Against narrow-mindedness and hatred

Usual ShowCase offers the possibility to watch the production in a few days theaters which organizes such a manifestation, because it is ShowCase intended primarily for producers, festival selectors and critics. However, the idea of ​​this showcase was broader and concerned what is called cultural policy in the countries of the region. Therefore, not only to watch performances, but also to connect artists from the region (the former republic of the SFRY) more closely. Theater artists from these countries, some of which are already in the EU, and for some God only knows when they will be, can and should cooperate, because in addition to the common war trauma, they also have a common theatrical and cultural heritage, and a common desire to create a theater that is important for their community, and respectable in a wider context, in materially limited conditions. The organizers and partners, eight of them (SARTR, Heartefact, Ulys'ses, Realstage, Para Film&Teatar, Binario Vivo) decided to bring together artists of different ages in Sarajevo, a city that suffered heavy destruction during the wars of the 1990s - from those who were born several years after the war to the so-called middle generation, who remember the war very well. Playwriting and theater criticism workshops, residency programs for directors and education in the field of production, presentation and fundraising. Also, theater professionals had presentations of projects for which they were looking for potential partner organizations. There were a lot of events and a lot of really nice offers from different projects, most of which deal with current topics like ecology and femicide. For me personally, the most amusing was the proposal for the project "The First Macedonian in Space" (Boris Vasilevski and Andrea Markoska), which humorously talks about the need of the Balkan peoples to inflate their national ego through expensive, pointless and unnecessary ventures. It was difficult to watch all the programs and, as a critic, I paid the most attention to the theater performances that were ShowCase selected by Becca Vucho and Urliha Johnson. The selection consisted, if we exclude SARTR, of what in our country is very broadly and somewhat wrongly called the independent scene, whose English name off-scene might be more accurate (though still very general). In these areas, culture is on the margin, and the off-scene is the margin of the margin. Off-scene, on the other hand, is more free to act than institutions, which are very often "hampered" by policies that do not favor the inter-national and inter-state connection of artists and creators.

photo: asja mustajbašić and amina ahmetagić

FIRST DAY

On the first day, we watched a Bitef theater performance Suicide as a social fact (concept, scenography and direction Ana Janković, playwright Anja Bilanović). The play begins with a woman (Iva Ilinčić) entering a very modest apartment with a large bouquet of gorgeous roses, placing them in a vase and beginning her regular evening routine. The performance flows smoothly in the rhythm of routine activities such as preparing dinner, removing makeup, brushing teeth. Simple actions take place in lonely silence, which is disturbed by the sound of mobile phones and computers - internet media is the only type of contact that the heroine of the play achieves. There is mild tension and anticipation in the audience, because we know we are watching a play that already in the title announces suicide. Suddenly, Ona stands up and, contrary to her previous actions, begins to talk about how she will kill herself by combining an overdose of tranquilizers and alcohol. After that, we get a detailed explanation of what happens to the body, but not why what happened happened. That is, why the woman who entered with a beautiful bouquet of roses at the beginning of the scene committed suicide at the end of the scene. The chosen theatrical procedure had great potential to convey and clarify the essence of contemporary loneliness, which leads an individual to suicide, with a delicate but powerful stage language.

The second part of the play is of a completely different style. In it, the actress, director and playwright of the project perform as cabaret figures. We understood that there are various social factors that pressure artists, but despite their desire to be entertaining and provocative, this part of the play does not have the potential of the first part. The strongest impression in the play was made by Iva Ilinčić in the first part - it seemed to us that everything shrunk, canceled and became gray and opaque, like the depression that eats away at modern man and forces him to commit suicide.

photo: asja mustajbašić and amina ahmetagić

SECOND DAY

The Machine (dancer Bojana Robinson, Institute 0.1. Ljubljana, Slovenia) is a dance performance that talks about the dancer's family problem. Namely, her daughter has to use a machine with which she inhales oxygen. Because the little girl is so familiar with the machine, the machine has become part of the family. The machine that, at the same time, preserves and limits the child's life, despite all the fears for his life, has become the mother's obsession. The development of the mother's obsessive attachment to the machine is depicted through dance. The movements are repeated, varied and developed: the dancer treats the machine like a timid animal, then becomes related to the machine and, finally, seems to lose her human form and become a machine herself.

A performance Hinkeman (produced by Nezavisno pozorište Zlatne godine, Skopje, North Macedonia) is based on Ernst Toler's famous play about Hinkeman, a war invalid, returning from the First World War. Director and adapter Tamara Stojanoska did not want to set Toler's text, but to use it and to talk about the overall brutality generated by the system through variations on the theme of "Hinkeman". Hinkeman's fate is terrible, but so is the fate of contemporary actors who play in to Hinkeman and who are exploited to the point of total exhaustion, the terrible fate of a woman who turns from a co-worker and friend into a sexual object, terrible interpersonal relationships in which man is a wolf to man... In the play, however, it is not fully clarified from which positions the system is criticized and what the system is in general - is it some kind of "external force" that, like marionettes, ultimately pulls the destinies of the characters, or is the system made up of the people who are in the system. On the other hand, the play captivates with the enormous acting energy of the entire ensemble - the actors play, it seems, to the point of self-satire. The result is a show of great energy, but with a monotonous rhythm and insufficiently clarified conceptual questions about the relationship between man and system.

photo: asja mustajbašić and amina ahmetagić

THIRD DAY

On the third day, we watched a play This is my truth., tell me yours (Centre for Drama Art, Via Negativa & City of Women, Croatia and Slovenia) performed by Jasna Žmak. We have already written about this performance in the text "Checking the borders" on the occasion of Bitef 2024 ("Vreme", no. 1761). Now we just need to add that it seems to us that in this theatrical context, the play "lay down" very well. Unlike the Bitef festival, where it was staged in a kind of contrast to large productions, here both the theme (exploration of the personal and artistic truth of a woman) and the artistic procedure itself (mono performance) were very well integrated into the whole.

The most interesting and complex theatrical productions on showcase is the host's performance Basement, written by Armin Behrem, directed by Alja Bešić, produced by SARTR. This play talks about how memory is a deceptive category and depends on who remembers, what they want to remember and what they want to forget, as well as how memory defines us. The theme of memory is addressed through two connected love stories – one homosexual, the other heterosexual. The combination of two themes, memory and love, that is, how we remember important moments from our love life, was the basis for the drama about the (un)freedom of a young man in BiH whose sexual life takes place between the rooms (room) and nightclub (Basement). The intelligent wit that the word basement, which is a symbol of misery, hidden and dirty, is written as if it is from another, English language (and as a potential name of a night club), clearly shows how much the writer feels that the values ​​of the Western world have been unsuccessfully implemented in his environment. The dramatic piece was a successful combination of contemporary dramaturgy (fragmentary dramaturgy, Rashomon repetition of the same scenes seen from different perspectives) and classical dramaturgy (rounded characters, clear, directed actions of characters, reversal and recognition [facing the truth], conflict). Basement is at the same time an activist play because it talks about the community's attitude towards the weaker - homosexuals and women, and melodramatic - love stories with a tragic outcome, division into victims and torturers, pathos... All this works quite well in the play and much more than the "chilled" approach in other plays helps us to start "cheering" for the values ​​advocated by the writer, director and actors. The director carefully directed the play, combining light, sound and movement, which change quickly and dynamically and are associated with parties. The characters are more types than complex characters, but that doesn't matter because they are built precisely and are meaningfully placed in the context of the genre. This was greatly contributed by the actors who gave the characters characteristic contemporary and recognizable gestures (Faruk Hajdarević, Anastasija Dunjić, Dino Sarija and Edin Koja Avdagić). That is why the characters are even closer to us and we really feel the sadness of knowing that a free life is impossible in a country bound by narrow-mindedness and hatred.

The theme and the whole story Killing sleep Qendra Multimedia from Pristina was especially disturbing and close to me. The play tells about the big dreams of freedom that Albanians had after the NATO bombing and the de facto separation from Serbia. The play follows the fate of the urban planner and architect Redžep Lucio, who was killed by the entrepreneur mafia in 2000 because he stood in the way of their wild construction. What is shocking here is how terrifyingly similar this story about the fate of the city and the fate of man is everywhere in the former Yugoslavia. The directing and acting procedures are minimalistic, with a clear desire for the audience to focus on the life story of a true hero, which becomes a metaphor for the urban chaos in which many cities in this region live.

The strongest impression after the end showcase is that we live the same dramas divided into smaller states, where families with sick children live hard, the weaker ones beat each other, and those who oppose the mafia are killed. But maybe we could have guessed that before he did showcase - it is enough to take a car ride through these disjointed regions to see how common our problems are, even though our countries are now different.

However, perhaps even more valuable is the knowledge that the most complete dramaturgical work was created by the playwright Armin Behrem, who was an outstanding student in Sarajevo, very quickly started working in professional theaters (playwright of a great play Purple of the Chamber Theater 55), is training abroad, and now he has been invited to work in the SARTR institutional theater - it is, of course, a play Basement. That's why the question of all questions is what will happen to all these imagined projects and written plays presented in Sarajevo on showcase - Let's meet! Will anyone be found to realize them? Artists, whether they are young or middle-aged, must have the opportunity to work immediately and a lot from the very beginning, as long as the artistic forces keep them, that they are not castrated and not killed by poverty, that they are not suffocated by loneliness, that they are allowed to be healthy, true and themselves and to grow, grow and grow, and then we will all be better off.

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