The deeper meaning of the game

The motto of this year's Subotica theater festival Desiré Central Station was "Theater is victory". Ozren Grabarić, actor and professor at the Zagreb Academy of Arts, talks to "Vreme" about the fact that theater always wins, but that we must keep in mind that the relationship towards theater needs to be nurtured, he also talks about how growing up in Barcelona influenced his peculiar acting expression, about the play The elephant man which was performed at the festival, about the experimental in the theater, about the search for something new with the awareness that we cannot invent anything new.

"WEATHER" Andras Urban, director and director of the Desiré Central Station festival, defines that festival as a festival of experimental theater, while emphasizing that the term experiment, as well as the term convention, it has different meanings in different environments. How do you understand the determinant? "experimental theater"?

OZREN GRABARIC: I think that every show is an experiment in some way, because going to some unknown spaces, as much as we allow ourselves to do so, is an experiment. Experimentation in theater often had a negative connotation for me, since often when I saw what we called experimental theater, it was theater that I did not understand in any way. It was foreign to me, it is a theater that did not serve to tell a story but to deconstruct a story, to find new ways to rethink theatrical actions and to shake up what we consider mainstream. Only later, when I matured artistically, I realized that we can actually classify Beckett, Ionesco, Harms as experimental, we can put surrealism, which is extremely close to me... In the term "experimental" we can include authors who destroyed established canons. In one part of my growing up in the theater, experimental theater had a negative connotation, and only later a positive one. People sometimes think that experimental has to be shocking, but it often isn't. Today, if an actor comes on stage and tells a story, we can understand it as experimental theater in this accumulation of microphones, technology, lights... If only one man came and told a story, that would be experimental theater for me today. It is a search for something new, but in the context of today. Not in the context of everything that has ever happened, because ultimately the question is whether we can invent something new.

In the context of the experiment, How did you grow up in Barcelona?, in another language and environment, affects your game?

There, the education system was different, I went to a city school, and there were various factors that influenced me, in a certain sense, to go through the trauma, to find an answer to it, and to sharpen me in some other things. Since I did not understand the language, I began to read bodies, what the body tells me. In the six months it took me to learn the language, I had to compensate for everything. I didn't do it consciously, I did it instinctively, now I can talk about it consciously. On the other hand, schooling in Barcelona encouraged us to think, not like here, to remember dates... I don't remember that national pride was involved in education and then indoctrination... Although, today everything is indoctrination, so that the word becomes meaningless, but it is most visible through education. In Barcelona, ​​we were encouraged to create and to talk about what we think about various topics... If, for example, I had stayed in Zagreb, my formation would of course have been different. Barcelona is, moreover, a port city, which has quickly embraced diversity. I remember that some TV presenters were drag queens. I was amazed at that, because it was not possible here. That feeling of diversity as wealth, it infected me in a way. I avoided those years when nationalism was extremely rampant in these areas, because of the war, because of everything... My parents are scientists and they protected me from such narratives, so when I heard the language, I only heard thoughts, I didn't pay attention, I didn't heard where someone is from. That's why all my philosophy is not in language, in speech, but everything is based on what the thought is, what is behind that thought, what the person actually tells me. It is thought that truly defines a man. If the thought is clear, then everything is clear to me. Then the experiment in the sense of deconstruction can come to life in full glory. If everything becomes a form and I don't hear a thought, then for me theater does not exist. Theater is a thought that is transmitted from the stage to the audience and is primarily transmitted by actors. Sometimes the director's process does it, but if you see the director's process and hear the actors who do not speak a thought but only a text, for me it becomes a form, vain, and any epithet of experimental does not help me.

In the interview that I am for "Time" worked with theater critic and theater scholar from Croatia Anđela Vidović ( "Time" br. 1717), she mentions, I'll paraphrase, to be careful with the fourth wall, that the abrupt demolition may turn off the audience.

In Shakespeare, the monologues were spoken directly to the audience; whenever an actor speaks, he speaks directly to the audience, then the fourth wall was put in place and it became pass that the actor speaks to the audience. Now that space is opening up again. Nothing is new, all the elements are there, and how we combine them into new stories is the only question. And the question is still what is thought itself. I agree that breaking down the fourth wall is awkward when it is aggressive and when it goes directly to the audience - those slogans we saw, that political theater that strongly wanted to talk about one view of the world. Again it is a matter of indoctrination and we need to be careful here. In order for the theater to have its intended function, which, in my opinion, is an enlightening function, it must not be on the side of the answer but on the side of the question. There are people of different worldviews in the auditorium and when it gets dark, we all become one, the theater unites us. If you present one worldview very loudly in the theater, you will not have diversity in the audience, but only fans who already agree with the doctrine you speak from the stage. It is empty, it is a dead theater, it has no function. It only serves to reinforce the ideas the audience has already come up with. People in the audience have to question the ideas they come up with, because if we're very much on the answer side, then we have a problem. This happened in various performances that were characterized as political theater and that broke the fourth wall. In this context, I can say that breaking the fourth wall can repel the audience. And the opening of the wall, our Gavela spoke brilliantly about that through the concept mitspiel, if I play with a partner, I play for the audience, I speak to the audience through my partner and this awareness is reflected in my voice. By doing so, I involve the audience in the act of creation and they become an active observer, not a passive one. If I exclude the fact that there are, I don't know, three hundred people watching me in the hall, why would they even come to see the play if I don't have them in mind? I have to constantly keep them in mind because I'm talking to them and I want them to hear me, to hear what I'm thinking. This means that every time I play with a partner pretending that the fourth wall is there, it's not there, because I'm still talking to the audience. But in the context in which you speak, yes, I agree that one should be careful with him.

photo: Edvard Molnar

In the play The Elephant Man, which we are watching at Desiré directed by Kokan Mladenović and produced by the Belgrade Drama Theatre, there is also talk of strong exploitation and exclusion from society.

We are talking about a strong need to belong to a community, a strong need to belong makes some people marginal who want to belong, and society either rejects them or uses them for its own ends. In this sense, the most interesting thing about working with Kokan Mladenović was researching Merik, since he is an intelligent, sensitive being, uncorrupted, but isolated from the world, and he strongly wanted to belong to the world he admired, the aristocracy, the artists... In this aspiration to belongs, in our play it was done subtly, he started to lose his qualities, became a bit vain. And he begins to treat some people as different, and when he becomes aware of it, aware of the society that surrounds him, he rejects it. Society really shapes the individual.

There is an exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade Activity: one hundred years of surrealism, a large exhibition dedicated to Surrealism was set up in Paris' Bobur, and all this on the occasion of the centenary of the creation of that movement.... You are playing in a play at the Croatian National Theater in Zagreb King Gordon Radovan Ivšić, surrealists. The play was directed by René Medvešek. At the beginning of the conversation, you mentioned that surrealism is important to you.

I think of it as a transition from one realism to another realism, because theater is realism, dreams are realism, but they are a transition between what we mean when we say realism, that's where the film went, conventional psychological realism, and what realism can be. , and the more complex it is, the more it contains what is unconscious, stored in dreams, and such realism, the theater can be. Admittedly, there are also authors in the film, such as Wes Anderson or Roy Anderson, who are out of the realm of psychological realism. Surrealism is one that rejects the consistency that exists in conventional realism and to which we strive to make everything immediately comprehensible. Surrealism is like the philosophy of a wise adult child. Surrealism, and that's why it was important for me to do the play King Gordon, never forgets the child in us. The child in us was free, our imagination was incredible and all roads were open before us, as we grow up we put barricades on those roads, dead ends arise, some streets we didn't even enter, and as children we were clean, transparent as crystals, which Krleža would say. Everything was open to us. That incredible freedom is an elixir, the nucleus of creativity from which I think art emerges, and it is the space of children, the space of naivety. Not naivety in a pejorative sense, naivety as the possibility to believe in new worlds and that these worlds act on us. That our body believes in a new reality. For me, surrealism is a child's freedom, but the freedom of a child who already has experience, it is not a game for the sake of playing, but there is a deeper thought behind it.