Return The Old Arena - a club for culture and information 2015
























 The spaces where the Ostrava 2015 project has its offices and where from March 2010 the multi-genre space called Old Arena is operating has a rich café and theatrical and past. As early as the 1860s, when the building at No. 49 on Masaryk Square (Masarykovo náměstí) was owned by František Kroček, there was already a café with a tavern here. The new owners of the building, Ignatz and Katharina Reisz, upheld this tradition by opening the Café Central here. The café was located on the first floor of the building and consisted of just one room divided by a glass wall. In 1898 the café expanded into the front part of the building, where an independent reading room and game room had to be furnished for the ever-growing number of visitors. It is necessary to mention that the current appearance of the Reisz building, which is preserved from 1912, is the work of the important Austrian architect Wunibald Deininger, a student of Otto Wagner at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1920 the Café Central (later the Astoria) was rented from the Reiszes by Karel Hampel, who previously had worked as a waiter at the Union and Royal cafés. Separately, in the back area of the café, Hampel operated the infamous Blue Mouse bar (Modrá myš) until 1925. “Many tavern and café proprietors, in order to increase their revenues, often employed women, so-called joy girls, who had the task of entertaining the guests and getting them to spend more money. And any resulting intimate relations often were hard to keep under wraps. Aside from the Astoria, among other cafés that had problems with officials because of this widespread practice were the majority of smaller popular cafés such as the International, the Mocca and also the Bellevue. The practice was usually similar to what went on in, for example, the Mocca café: A guest paid in advance, 120 or at least 60 crowns, for a bottle of wine and was then diverted with the waitress to a closed-off space in the back where no one was allowed to disturb him. If the guest also ordered wine for the waitress, the café proprietor further increased his profits by bringing her only sugar water in a green glass. Attempts to curb this abuse got substance in the form of ordinances passed by the district authorities on 12 April 1932 and 4 May 1932 that forbid the hiring of women in the tavern and barmaid trades. It was allowable to hire only acrobats and parquet dancers older than 16 in businesses with regular cabaret and revue performances, bread dispensers in large cafés not having the character of a nightclub, and female kitchen personnel. Female servers could only be members of the proprietor's family who lived with him in the same household (Šárka Glombíčková, “The Vanished World of Cafés in Moravian Ostrava”, Ostrava anthology No. 22, 2005).

In the mid 1930s, in the building where the Café Astoria was, the Café Stachelkaktus, or Spiny Cactus, also operated. The documentarist Lukáš Přibyl, a descendent of the Reisz family, tells the history of this salon: “It was a sort of informal cultural club or salon which originated in the flat of my grandfather, an Ostrava dentist. As was common in the 1930s, as opposed to today, dentists mingled with architects, actors and so on, so he and his brother created the Café Stachelkaktus in that huge flat. They had their own tablecloths printed, they had matches with the Stachelkaktus logo – a giant spiny cactus that stood in the window. They sent out invitations, which had to be addressed, they had a piano there, and musicians would come there, beautiful actresses … the Café Stachelkaktus became the centre of cultural and intellectual life. I known that several famous Austrian architects, who were just starting out at the time, built houses in Ostrava for rich German families, and they asked my grandfather if he would comment on their plans. They fraternized a lot with the Viennese stage actors who came to the Café Stachelkaktus. At that time it was mainly Jewish society, where German was spoken, because in Ostrava the majority of Jews spoke German, at least at home.

And how did the Reisz family end up in Ostrava? “According to the family history,” says Přibyl, “sometime in the 1840s Ignatz Reisz arrived from Nitra in Slovakia (at that time part of Hungary). He was a tailor who set off wandering and finally arrived in Ostrava, which at that time had started to expand due to industry and coal. He got an idea – like a “little Henry Ford”: He decided to produce miners’ uniforms in quantity. At that time miners went to church on Sundays in their uniforms. And everyone, when they had a uniform sewn for them, wanted to see the result as soon as possible. Only that it took several days for such a uniform to be sewn. And so Ignatz Reisz borrowed money, where he could, to have uniforms sewn in all possible sizes, and when some miner came, he had him try on a uniform, altered it, and the miner could leave in it straight away. The uniform was a little more expensive, but the miners knew that it fit them well. And thanks to that, Ignatz Reisz flourished and he built a house on the main square, which was gradually reconstructed and in which later the Café Central originated. In the building next door there was a flat where the whole family lived and where the Café Stachelkaktus also originated.

The Reiszes were a very big family. As Přibyl relates, his great-great-grandfather Ignatz Reisz first was widowed and then he married the sister of his first wife, with whom he had had six children. And their children had six children altogether (Ignatz’s grandchildren). “Great-great-grandmother Katharina was killed by the Nazis, probably at the age of 90, in Auschwitz. She had survived deportation through Terezín. All six of the children unfortunately perished in concentration camps. But of their six children, five were rescued. Four were in England, among them Karel Reisz; my grandfather Bedřich went through the concentration camps and survived, and the sixth one, Richard, unfortunately perished.

Another legend from the family history has to do with the friendship of the Reiszes and Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich. “The Wachsman family (that is, of Jiří Voskovec) hid some valuables for our family during the war. My grandfather was born in 1904, still in the times of Austria-Hungary, and he was part of the generation who gravitated rather to German cultural circles. But my younger great-uncles Erich and Frank knew Voskovec, and when I read the V+W books, they even told me which of these jokes were told and how certain situations in their plays arose – at which table in which café or pub, and so on,” says Přibyl, relating the recollections of his relatives.

From 1951, on the first floor of the Reisz building the Music Theatre operated, which in turn was run by the Ultraphon record label. It was supposed to have served primarily for programmes of recorded music, gradually however it accepted amateur and professional theatrical productions into its programme. It presented programmes of classical and popular music compiled from gramophone recordings which were not very accessible at the time, supplemented by films, recitations and narrations.

For a short time (October 1968 through March 1970), the Waterloo Theatre also operated in the spaces of the Music Theatre. The ensemble of the Waterloo Theatre was founded by Tomáš Sláma in 1968 and among its members were the former members of the Under the Eaves Theatre (Divadélko pod okapem), including Petr Podhrázský, Edvard Schiffauer, Petr Ullmann, Luděk Nekuda and Pavel Veselý. Apart from authors’ performances, the ensemble also staged various single-evening programmes such as text appeals, authors’ evenings, evenings of poetry and music, recitals and others, to which guests were frequently invited, for instance Eva Olmerová, Hana Hegerová, Miroslav Horníček, Eduard Pergner and Karel Kryl. In the autumn of 1969, the ensemble became professional and was renamed the Waterloo Theatre Club. However, already in March 1970 its activities came to an end. After some of its members were denounced by a State Security agent, the members’ activities along with those of the theatre were investigated. Several members (Petr Podhrázký, Ivan Binar, Petr Ullmann and Edvard Schiffauer) were given prison sentences, ranging from nine months to two years. Four other members received suspended sentences. All of the sentences concerned writing and staging a play called Son of the Regiment, which paraphrased a work by the Soviet writer Valentin Katajev. According to the sentence delivered by the Regional Court in Ostrava in June 1972, the play Son of the Regiment “seriously offended a friendly socialist country and its brotherly help in August 1968”. For the pictures of some of the Waterloo Theatre performances, see here.

In 1994, the Arena Chamber Theatre ( Komorní scéna Aréna) took the place of the Music Theatre. It was the smallest of Ostrava’s theatres, with a capacity of around sixty viewers, and from its start, its programme was aimed at high-school and college-age youth. In 2005, the Arena Chamber Theatre moved into a new theatre building near Sýkora Bridge (Sýkorův most) and the space on Masaryk Square (Masarykovo náměstí) remained empty.

In July 2009, offices were established on the second floor of the building for the Ostrava 2015 project, and since September 2009 the former theatre spaces on the first floor have also come back to life. It was transformed into a contact and information point for the Ostrava Camera Eye film festival, and several festival events also took place here. The spacious hall provides the setting for the Ostrava 2015 team in regular meetings with friends and colleagues of the project. It was here that on 14 January 2010 the project based on which Ostrava advanced to the second selection round of the competition for the title of European Capital of Culture was presented to the public for the first time.

In March 2010, the Old Arena was transformed into a “contemporary space for art” in which Ostrava artists can realize and present their projects and which will feature regular programmes for children, workshops for adults, films, theatre and literary events for everyone. Once a month, the Old Arena will also host an Evening of Ostrava Arrivals – thematically focused get-togethers with guests who have come to the city from all corners of the Czech Republic or abroad and for whom Ostrava has become their new home.