In 1989, I wanted to redress for something- theatre dramaturg recalls her journey towards activism
Darina Kárová was born on July 31, 1951, in Skalica as a daughter of Slovak painter Olga Bartošíková and Czech academic Ľubor Kára. She spent the first six years of her life in Prague and later moved to Bratislava with her parents and younger sister Elena. Her father was the editor-in-chief of the periodical Art Life and initially a convinced communist. But due to publishing progressive artist in the periodical, he was expelled from the party in 1974. Despite her bad cadre profile, Darina Kárová became a year after that dramaturg of the Nitra Theatre (since 1979 Andrej Bagar Theatre). Her most prominent professional collaboration was with director Jozef Bednárik. They also attempted to smuggle political connotations into the staged plays and this trick the normalisation regime. In 1977, she and other members of the theatre company were forced to sign Anticharta, which she perceived as a very humiliating experience. At the events of November 1989, which caught the theatre ensemble in Moscow, she felt the need to atone for something, either personally or from the perspective of her family’s history. Already in Moscow, theatres wrote a statement condemning the attack on the student rally at Prague‘s Národní třída. After returning to Slovakia, they dismissed the theatre’s representatives and established a coordination and strike committee (the chair was Darina Kárová), who cooperated with the civic platform Public Against Violence. They also organized meetings and discussions, distributed leaflets informing the public about the revolutionary events that led to the fall of the socialist regime in Czechoslovakia.
