"The Havels" Review

Czeck celloists Irena Havlova and Vojtech Havel (The Havels) brought their story to Marfa last month, in a two part musical performance at the Goode-Crowley Theater that was part jazz, part sci-fi sound track woven together in the belly of a whale and laced with Indian gin-fizzes and the ghost of Ravi Shankar grinning in the background.

These were musicians at the top of their game. They’ve been playing together since 1985. They write their own stuff and its wholly other – unique, perfect maybe, because it has no comp. Cellos, Tibetan Bowls, piano, an occasional voice and candles – but mainly cellos, alto and tenor balanced in an unreal way – going places, in and out of sync, as needed.

The first act seemed to be their story: original attraction, fatal, screechy, mid- game unison, lover lows, grinding melodies, highs, abrupt stops, a chime, train-thunder and a bench-sharing, four-handed piano finale.

Their influence: notes we cannot hear? Or pre-perestroika poets of east Europe; them who was in and out of the Soviet orb – mad dictators, a country polluted politically, industrially, Transylvanian gypsy fiddlers like Csiszar, playwrights like Vaclav Havel. The Havels got freed-up in Prague somewhere along the line, perhaps only behind locked doors to experiment in the unclassified. But the breaking of the Berlin Wall and three journeys to India, set these poet/musicians on their way to international acclaim and to feather their cellos on high octane. Check out their “Little Blue Nothing” on YouTube.

I almost ran over Vojtech trying to park for a pre-performance party at the newest restaurant in town “____ “. Much like his music, he gave me a look that I couldn’t interpret. Was it Marfan drip oozing out of his expression or did he just not understand that pick-up trucks in Texas get the street and the sidewalks too under emergency U-turn conditions?

At the party I gave him a three minute apology and he gave me one of those looks again. After realizing at the theater that he was half the act, it all seemed to work out – interpretation is a funny thing. I still don’t know if he speaks English.

The second act included more chanted words from a language where I only understand the name of a ski resort; Banska Bystreka. A lot of Banska Bystreka and again tremendous powerfully conducted sounds wrapping together for our personal deconstruction.

You don’t get this everywhere. Ballroom Marfa has done it again.