorer, in 1642.

Collectivized Clothesline? Not everyone in the audience knows quite what to make of these weird Communist carryings-on. Appreciating its brilliantly abstract artfulness, nervous Aussies nonetheless wondered if the troupe might not be putting something over down under.

Up went a clothesline. Ah, ha! The party line. Clothes went onto the clothesline. What could they symbolize? Two pairs of men's underwear began to fight over a pair of frilly panties. They kicked, tripped and bashed at each other until one slumped in defeat. The winning male underwear hipped up to the wigglingly impressed panties and the two dove together into a clothes basket to do a little Czechmating.

Then the Australians relaxed and en joyed it. After the underwear came out of the basket and returned to the line, a pair of children's underpanties soon appeared there, too, then one, two, three more in diminishing sizes. That kind of collectivization is ring-a-ding-dingo from northern Queensland to the Tasman Sea.

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