Ivan Acher
Biography
A carpenter, forest labourer, designer, musician and composer rolled into one, Ivan Acher naturally blends electro-acoustic and contemporary music. A seeker of progressive cross-genre solutions and striking approaches to instrumentation and arrangement, he has employed musical and non-musical instruments, which he himself makes. As a composer and performer, he has participated in Vladimír Václavek’s VRRM projects and Pavel Fajt’s Autopilot, and has regularly appeared with the NUO jazz all-stars mini big band.
Since 2002, he has collaborated with the Agon Orchestra, specialised in contemporary music, for whom he has created almost 20 compositions. Acher’s pieces have been performed at classical music festivals in Prague (Prague Spring), Hamburg, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Bielsko-Biała, and elsewhere. The bulk of his oeuvre is made up of scores for dance and theatre productions, which have earned him numerous accolades. To date, Acher has worked on more than 300 stage projects. He has received nominations for the Czech Film Critics Prize, the Czech Lion, the Czech Theatre Critics Prize, the Alfréd Radok Prize, the Dosky, and other awards. As a composer, he co-operated with the legendary Prague Chamber Theatre – Comedy Theatre (Dušan Pařízek’s productions Quartet, Anticlimax and The Trial; David Jařab’s The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch, Weissenstein and The Heart of Darkness) and Lenka Vagnerová & Company (the dance show La Loba, which received the Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; Riders, Gossip, etc.).
He has created music for a number of productions at the National Theatres in Prague, Brno and Bratislava, as well as other Czech, Slovak and international stages. Ivan Acher has written scores for dozens of features and documentaries.
He has also created film projections (Magorova summa, The Trial, The Heart of Darkness, etc.), photograph cycles (Gulliver’s Travels, Males and Their Young, etc.) and collections of poems (Psí mlíko, 1996; Nate tumáte, 1995; Verbování, 1994; Bo hynemeť vstana, 1997).