Sreten Asanović, Nomina, Plima, Ulcinj, 2011
By: Ivana Ančić
English version will be available soon.
The Beautiful, Beautiful, Beautiful Catastrophe , ZPC, Zagreb
By: Ivana Anić
Five performers, five stories. Five performers, one story? The Beautiful, Beautiful, Beautiful Catastrophe is a piece by dance artists Selma Banich, Deana Gobac and Roberta Milevoj, dance artist and critic Iva Nerina Sibila and theatrologist and critic Nataša Govedić in which they deal with their own stories, as well as other peoples’ and universal ones. The play has an experimental character but it is long and exceptionally fragmented and even leaves the first impression of being improvised. The text, the gesture, the dance, the symbolic action and the metatheatrical actions are constantly fighting for their position in the game, so that, at the end of the play, the viewer feels as if bread-crumbs, the assurance of a safe journey home have been eaten by the birds. But, the disadvantages of the conceptual duel are, at the same time, its virtues, indicating a harmony between form and content.
The play is about those that tell the story, about the ways they tell it, about the content of the story and about the search for the point of the message, and two scenes at the very beginning of the play summarise the poetics of the entire play. In the first one, Selma Banich tries to do something very simple, for about ten times – spread a white napkin in her hands and let it fall to the floor. Despite her effort, the napkin never falls to the floor as she wants it to, it does not land perfectly flat with the floor but, carried bythe wind, constantly falls all crumbled up. The message that the sender has sent is not the same message that came to the receiver due to circumstances – in this case, the laws of physics – which have changed. There is an extra significance in the fact that the sender of the message is the white napkin, the symbol of wish for reconciliation and communication, which has failed to achieve its mission. The second scene is symbolically connected to the first one. Deana Gobac, a professional ballerina, tells a story about an event from one performance of The Swan Lake, when the main dancer fainted at the very beginning of the performance. Used to her health condition, her colleagues continued with the performance and the problem was solved by Gobac dancing her role. But that also meant that the viewers had to accept the challenge of pretending that there is not a fainted ballerina on stage, while her colleagues continued with the performance stepping carefully so as not to step on her.
At that moment, the viewer is a witness to an illusion inside an illusion inside another illusion – the moment of maximum metatheatrical concentration – e.g. he/she is watching a play which is by itself an illusion and listens to the performer telling a story from her own experience of another performance, in which the audience, that already agreed upon the basic ‘’as if’’ moment of The Swan Lake, pretended not to see a body of a fainted ballerina on stage.
At the end, the audience is left to base all communication on this timeless ‘’as if’’ between the performer and the audience and between the performers themselves, in which we pretend to understand what someone wants to tells us with words, dance, gesture, that we have reached someone’s ‘’truth’’ while in reality we can hear only parts of songs from the soundtrack of someone’s life. For instance, when Roberta Milevoj listens to music on her mp3 and manages to transfer only every fourth or fifth word of the lyrics to the audience and to her co-performers. Although the idea of impossibility to express the ‘’truth’’, the truth that continues to slip away from us – even when Deana Gobac dances her own, goofy Fly of the Bumblebee to Rimsky-Korsakov music for the third time, after which she concludes ‘’This story breaks your heart. Maybe it really is stupid’’ – The Beautiful, Beautiful, Beautiful Catastrophe is not a pessimistic play. That is, it is about a ‘’catastrophe’’, but about a catastrophe that is three times ‘’beautiful’’. It is a play about a world that keeps going forward despite the fact that it does not understand itself, that encourages thy neighbour to perform their own Dance of the Bumblebee even if it does not understand it, that gives in to the crazy game, just like Nataša Govedić who keeps losing her shoe during the performance and does not worry about it. It is also significant that the most direct and the most intense messages of a woman like Nataša Govedić – theatrologist, writer and theatre critic, so someone who lives from the (written) word – are not words but emotional and facial expressions and gestures. Regardless of the story of impossibility of direct communication, the non-verbal expression of Nataša Govedić was understood by everyone in the audience. Or was it? There is also a problem here, a problem of correct interpretation, which leads to the relativistic criticism of interpretation of any meaning as the correct one, after which we get tangled up in a noose from which we can not get out alive. ˝Nothing is for certain’’, writes Govedić at one moment on the board at the bottom of the stage.
How to move on? How to understand each other when we keep slipping away from each other, slowly disappearing like a soap-bubble when we touch it? Iva Nerina Sibila points out precisely this huge frustration when she tells a story ‘’with hundred beginnings and hundred endings, which takes place in the past, in the present and in the future and whose core is always the same, but it can not be told because it can not be captured.’’ Maybe, by the end of the day, we are all Alexander the Great from the anecdote in the play. Apparently, when he came to India as a conqueror and asked for some bread, he was brought a golden bread because, as they told him, if he wanted an ordinary wheat bread, he would have stayed at home. This is how we conquer, too, reaching forward in a quest for faster, higher and stronger. We come up with theories and worlds because it is ‘’necessary to create disorder for a person to be an inventor’’ quotes Nataša Govedić, although sometimes the only thing we need is a ‘’crust of bread’’, that zero point of horizontal understanding between people. The above mentioned disorder is best reflected in the penultimate scene, when the actresses, to a music that is like a soundtrack for a black and white western – perform a choreographed exchange of positions in a self-imposed line. While the dancer speaks verbally and the theoretician uses her body, in each moment for each of them, or for each of us, there is room in this play.
Sreten Asanović, Nomina, Plima, Ulcinj, 2011
By: Ivana Ančić
English version will be available soon.
OSMI I SEDMI PUTNIK, Aleksandar Bjelogrlić, Citadela, Agora, Zrenjanin, 201
By: Dalibor Plečić
English version will be available soon.
Stjepan Gulin, Paz’te sad, paz’te sad (Meandarmedia, Zagreb, 2011.)
Authors: Ivana Ančić
Igor Marojević, Kroz glavu (Dosije, Beograd, 2012.)
Author: Dalibor Plečić
Damir Miloš, Pisa. Povratak (Meandarmedia, Zagreb, 2011.)
Author: Morena Livaković
POLITIČKE I DRUŠTVENE KONSTRUKCIJE IDENTITETA U VIDEO-PERFORMANSIMA NA BEOGRADSKOJ SCENI 1970-ih
Esej Vladimira Bjeličića
Esej u celini možete pročitati na portalu SEEcult.org
Esej Tihane Bertek
Od promatrača do sudionika
GALERIJA KAPELICA I POST-JUGOSLAVENSKI BODY ART (1995–2010)
Esej – Bojan Krištofić
Esej o radovima Šejle Kamerić, Maje Bajević i Nebojše Šerića Shobe
Piše: Slađana Golijanin
ESEJ – Razvaline socijalizma kao inspiracija za muzejske eksponate Mrđana Bajića i skulpturalne dosetke Ivana Fijolića
By: Milena Milojević
Piše: Nino Kovačić
Gostujuća izvedba šibenskog HNK, Pir malograđana, prema tekstu mladog Bertolda Brechta (napisan 1919.) izvedena je po sljedećoj formuli: na Danima satire u satiričkom kazalištu Kerempuh gledamo satiričan komad. Prema reakcijama publike, bila je uspješna, ali teško se oteti dojmu da je smijeh bio formulaično zagarantiran, jer bi takav instruirani moment humora trebao zauzdati spontani smijeh. Je li se možda radilo o “malograđanskom” humoru?
Glumice i to, KNAP, Zagreb, premijera 12.5.2012.
Piše: Nino Kovačić
Glumice i to, nova predstava u zagrebačkom KNAP-u, neobičan su kazališni ‘slučaj’. Naime, predstavu su, dramaturški i režijski osmislile te, naravno, glumački ostvarile četiri mlade glumice. U trenutačnoj opće-društvenoj, pa tako i kazališnoj situaciji, kojom prijete olovni pojmovi poput recesije, prekarijata i outsourcinga (nedavno su najavljena i otpuštanja “hladnopogonskih” glumaca), one su, kako piše u najavi “nezaposlene i pune entuzijazma, odlučile su preuzeti stvar u svoje ruke i napraviti hit!”. Očito sklone postdramskom pristupu izvedbi koji se, između ostalog, bazira na ekipnoj work-in-progress metodi, izvedbenoj anti-iluziji i autoreferencijalnosti, glumice/autorice su se “trgnule” i napravile parodiju o tome kako rade predstavu, po ironičnom ključu: kad ne ide pravljenje predstave treba napraviti predstavu o tome kako se ne može raditi predstava.
“Nije život biciklo”, Biljana Srbljanović, režija: Anselm Veber, Produkcija: Šaušpilhaus Bohum, Nemačka; Sterijino pozorje 2012, selekcija Nacionalne drame i pozorišta
By: Tamara Baračkov
English version will be available soon.
„Grebanje, ili kako se ubila moja baka“, Tanja Šljivar, režija: Selma Spahić, Bosansko narodno pozorište Zenica/Bitef teatar-Hartefakt (Beograd), premijera: 7. septembar 2012. (Zenica), 11. oktobar 2012. (Beograd)
By: Tamara Baračkov
English version will be available soon.
„Sluga dvaju gospodara“, Karlo Goldoni, režija: Boris Liješević, Grad teatar Budva/Srpsko narodno pozorište Novi Sad/Narodno pozorište „Toša Jovanović“ Zrenjanin, premijera: 27. jul 2012.
By: Tamara Baračkov
English version will be available soon.