Sreten Asanović, Nomina, Plima, Ulcinj, 2011
By: Ivana Ančić
English version will be available soon.
Born in the YU, directed by Dino Mustafić, production: Yugoslavian Drama Theatre, premiere: October 12th, 2010
By Ivana Anić
“The country disappeared in words. We became ‘us’, ‘them’…” This is the beginning of Mirjana Karanović’s last goodbye to Yugoslavia directed by a Sarajevo based director, Dino Mustafić, with Serbian actors from the Yugoslav Drama Theatre and in front of Zagreb audience in the packed Zagreb Youth Theatre. They came to wave their last goodbyes to the ship that had long sailed and taken its passengers far, far away, and to sing the elegiac “Hey, Slavs”, the anthem of a former homeland.
The signifier has changed and now, instead of Yugoslavs, we are Croats, Serbs, Albanians, Bosnians. But, this play does not deal with the signifiers, but with the signified. With the individuals who make up a nation or nations. Singulars in plural. It deals with actors as the play’s co-authors who come out to the stage as a group of individual identification numbers from some administrative form and leave with the “earned” right, after they have offered us their own narratives, retreat from the same stage with their full names and surnames.
It deals with the audience, which, for the most part, just like the actors, simmered in the same Yugo-sauce made of Communist Party, cypress trees, three-day-on-the-train to the seaside, Paul Newman, and red Youth scarves. It deals with border crossings of identity and geography that were for a long time, with guns in their hands, guarded by semantics, politics, and some different kind of five-year plan developments, soaked in blood, horror and hatred in which, instead of planning business and economy of a country someone planned an economical elimination of their enemies.
Rođeni u YU (Born in the YU) is not a play that wants to run away from history. On the contrary, like two people on a seesaw, it balances on a point where particular meets common, such as when Marko Baćović humorously reminisces his first sexual experience on Tito’s March as “the first gigantic erotic feeling, which, later they explained to me, is called an orgasm.”
This encounter with the chronological advancement of the actors’ memory transforms into a point where an individual shivers with horror, and this, of course, is the beginning of the nineties. Here of particular interest is the scene in which the young Radovan Vujović talks about his visit to Zagreb where at some house party he manages to get down with some Zagreb girl, and the scene of their intercourse at one moment retrogradely becomes a scene of war rape through director’s choices such as the change of lightning, the introduction of sinister music, or by gathering the actors who chant in unison: “Kill the Shqiptar so the Turk has no son / Kill the Croat so the Shqiptar has no brother / Kill the Serb so the Shqiptar has no son.” Such fragmentary and chronologically nonlinear yet clear structure of the play, as well as autobiographical and documentary approach, make up Dino Mustafić’s directorial concept developed in cooperation with nine actors and six (!) playwrights. Namely, many sketches the actors deliver on the stage are parts of their autobiographies for which the director “gives” the stage over to them as some sort of a confessional. These sketches take place at home in Serbia in front of a television, while lying on a beach in Dubrovnik, in Vukovar, during a drunken discussion in a bar with an old army friend, and the switching of narrators, with an occasional listing of a new place and time of action, is the only indicator that the new personal story is about to begin. Namely, the age difference between the oldest actress, Branka Petrić, who was born during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and the youngest actor, Radovan Vujanović, is almost fifty years. The actors occasionally “step out” of their own autobiographies and become Organ of Peace, Intellectual Nationalist, Folk Singer, Bureaucrat, in short, typical character types. Occasionally, the director transforms the actors’ narratives into visual metaphors; for example, when Slobodan Beštić reads a long list of streets whose names have been changed and the rest of the actors in a disoriented cramp try to find where to sit down on the stage.
In this atmosphere of conflict between the personal and the national, of frailty of private lives, heartlessness and immunity of military and bureaucratic machinery, the only critical tools and mechanisms of coping with reality an individual can employ are humor and grotesque: whether when Predrag Ejdus makes a comment that in the 1992 World Cup Yugoslavia would surely beat Argentina if its former federal republics did not wage a war against one another, or when all the actors, making a sophisticated choir of citizens with musical sheets and texts in their hands, sing a horrifying song: “It will be super when your son’s eyes / in your supper make I – oh joy!”, or when they, now like elementary school students, rise two enthusiastic fingers in the air which then symbolically turn into a defiant middle finger as a visual sign of resistance.
There was much symbolism at the opening of this year’s 56th Sterijino Pozorje Festival in Novi Sad on a day when Ratko Mladić was arrested, when the audience got to their feet while “Hey, Slavs” was being performed. Just as there was much symbolism when the audience in Zagreb remained in their seats, with only occasional clapping or giggling. The stage itself, an impressive construction of wire by the stage designer Dragutin Broz, which opens up towards the audience in the form of a conical tunnel, most likely also wanted to deliver some message. Perhaps an exit to the light of day from the Plato’s cave in which a person sees only shadows of things? Quite possible. Maybe that’s why on the stage there are only nine actors and nine plain red chairs, and all this just so that we could, without distractions, reach the ‘ordinary’ people and their place in this world. Such approach to a person as an individual and not a member of a collective is at the same time very humane, but also very doubtful from the theoretical and practical standpoint because it fails to provide answers to many questions, such as: are there bad nations or only “good and bad individuals” (as Branka Petrić’s father-in-law used to say), is there such a thing as collective guilt, can you do bad by not doing, who committed all those atrocities, and who should apologize to the victims’ families? To these questions, regretfully, I still don’t have an answer, but there is an interesting story. Namely, at one moment during the play, Anita Mančić says, “I will never forget this. If the wind can have a terrifying sound, then that’s Vukovar. If you want to wage a war at any place on the planet, go to Vukovar. See that, hear the sound of that wind, smell that terror. Then you go back and think whether you’ll do that or not.” When she said this at the opening of this year’s Sterijino Pozorje in Novi Sad, applause thundered through the theatre. On the other hand, that same applause could not be heard in Zagreb, and the sentence that left the Croats cold was said by a woman whom the Serbian authorities denied a Croatian visa when she wanted to attend her sister’s funeral.
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.