The performances of Kokan Mladenović do not leave the audience and the public indifferent. This year he directed Doctor Nušić, based on the comedy Dr by Branislav Nušić, performed by the ensembles of the National Theater in Sombor and the Kruševac Theatre, rancher in the National Theater in Kikinda, and the premiere of the play Dogville, the theatrical adaptation of the script of the film of the same name by Lars von Trier, will take place on December 19 in Belgrade's Mixer House. Doctor Nusic received three awards at the recent International Festival of Classics "Vršac Theater Autumn": for the best play, for direction, and for acting (Saša Torlaković), and at the recently concluded Yugoslav Theater Festival in Užice - an award for an episodic role (Bojan Veljović) and a special award for song lyrics (Marko Šelić Marcelo).
"WEATHER": Let's start with the latest play: why did you choose Dogville</b>?
KOKAN MLADENOVIC: Behind the peaceful family lives of the residents of Dogville, who like to talk about themselves as believing, noble, loyal people to the local community, hide hatred, aggression and intolerance towards any different way of thinking, loving or behaving. Dogville, living in isolation, built its own rules and developed some special types of people, which exist only in small, closed environments. It is in the interest of those people that Dogville never becomes part of a wider space, because that change will render meaningless their importance, power and value that exists only within the isolated world of Dogville. Dogville does not tolerate diversity and will take cruel revenge on anyone who thinks to change anything in that palanquin idyll. Do you want me to list some more unpleasant parallels with the city we live in, or...?
For so long, ever since the breakup of Yugoslavia, we have lived apart from the world, immersed in vulgar survival and hatred, with collapsed and then collapsed systems of education, knowledge and culture, that it is no wonder that these special endemic species have developed here, species that they arise, reproduce, and then occupy a territory that, having lost its connection with the world, has become an ideal training ground for deviant individuals of every fele. Some of these individuals, at the end of this uncontrolled process, logically, think that they are the messiahs and saviors of the nation and, if some Darwin does not appear urgently, they will eventually destroy the little common sense that is still left in our Galapagos.
Cowboys is a play about the happenings behind the scenes of a theater, but also the culture carried out by unqualified people. The truth, they end up making a great musical, and here...
A performance kauboji, which, based on the text by Saša Anočić, I performed at the National Theater in Kikinda, celebrates the joy of theater, but also reveals its sad side. In contrast, from our real life, joy is banished. One cannot be happy in an unhappy country, and the country we live in has turned its history into a series of missed opportunities. One of those missed opportunities is reflected in the inability to fundamentally change ourselves and the social system in which we live. We are proving again and again that we are immature and incapable of democracy and we are rushing towards another leader cult. On the scene, both in our country and in the world, is a half-world generation that engages in politics out of self-interest, understands the games of those more powerful than itself and the movements of big capital, and tries to grab as much wealth as possible for itself and its like-minded party members in the shortest possible time. They do not have a vision of the state and the welfare of the people. Their consciousness is limited by the mandate, by that famous period that is available to them to steal as much as possible, and then leave peoples and countries to some new unscrupulous characters. There is no politics or culture here. There is only pop, and pop is divided into political pop, "cultural" pop, and pop in the true sense.
Your play Doctor Nusic, among other things, it is said that only those who do not want a diploma or who do not have the money to buy a diploma do not have a diploma in Serbia. What do you think?, what do those who earned their diploma through memory and study think about it?
Isn't our new social mechanism worthy of praise, which made it possible for almost anyone who has a little money, in a country of former workers and peasants, to have a university degree and, why not, a doctorate. This general democratization of education led to the fact that today in Serbia, not only the smart people have diplomas, but all those who want it. Nowhere in the world will you meet graduated starlets, party gorillas, ministerial chauffeurs, MP swastikas, as is the case here. How can you not envy the people who bought colorful diplomas at that well-planned sale of knowledge and lined them up in their showcases, between tapestries and crystal glasses.
"Knowledge, only knowledge, knowledge
well that's discrimination!
That's the fascism of the smart ones.!
A diploma is for everyone.!..“
That's what Marko Šelić Marcelo, the writer of the songs in our play, says. Fortunately, we abolished the "fascism of the smart", and made education available to everyone, lowering its price to affordability. Numerous affairs that shook the public after the premiere of our Dr a, showed that Nušić was not only a great diagnostician of deviations of his time, but also a wise anticipator of the irreparability of our mental deviations. In the luxurious offices of our highest officials hang diplomas which, regardless of the seal they bear, are signed by Branislav Nušić.
Did Tomislav Nikolić watch it? Doctor Nušić? Does he even know about that show?
Unfortunately, not only diplomas are forged in Serbia. History, memory, and even conscience are changing. It depends on the needs. We live falsifications of our own lives, under the watchful eye of those who respond to every critical thought by strengthening dogmatic consciousness. That is probably why we were not surprised by the paranoid reaction of the president's adviser on culture, who is at the premiere Doctor Nušić recognized the image of his beloved leader in the image that the "doctoral students" form during the graduation song, and then, as if in some Politburo thriller, insisted that the scene in question be removed because it insults the "image and work" of the president himself. Or, perhaps, it bothered him that the composition of this picture was accompanied by the verses:
"And he doesn't spare ambition., don't be stingy:
after a regular diploma, buy yourself a Dr."
It is quite possible that in this picture, if you have a guilty conscience, you will recognize the one who is not in it. After all, someone recognizes the Virgin Mary on a toast, so why wouldn't a counselor recognize his idol on the props of a theater performance. Perhaps he should be reminded of Gogol's motto Auditor - "Don't blame the mirror if your face is ugly."
In one of the songs in Doctor Nušić is said ironically thank God, It's not like that anymore.. Are the lessons of theatrical performances useful??
What at the time Nušić's play was created was only an indication of a social deviation, an unscrupulous action of the new rich, in the meantime has become the manner of our time. His Dr is a piece about the buying and selling of knowledge, about a destroyed value system in which the money of primitives dictates social taste and fashion. The words of speculator Života Cvijović sound painfully recognizable: "Today, brother, everything is for sale." Everything is for sale - honesty, honor, conscience, love, friendship, reputation, respect, everything, brother, everything!" Inflation of knowledge, buying diplomas, foreign brokers and fake humanitarian workers, intertwine in this half-world network, making it more current than ever. Nušić's play, contrary to the comic manner of the era, has almost no positive hero. The time that the great comedian sensed, and in which we live, is exactly that - a time without a positive hero. In such a time, we tried to, without betraying Nušić's humor or the satirical potential of the play, talk about today's Serbia, a country that has sold out its own intelligence. If we add to that an enviable dose of sarcasm, we will end up in an ideal country, Serbia, the land of realized utopia. Hence the lines from the beginning of the play:
"Ladies and gentlemen! Lord and man!
Investors, tourists,
September dawn that digs!
Welcome to Serbia.,
a land of fairy tales and dreams!
Where there is no shortage of money,
but the most valuable thing is the brain!
Where there is no expense and schism,
but only luxury!
Memory, honor, knowledge they are celebrating.
Honey and milk are flowing from the tap.... "
Unfortunately, Serbia is a country where satirical literature never gets old. We still look at the texts of Sterija, Nušić, Domanović, as if decades and even centuries have not passed, and in them we find our own face, equally ugly, equally distorted, the face of a people who do not correct their mental deviations, but show them with some senseless pride. hang on yourself like an ornament.
Your latest plays are acting, sings and plays, and yet you recently stated that in Dogville you are looking for a new theatrical form. What is insufficient for you in the existing ones??
A performance Dogville it was made completely opposite to the way of thinking and functioning of our slow and outdated theaters. It involved the gathering of like-minded people around a theatrical idea, finding partners, collaborators and space, selecting actors at the audition and researching a different stage form, which, in our case, brings a performance that is both a concert and a place of social polemic and, we hope, exciting. theater act. Noticing the neuralgic points of our city and our lives, we try to speak and sing at the top of our voices about this mockery of wrong politics, ruined culture and the destroyed future of a city and a country.
Dogville it is certainly not a show for those who, every evening, sit in front of their television screens as if in front of an iconostasis, and wait for a leader with divine visions to speak to them. In contrast to the stripped-down Ibije culture in which we live, our play tries to bring back to the public stage the spirit of rebellion and dissent, the spirit that adorned the Belgrade of walkers and oppositionists, a Belgrade that no longer exists, or that cannot be seen from the media fog in which they convince you that every day you live better and better, although you have many reasons to be ashamed of what surrounds you.
It seems that the EU supports Prime Minister Vučić's policy. How do you explain it??
I am not Catherine Ashton, nor any official of the European Union, and I have no obligation to forget who were the people who are at the head of Serbia today. When you abolish morality as a category in a society, everything becomes possible, including the fact that a sworn Chetnik duke, in his advanced years, gets a university degree, memorizes a few sad pro-European phrases worthy of bad manuals, such as "Foil yourself - Europe" and became the president of the country. What kind of example does that set for our children? Dear children, you can freely, until the age of fifty, live contrary to all the rules of civilization, participate in paramilitary formations and fight in foreign countries. You can spread hate speech, evict members of other nations or celebrate the murders of your political opponents. You can, by your actions, humiliate the parliament of a country and turn it into a simple palanquin circus. You can... forget all that one day and go from being the worst student to becoming, no less, no more than the president of the country. From the same ideological matrix comes Šešelj's youth, Milošević's minister of information at the time of suppression of press freedom and closure of the media, the owner of the most uncivilized behavior in public appearances, and today the monopolist of the European idea and ultra-democrat, Prime Minister of Serbia Aleksandar Vučić. These are people formed in the thick of the nineties, in the smell of gunpowder and blood, and it is a matter of time when they will stop playing vegetarian in public and wish to return to their true nature.
Therefore, I do not care who the European Union supports and for what reasons it does so. I just know that my common sense, the culture of memory and the remaining civic courage do not allow me to, without shame, pronounce the names of the people who lead the country in which I live.
Intellectuals in Europe are thinking intensively about a possible third world war. And with us?
There won't be a third world war, but even without that, the world we live in is "out of joint", as Hamlet says. We have successfully demolished all utopian projects and all ideals of the collective good. Our children grow up in a world of selfish and unscrupulous people, without any awareness of others. Money has become the powerful framework of the world, and success has become imperative.
I believe that the time in which we live is the time of the disappearance of states, unfortunately, not in the sense in which Marx sees the death of the state, but in the sense of the miniaturization of states in front of the giants of big capital. They will buy your banks, your mines, water sources, coasts, factories; it will buy your life by imposing on it the imperative of endless work and servitude to hierarchical advancement, or loan repayment. The moment we sold our ideals, we sold for nothing what makes up our world.
We live in dishonorable countries, we live far from any ideology, reduced to predatory survival from today to tomorrow. And that, unfortunately, is not something that is only applicable to Serbia. This is the situation in the region as well, and I'm afraid in the wider area as well. Our powerful people are equally unscrupulous, our authorities are equally arrogant and culture-averse. Our art is limited by those who do not know, and do not want to know, anything about art.
In recent years, you have been working in the region and in the interior of Serbia. How do you evaluate the Belgrade season from that perspective??
As Shakespeare says, the theater is a mirror of society, and our theater is the image and opportunity of a society without an ideological vertical, a society with dubious morals and even more dubious taste. The system according to which our cultural institutions function has long been overcome, but it survives, not at all surprising, due to the compromise of the government, which knows nothing about culture and its importance for the destiny of a nation, and the theater world, which has long forgotten the essence of our art and lives its own lulled lives that are measured by cheap popularity and a well-paid salary. That system can no longer be fixed, and King Lear's great sentence applies to it: "Let all change, or all perish!"
Your ideas about the transformation of the theater, which you spoke about when you were the manager of Atelier 212, they encountered misunderstanding. However, set, in the City Secretariat for Culture, they are considering implementing some of your proposals.
The results we achieved during our three-year adventure in Atelier 212, ranked that house among the most intriguing theaters in this part of Europe. We acted as part of a large market that includes all the countries of the former Yugoslavia, we dealt with topics that interest us and engaged top artists - Oliver Frljić, Boris Kavaca, Emir Hadžihafisbegović, Nikola Ristanovski, Jagoš Marković, etc. We installed Krležine Glembaye, after a thirty-eight year break, on the Belgrade stage. We brought Abdullah Sidran back to Belgrade and upset Serbia with a performance Zoran Djindjic… Performance Zoran Djindjic Oliver Frljić's was a bite that stuck in the throat of post-Đinđić's Serbia, but also a bite that the Atelje 212 ensemble, with honorable exceptions, could not digest. Lulled in the endless security of their salaries, unprepared for bold strides in the repertoire, they paid for their popularity and rallying services with various political options and - the story was over.
In the literal sense of the word, it was not finished. You left the Atelier., and the discussion of whether you advanced or regressed the Atelier continued.
The dust that arose around my departure from the post of manager of Atelier 212 exposed the cowardice and lack of ideas of our cultural and public scene, in a way that leaves little choice. I left and am enjoying my fulfilling and creative exile. As Beaumarchais's Figaro says: "A man who sincerely loves the theater can only do one thing - run away from it!"
So, I don't know what the city authorities are thinking about in terms of culture, but the very fact that they are thinking about anything would pleasantly surprise me.
You are considered a man who can speak his mind out loud.
We live in a poorly written and even worse directed farce. Decades of our lives are spent looking at the same faces of politicians who are sometimes in power and sometimes in the opposition, and whose interest is not the betterment of the people but the power itself, with all the benefits and privileges it brings. It doesn't matter who is in power, those who compromised the concept of democracy in these areas in the long term with their own incompetence and corruption, or those who, after leaving Seselj's overcoat, suddenly saw and walked around holding on to the magic wand of the European Union, or close associates of Slobodan Milosevic , immersed in crime, intrigues of the secret services, chained to their armchairs that give them the meaning of existence. Serbia is a destroyed and humiliated country where pops drive overpriced cars, live in gilded palaces and sometimes, I guess when it's not fasting, rape small children, a country of variety shows and reality shows where every value system has been destroyed. Today, it is moral to have no morals, it is stupid to be smart, and it is unfashionable to be honest. God does not reside in the church, justice in the courts, education in the school, and humanity in healthcare. If there is a higher bottom, than the one we found ourselves at, then it is the bottom of our not realizing that we have touched the bottom.
Yet, you will agree that we all strive for a way out...
There is no way out. Serbia, probably for the first time in its history, is a country without an opposition and without any oppositional potential that can lead it forward. The only thing worse than this kind of government, which, don't forget, we elected ourselves and which thus speaks more about ourselves than about itself, is the Serbian opposition, a group of people without any vision, wasted in the endless privileges of parliamentary mandates, satisfied from the period of the former government, with a mouth full of democratic phrases and pockets full of dubious money. I say with astonishment that the time of Slobodan Milošević's rule, that monstrous government that destroyed our lives and the space we live in, had a much greater oppositional potential embodied in the Belgrade Circle, the Civic Alliance, Radio B92, Studio B, "Our Struggle" and the entire broad movement of the thinking and justice-loving world. That world no longer exists. Serbia is a country without any future, Dogville which, I'm afraid, will have the same end as in Von Trier's great film.
Are you not in Belgrade theaters because of such attitudes??
The past seasons were probably the most successful in my theatrical life. I was lucky enough to be away from Belgrade for almost two years and direct plays with Hungarian, Slovenian, Romanian and Croatian actors. The cities I stayed in and the people I met enabled me, among other things, to live again in my homeland, Yugoslavia, and confirmed my belief in the indivisibility of the Yugoslav cultural space.
On the other hand, the dullness of theatrical Belgrade, the wear and tear of the model by which our culture functions and the sad turn to the right of our theatrical repertoires taught me that one does not necessarily have to look forward to returning home.
