Published in Theater der Zeit, 18 December 2015
Read the whole interview in German here
Published on 3 February 2016
The TERRORisms festival has gathered everyone who finds it hard to talk about ‘terrorisms’ both literally and figuratively. “Terrorisms” are themes one is afraid to touch even among their closest friends, “terrorisms” are all about controversy on the state level where the truth and lies are so elaborately minced and mixed that you can’t tell one from the other. “Terrorisms” are about getting off at the wrong stop just because you didn’t like the look someone gave you.
You can’t suffer from acute pain forever. Over time, pain is reduced to mere figures and dry facts. TERRORisms pumps fresh blood into the questions tattered from too much repetition. The most agonizing questions are always driven out into the realm of the subconscious. This process may occur within an individual as well as within a whole state. Memories lose their verbal shape since words lie too often. Maybe for this very reason, in the majority of festival performances text plays a secondary part. Similar to a dream, art brings back powerful imagery with renewed energy and unprecedented coolness of judgment. Five stage productions presented at the festival slap the audience in the face, tickle their ribs, shove a fist into their chests.
As Hans-Thies Lehmann wrote in his book “Postdramatisches Theater”, “It is not through the direct thematization of the political that theatre becomes political but through the implicit substance and critical value of its mode of representation.” The TERRORisms performances tap into terrorism both explicitly and implicitly
A hilarious show staged by Ludovic Lagarde’s French company (which, however, gives you goose bumps every now and then), and a philosophically witty production by the Danish/Norwegian director Jonas C. Petersen (who would have thought that English and Norwegian sense of humour à la “stiff upper lip” can be so close?!) are in contrast with the both romantic and realistic work by Iva Milošević from Serbia and Armin Petras’ interpretation of the world in the grip of nuclear apocalypse. In all these productions a person is crushed by circumstances and grinded by their time.
Shay Pitowsky’s production God Waits at the Station looks terrorism directly in the eye. The face of terrorism is distorted with grief. A gap in the two heroines’ cultural codes seems to be bridged on the level of interpersonal relations; however it doesn’t stand the test of loss. God Waits at the Station is about the burden being too hard to bear on the shoulders of a common person.
Techniques commonly deployed in documentary theatre give the show a specific pace. The bomb is already ticking and the memories gather before it goes off. God Waits at the Station makes the audience start their own internal investigation.
The productions at the TERRORisms festival break the lulling hum of TV-sets, of the whole media world modern society is used to live in, disrupting the common logic inherent in the audience’s minds. Creating a festival that has to deal with such complex issues one can easily try to hide behind a net of restrictions, to protect oneself against the consequences of straight-from-the-shoulder remarks and hardline views. Luckily, this is not the case. Theatre has found the only way out existing within it and beyond. It placed a person in the centre of each story, a person with their own passions and sorrows.
Law proclaims order, terrorism proclaims disorder and chaos; theatre goes beyond the limits of the ordinary not to instigate chaos but to reveal black-and-white shortsightedness of both law and terrorism. Interestingly, all three of them — theatre, law and chaos — claim power. They want to dominate our hearts, instincts and minds. However, if there should be one to rule, let it be theatre.
Published on 3 December 2015 (Article originally written in Russian)
Interview with Jonas Corell Petersen and journalist Sol Sigurjonsdottir.
Aftenposten Morgen. Published in print 12 January 2015
This interview will be published here soon.
Published on 3 December 2015
Read the programme of LA BARAQUE at the Comédie de Reims here:
Dossier_La Baraque
Published on 3 December 2015
On Yugoslav Drama Theatre’s Ljuba Tadic Stage in Belgrade, director Iva Milošević is in the midst of staging the latest play by Milena Markovic “The Dragonslayers”, a play that artistically addresses the Sarajevo Assassination, Gavrilo Princip, and the Young Bosnians. The set is designed by Gorcin Stojanović, the costumes by Maja Mirković, and the music is composed and performed by Vladimir Pejković. YDT is going to realise the production of “The Dragonslayers” as a part of the project of the Union of European Theatres marking the centenary of the beginning of World War One. The premiere is scheduled for 7 June.
The cast includes Nikola Rakocević, Mirjana Karanović, Milan Marić, Radovan Vujović, Dubravka Kovjanić, Jovana Gavrilović and Srdjan Timarov.
B.T: The Young Bosnians believed life to be a work of art, they loved mankind intensely, even while despising it. What were the thoughts you had after reading “The Dragonslayers”?
Iva Milošević: Their rebellion reminded me of the youth rebellion of 1968 and of punk rebellion of the late 1970s. Both were primarily rebellions of the heart. That’s what the Young Bosnian’s revolt was too.
B.T.:Which of your personal experiences have you recognised in the play “The Dragonslayers”, or rather, what are the reasons as to why you’d like to see this play in a theatre?
Iva Milošević: I was shaken by the vast sorrow and anger which drove these high school seniors to revolt, to oppose this ‘dragon’ that endangers their dignity, their freedom, and puts them in a slave-like position. This ‘dragon’ they fight is not only personified by the tyrannical figure of the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne, but also by all those who consent to injustice with their heads bowed down, be it for lack of courage or for personal gain. When one reads the play by Milena Markovic, one faces the fact that the freedom-loving spirit is an indestructible category that, every now and again, throughout history, raises individuals above the numbness and indifference of the many.
B.T.: We ourselves live in curious times, in a way reminiscent of the period when Gavrilo Princip and the Young Bosnians themselves lived. Who are Milena Markovic’s dragonslayers really?
Iva Milošević: They are young rebels, intellectuals, enraptured freedom fighters, idealists who come from great poverty and misery. They strive for complete emancipation, both for their need to affirm themselves as dignified human beings and for desperation stemming from their sense of having no future.
B.T.: The story of the Young Bosnians is also a story of freedom, social justice, anarchism. Why is the play about Princip so ‘hot’ in this day and age?
Iva Milosević: I think the reason for it lies in the fact that the petit bourgeois spirit and authoritarian character, the axis of today’s world, find any resistance actively opposing the limitation of individual liberties hard to digest. Particularly great scepticism and cynicism is stirred when this opposition involves self-sacrifice and empathy towards the imperilled.
B.T.: In your previous productions you examined how one gets to violence. Why it happens, where its origins are. What were the conclusions you reached in this step as a director?
Iva Milošević: The answer is simple. When someone is bending your spine to the ground, there are two options: either your backbone snaps, or you defend yourself.
B.T.: “The Dragonslayers” contain poetry and rhetoric and classical dramatic dialogue. How do you make all of this unified on stage? What are the heroes we are going to see like, considering the fact that Milena Markovic raised this tale to a mythic level?
Iva Milošević: It’s going to be a poetic show and I believe at times it will indeed work as a specific ‘heroic cabaret’ in its own right. It is going to be about the soul’s journey from righteous anger to heroic act, and paying the price for such life choices.
B.T.: What level of excitement accompanies your daily rehearsals of this play at YDT?
Iva Milošević: I am incredibly glad to direct this play and to have the very cast that I have. I feel a great sense of responsibility because we speak of young people who really existed, and because I am aware of the fact that amongst the audience there will be young people who came to see the play in search of answers to many important questions, such as the question of what it’s worth fighting for, but also the question of the price of the sacrifice for the general good.
B.T.: The story of the Young Bosnians has a tumultuous historical background. How do you view the different historical interpretations of the Sarajevo assassination and the Young Bosnians?
Iva Milošević: Revolt has always been and always will be a subversive topic. By this very fact it is subject to all manner of relativisation, politisation, appropriation etc.
B.T.: Have “The Dragonslayers” changed you and if yes, how?
Iva Milošević: Thanks to this play I got informed in more detail about the era and the Young Bosnia movement, of which, I admit, I had known very little.
B.T.: Who would you particularly like to see in the audience and why? What emotions would you like to convey through the play “The Dragonslayers”?
Iva Milošević: I’d be glad if the show attracts younger audiences, but I don’t see this as its most important task. I’d like it to inspire a sense of admiration for a young person sacrificing themselves for the good of others.
Go back to: The Serbian Press about “The Dragonslayers”
Published on 2 December 2015
45 years after the emergence of the Red Army Faction, we see our coexistence with the phenomenon of terrorism like a neighbour in a big city: we are living next to it but we don’t really know it. The growing media interest in terrorist attacks results in the easy formation of opinions and models that society blindly believes. In a wider sense, this media influence has been built by the western culture overseas that has been ruling for the past few decades. Living in a Big Brother society or a life of constant video surveillance moves the focus from the heart of the problem to a spectacular form. The creation and imposition of images, without giving much meaning to the story behind them, often leads to mass misbelief and psychosis. Hyper information, aggressive advertisement and ‘show’ business are moving the human being away from comprehensive insight on surrounding situations. It’s getting harder and harder for us to concentrate on something specific while we have free access to everything. We don’t question the news, brought to us as facts, less and less.
37 years after Andreas Baader’s death —conveniently declared as a suicide — in Stammheim prison in Stuttgart, we’re looking at the phenomenon of terrorism again: same place, different building. The Schauspiel Stuttgart hosted the international theatre festival TERRORisms. Under the auspices of the UTE (Union des Théâtres de l’Europe), the festival invited five productions from five countries, especially produced for this occasion: 5 morgen, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Germany; We Chew on the Bones of Time, National Theater of Oslo, Norway; The Dragonslayers, Yugoslav Drama Theater, Belgrade, Serbia; God Waits at the Station, Habima – National Theater of Israel, Tel Aviv; La Baraque, La Comédie de Reims, France. The official programme was accompanied by discussion panels and additional performances. Considering the frequent acts of terrorism in different locations, with different presumptive assumptions, the title of the festival explores the meanings of the word ‘terrorism’ in the context of different social mechanisms and their related problems.
It has been 14 years since the phenomenon of terrorism has become an excuse for taking extreme measures when it comes to human rights and the protection of privacy. With no small help from the media this phenomenon, which seems to be very convenient for the US, has been popularized. Thanks to this, the US has had the opportunity to make all of its military actions legal. Unfortunately, ‘terrorism’ has not led to prevention measures but has become a convenient pretext for imposing more extreme restrictions on our free existence in public. Big Brother has found a way to be in almost every public place. Private space and private life are becoming more and more a concept we know from stories and books. Using its function as a social and cultural mirror to focus on the above-mentioned tendencies, theatre sheds a light on these newly created “isms”. With various aesthetic forms and means of expression it explores the psychology and impact of TERRORisms as newly created mechanisms of propagating hate and public political controversies. In this light, the way theatre presents this phenomenon as well as its emotional attitude displayed in this context, is of particular importance. There’s no need to intensify terrorism’s characteristic features, no need to instigate further interracial, religious and political conflicts, no need to blame. Speaking of terrorism through the language of theatre, we should go in the opposite direction and depersonalize it, release it from its artificially created entity, from the stereotypes, but outside the theatrical conventionality.
Six months after the attack on the French satirical magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’, La Baraque directed by Ludovic Lagarde, was shown at the festival in Stuttgart. Two weeks before the premiere of the show, which took place at the Comedie de Reims, the director received a phone call about the events in Paris. The project was not terminated, the premiere was a fact, and the result was a cheering audience.
Today. La Baraque by Aiat Fayez is set in a small apartment in Paris. Two men and a middle-aged woman, living their relatively miserable life, smoking joints, fooling around— a push through the window, sets in order the downward spiral that transforms the three protagonists almost accidentally into executors of terrorist orders.
The terror in this case is only one part of the absurd daily life of a working class Parisian. With mouse ears and ridiculous movements, the main actors prepare explosives in the manner of children who don’t know what they’re doing. Naturally, they’re soon carried away by the money, and the game moves to another level. Ridiculous, funny, arousing pity and derision; the characters embody terrorism in the form of an unfortunate coincidence. The same pattern occurs with addiction to drugs, alcohol, prostitution and gambling. The lack of culture in a combination with the low quality of life is a strong premise for an easy degradation. Of course, the degree of damage is different. But the conclusion is similar. Deliberately created informational deformations, genocide of art and culture, media manipulation, spreading hatred, all of which inevitably lead to the negative reflection on society.
Six, eight or ten months ago… doesn’t matter. Terrorism has become a matter of statistics, daily news, and TERRORisms is something that should not just be examined through the methodologies of stage and screen art, ISMS’t it?
Published on 1 December 2015 (Article originally written in Bulgarian)
J.K.: A hundred years have passed since Princip’s assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand. What was crucial in your decision to stage Milena’s play The Dragonslayers, addressing the Young Bosnians and Gavrilo Princip?
I.M.: The crucial thing about this play is that it glorifies freedom-loving spirit. Milena starts from the assumption that her heroes were fighters for freedom who sacrificed themselves in a profound and sincere faith for the wellbeing of others. From today’s safe distance, one can think of the Sarajevo Assassination in many different ways, but ultimately it boils down to the fact that it was an act of revolt against oppression, injustice, occupation. And how do we view revolt nowadays? Not in public, but deep inside? This is the question raised by this show. So, the already worn out sentence, ‘fallen for freedom’, this is really true in this case. How do we view this today? Is it possible, from the perspective of today’s world and the spirit of these times, to speak about the freedom-loving spirit as an ideal not only contained in myths? When I started to think about this play, I remembered loving the song ‘Freedom’ by the band Azra. At that age, the chorus of the song meant a lot to me. It says: “Freedom is a woman. Take it”. What a simple and accurate definition. Freedom is not complicated. It is a matter of instinct, courage, desire, daring. Freedom is a challenge, a risk, but also a matter of self-recognition, self-validation. Cioran would say: “a war not only against the world, but also against one’s own fatigue of the world.” The production deals with contemporary relations, questioning what heroism would be nowadays, it deals with desire, fervour, anti-bourgeois and non-conformist meaning — the freedom-loving spirit, and all that through poetry. And, as Mirko Kovac puts it, “poetry is an illusion, and an illusion is not to be interpreted, but chased before the images take form.”
J.K.: The Dragonslayers is not a historical play. Where do you perceive its truth to be?
I.M.: The truth of this play is in the question of where the spirit of freedom is today. What happened to it? Is the spirit of freedom endangered nowadays? Murder is not its subject, it’s merely a dramatic circumstance, a historical fact. But the disgust, the sons’ rebellion against the fathers, what Peter Sloterdijk deals with in his book Rage and Time, this feeling of profound radical essential injustice of the world — these were the subjects we addressed.
J.K.: Characters in The Dragonslayers are not fixed. As far as the cast is concerned, how different is this rehearsal process from the usual studying of the script?
I.M.: It’s very different. A lot of talks, exercises, improvisation, sideline inspiration.
J.K.: Your work so far proves that you readily and gladly decide to stage your contemporaries. Do you collaborate with Milena?
I.M.: We respect the playtext. We respect the dramatic structure. I talk to Milena, but she does not sit in rehearsals.
J.K.: You like to work with ‘your team’. But this time it could be said that you work with the young forces of Yugoslav Drama Theatre. What qualities did your work gain with it?
I.M.: Sadness of a young person is the saddest. On stage, their emotions are exciting in a special sort of way because they are raw, devoid of layers of experience, thinking things out, analysis, self-irony. Discontent with the world, anger at what keeps missing is an intense feeling, a simple one. And it weighs a ton.
Go back to: Dramaturgical Materials of “The Dragonslayers”
Published on 30 November 2015
At the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, Iva Milošević is directing THE DRAGONSLAYERS, a new play by the renowned playwright Milena Marković, a play with the subject of the centenary of the beginning of World War I, the Young Bosnians, Gavrilo Princip… When asked about her reasons for writing this play, Milena Marković says, “My personal motivation stems from my value system that is primarily anti-authoritarian and freedom-loving. And—’
T.N: And?
M.M.: And it is like that even when it is about an authority coming from the value system I myself have been formed on, which is the so-called modern Western world. The title comes for The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche, where he dreams of a generation that would change the world. At the time when Nietzsche was writing his book, imperial forces have come to their end, and this unsustainable system in which a minority was doing better and better, and the majority was having unbearable conditions, fell apart. Of course, a whole wonderful world disappeared, and another one emerged. Many writers of the day, writers of decadent or accursed movements, sense the threat and the delight of this unavoidable change.
T.N.: The central theme?
M.M.: The central theme is the suffering of noble young men with class and social and national awareness who feel the injustice and realise they must perish, and at the same time, some of them love life so much and question whether they are right or not.
T.N.: You personal stance on Gavrilo Princip, Young Bosnia, the centenary of the beginning of World War I?
M.M.: We currently live in the age of the great war of economics and propaganda. Everyone has the right to take sides, or to remain on the sidelines, but there are some great pressures involved. We are small and irrelevant, a bloody change in the exchange between the great powers, to paraphrase Andric. I want no part in this feast of various wardens and satraps where bones of dead heroes are rolled over back and forth as anyone sees fit. The Young Bosnians were heroes of that age. The world they fought for no longer exists, if it ever has.
T.N.: You see this as separate from the play itself?
M.M.: It should be seen separately from the play, everyone is entitled to experiencing the play in their own way. A work of art is such a thing that it should not only suit one particular day and age and one particular political group. It should be such a thing that, if someone likes to think the play is about his grandfather, let it be about his grandfather, if the play is about himself, let it be a play about himself, if someone merely wants to enjoy the verse or the performance, let them. Our provincialising, among other things, consists of there being a constant pressure to justify every single thing politically, which is often done in very vulgar and banal ways, and before the eyes of the bosses, from various sides.
Go back to: The Serbian Press about “The Dragonslayers”
Published on 27 November 2015
“Our shadows will walk in Vienna, haunting the court, scaring gentlefolk”, Gavrilo Princip wrote on the wall of his prison cell in Terezín in today’s Czech Republic, one time Austro-Hungarian empire, then in its terminal phase of decomposition, as was the body of the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassin who was thrown into a communal grave with “some thieves…”. This was revealed on 7 June to the audience of ‘The Dragonslayers’ by Milena Marković, directed by Iva Milošević, by a conscientious Czech corporal of said empire (played by Mirjana Karanović) infected by panslavism and moral pressure within.
The graffiti (the word created by coding into contemporary Serbian) from the wall of Princip’s cell inspired two of the most prominent and most produced Serbian playwrights, Biljana Srbljanović and Milena Marković, to address — in two respective plays, both commissioned by theatres, the former by the Schauspielhaus of Vienna, and the latter by the YDT — the subject of 100 years of the Sarajevo assassination and its implications not only on the history of these regions but also on the interpretation of the motives of the members of Young Bosnia themselves. It is difficult to avoid comparisons between the two plays since both address the same subject matter in a similar post-dramatic dramaturgical key. It is also very ungratifying to make comparisons, since, however similar they might appear at the first glance, the plays, and their respective stagings in particular, are quite different. Still, this article will primarily focus on ‘The Dragonslayers’, and not on a comparative analysis of this play and ‘This grave is too small for me’ by Biljana Srbljanović. The production begins with a recontextualisation of the position of Young Bosnians and their revolutionary ideas by drawing pop-cultural parallels to punk and recent European leftist-anarchist movements which see Europe, just as they did in 1914, as an ossified, bureaucratised shambles in search of exploitation of the poor and the small, the more brutal the better. This move, in which the actors wear contemporary clothes and shout (or sing in songs with a Brechtian V-effect) the slogans of “the brave new Europe”, very clearly establishes the symbolic plane of the story of Princip, even though — except in a direct and slightly superficial way — it hasn’t even started: it all happened for the very same reasons for which the European Union is collapsing now — social ones.
Putting the Young Bosnians in a social context continues for the following half an hour of the show with a series of cabaret miniatures whose purpose, since this is a paratheatrical genre that appears and reaches its zenith in the early 20th century, is to present the spirit of the time in which the Young Bosnians decide to do what will, in visual codification by the director Iva Milošević, turn them into pop-culture fairytale-like heroes — the Dragonslayers. As soon as the directorial and dramaturgical narration begins with the Young Bosnians (Princip, Ilic, Cubrilovic, Cabrinovic) and their biographies, as well as their intimate motivation for the assassination, the show actually begins, gaining the necessary fullbloodedness, establishing the relationship with the audience.
The accounts in the form of dramatic miniatures by Milena Marković were directed as a cabaret programme with the required ironic distance, but clear emotional engagement and impressive underlining of clear motivation in poverty and misery, oppression and humiliation that peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina, primarily in a social and societal sense, endure from the Austro-Hungarian annexation government. These episodes have enough historical and dramaturgical realism to make any viewer believe them, but also a clear stylistic distance, and that in terms of meaning, in dramaturgical elements of post-dramatic theatre and a poetic distance that Milena Marković always uses in her plays and director’s setting of the cabaret. Scenes of intimate farewells to a petit bourgeois family environment, a pathetic rural environment or an intellectual humiliation serve as an excellent overture to dramatic (as well as historiographic) culmination in the scene of the assassination. And it is there, as far as this text is concerned, that the sole and crucial comparison with the production of ‘This Grave is Too Small for Me’ directed by Dino Mustafic is in order: while the latter sets the Young Bosnians in a free and quite unfounded signification relation to Serbian nationalism of the 1990s and plots of Milorad Ulemek Legija, ‘The Dragonslayers‘ lack political and ideological level, both in symbolic and dramatic terms. This level is, in the narration of the production, solved after the very assassination with the processing of transcripts from the trial and statements made by the Young Bosnians themselves, but it steps out of the narrative construction, and, following the assassination and rounded story about its participants, turns into a superfluous addition, even though the scenes of torture are interesting in terms of their visual impact. The directorial concept is a combination of post-dramatic theatre, with confessions of characters fit into the cabaret visual form offering the necessary historic distance, not only in the sense of genre accuracy, but also in the very core of the playtext itself.
The set design solutions are reduced and don’t draw attention away from the narrative, whilst costumes are a surrealist cabaret stylistic game and levitate between Dadaism and the avant-garde, which additionally emphasises the intellectual and artistic spirit of the times in which the assassination is taking place, as well as the diametrical difference between the spiritual life of Europe and that of a Bosnian small town from which the downfall of the former commenced. ‘The Dragonslayers‘ are a play difficult to assess objectively: Theatre recontextualises and codifies the Young Bosnians as working class heroes in an excellent way, but in a pop-culture sort of sense; superhero revolutionaries who, each for different reasons, want to reach the ideal of freedom. This is all structuralised in a tempting, skilful and clear way for every spectator of contemporary theatre to see, particularly those whose knowledge of the assassination of Sarajevo does not exceed the level of a newspaper article. On the other hand, this subject is by far more serious, grave, and, historically — and for us even socially — more important than playing with symbols and visual and cultural contexts. But, as a paraphrase of the quote from the walls of the Therezín dungeon, ‘The Dragonslayers‘ will spy on you, haunt you, make you laugh and scare you for a long time after you’ve seen it. In the end, that’s all that counts.
Go back to: The Serbian Press about “The Dragonslayers”
Published on 23 November 2015
