The original production STAND UP (AND TRY TO STAY STANDING), which will premiere in March 2026, will take a very unique form. In terms of genre, it moves between storytelling, stand-up, physical theater, and postmodern cabaret. Stories will play the main role in it; personal, dreamt, lived, imagined, real, and fictional.
The theme of the production is the question of how we actually tell our personal stories. This topic is based on our theatre´s long-term research into stories in general and, more specifically, the question of narrative identity, i.e., the way we tell stories about ourselves.
The creative team will collaborate with a group of senior actors in preparing the production. Collaboration with this group began in 2024, when Divadlo Continuo started working with its regional partner, the EDU centrum A3D at the South Bohemian Theater, which supports artistic projects of seniors. The first result of this collaboration was the participation of six senior actors in Divadlo Continuo’s international site-specific theater project For Now, Until Then, Forever. The collaboration continued in 2025 with a series of activities, including initial work on this production. It was presented to the public as a work in progress in December 2025.
Methodologically, the preparation of the production will draw on the creative team’s experience in processing personal, historical, and mythological stories and transcribing them into theatrical language. Theoretically, the work is supported by the works of a number of philosophers and psychologists (e.g., Roger C. Schank, Robert P. Abelson, Jill Freedman, Gene Combs, and Dan P. McAdams), who have addressed the issue of storytelling from various perspectives, as well as by the principles and practice of narrative psychology. The concept of „narrative identity“ plays an important role in the creative process, providing a wealth of inspiration for creative theater work. One of the most important social psychologists who had a fundamental influence on the development of narrative psychology, Elliot George Mishler, says that „we are the stories we tell about ourselves,“ pointing out that the story we tell about ourselves usually does not correspond to the reality we have experienced and that it often changes and evolves fundamentally during our lives. And this perspective is one of the basic principles with which the upcoming production will work.
The stage design of the production will be based on original material created by the performers during rehearsals. This will focus on searching for and rediscovering personal stories that are not only preserved in memories, but also resonate in the body, in its physical form and movement expression.
For the creative work of the company, collaborating with senior actors means expanding the possibilities of their own unique theatrical language, as well as overcoming the established premise that physical theater is the domain of only young and trained performers.
