Tag: Serbia

The Rich and the Poor: Coming Together and Drifting Apart in the European Theatrical Landscape

The Rich and the Poor: Coming Together and Drifting Apart in the European Theatrical Landscape

Money (or the lack of it) was a recurring issue during the second conference on theatre structures promoted by the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe. Between the State and the market, financial gymnastics tends to be the rule — but there are some exceptions.

Conference on Theatre Structures at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade, Serbia

As the peak of the economic and financial crisis that paralyzed Europe during the last decade — to a greater or lesser extent, according to the strength and the resilience of national budgets — seems finally overcome (or so they say…), money is still the elephant in the room when it comes to analyzing the differing (and often conflicting) paradigms that rule the arts, and theatre in particular, in the European context. Indeed that’s how it felt a year ago in Milan, when the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe (UTE) held the first of its conferences on theatre structures, in an event that finally materialized not only the thousands of kilometers but also the thousands of euros that keep the Teatro Nacional de São João, in Porto, apart from co-members such as the Schauspiel Stuttgart or the Piccolo Teatro de Milano (eventually leaving some room for debate on the uncomfortable transit between theatre and politics in turbulent contexts such as Tunisia or Israel). And again, that’s how it felt a week ago in Belgrade, where the impact of the still ongoing shift from Eastern Europe’s hyper-regulated and hyper-centralized systems to a market economy was in the spotlight, framing the more or less converging experiences of Bulgaria’s Sfumato, Romania’s Teatrul Bulandra, Serbia’s Yugoslav Drama Theatre (JDP), Greece’s National Theatre of Greece in Athens, and Russia’s Stanislavsky Electrotheatre.

The price of adjusting to a new environment which is mostly defined by the state’s retreat and the scarcity of available funds is a common feature to most of the theatres working beyond the former Iron Curtain, despite regional differences. “We all face similar problems, but in the Serbian case they’re aggravated by the fact that the system itself is going through changes. Yes, we do need more funds—but we also need a new model”, said Tamara Vučković Manojlović, JDP’s general manager, right at the opening of the conference. “The laws that have recently been approved do not acknowledge the cultural sector’s specific characteristics, and public funds decrease as the idea that theatre must adapt to the principles of a market economy makes its way”, she added. Today, YDT’s ticket sales revenues make up for 18–22% of its total budget and the emphasis on diversifying the theatre’s sources of income has led to the frequent rental of its rooms, a side-activity which already represents a “substantial” cash flow.

Also in Bulgaria, where the State’s investment in the cultural sector remains at 0.5% of the country’s GDP, the funding mechanisms behind its 35 public theatres also began fluctuating according to the laws of the market. “Starting eight years ago, the budget of each and every theatre depends on the ticket sales—we’re now under the market’s Diktat”, Sfumato’s artistic director Margarita Mladenova argued. This new funding system, she explained, pushes theatres towards a serial production approach, eventually compromising long, experimental artistic processes, such as the ones that historically defined the Sfumato: “We’re strongly advised to rehearse less and sell more. Breeding new actors, new poetics and new aesthetics is currently marginalized.” Meanwhile, whole theatrical seasons gravitating around famous, crowd-pleasing TV stars abound, sacrificing the institutions’ long-established artistic identities: “To make sure they make enough money, directors cast ‘dancing bears’ [A/N popular TV actors] in the leading roles, and the remaining actors are forced to gravitate around them so they can be paid. It’s atrocious.”, Mladenova stated, advocating for a new funding system that may replace the “emphasis on consumerism” by highlighting artistic integrity and further regulating the local administrations’ financial contribution to Bulgaria’s theatrical landscape (the current set of rules favours rather arbitrary funding policies).

In Romania, where municipal budgets are a key-element to the survival of the country’s public theatre network (only national theatres are directly State-financed, and less than 0.8% of the GDP is invested in the cultural sector); the paradigm is changing, too. Bucharest is definitely a world apart—three million people, half of the country’s GDP, a billion-euro municipal budget, 28 cultural institutions, 14 city-funded theatres—, but outside the capital city survival is especially hard, Teatrul Bulandra’s Alexandru Darie pointed out. Both the market and the rules defining how to access the municipal funds (about 70–80% of the total budget, in Bulandra’s case) pave the way for an industrial, mass-production model: new productions tend to multiply (seven to ten per year being the current average) as the shows’ careers are downsized (a maximum of 10 to 15 sessions per show).

Meanwhile, on yet another front, the “extraordinary boom” of private theatres which proliferate in alternative venues is reshaping Romania’s theatrical landscape—“for better and for worse”, according to Alexandru Darie. “Private theaters are more likely to forgo legislation or evade their fiscal responsibilities and have lighter structures that tend to be more flexible and free from administrative constraints. So, it’s an unfair competition for public theatres, which only this year were again granted permission to hire new actors and technicians [in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, this was strictly ruled out]. An actor we recently hired for a new production of Ivanov told us that while we were paying him about 100 euros a night for burning himself out and weighing two kilos less after each performance, a private theatre would pay him twice as much just to sit in a chair and tell jokes”, Bulandra’s artistic director reported. Then again, it’s also true, he admitted, that the freedom of action of the private arena has allowed for the appearance of “emerging talents (actors, directors, etc.) that are now finally permeating the public theatres”, eventually updating their repertoires and their theatrical languages”. 

“At the moment, it is a war, but I hope that in the end the clash between these two worlds will benefit the public theatres”, Alexandru Darie summed up, endorsing a new framework in which these institutions “heavily controlled by the State and local administrations” (“We must demand permission for everything!”) can have higher flexibility and autonomy levels.

Just like in Bulgaria, a structural change also seems inevitable in Romania: “Maybe we must follow the examples set by Italy or Germany and redefine the status of our theatres, a move some of my colleagues are afraid of because they suspect change will mean less funding.” Anyway, the current legal framework has also proven insufficient as far as benefactors’ and sponsors’ incentives are concerned: “The system favours investing in festivals, which is where all the rich and nicely dressed people show up; nobody will care for the theatres’ daily activities unless the law is reformed.”

Transitioning

Meanwhile, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where State control assumes spookier nuances (as it has recently been underlined by the painful Kyril Serebrennikov’s case), the systemic shock caused by the collapse of the USSR seems far from digested. Part of the “enormous structure” set up by the communist regime in every corner of the country is still on—about 700 theatres are supported either by the State or the local administrations—, but in many cases (including the historical ballet and opera theatres of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky) their dotation doesn’t even cover these institutions’ heavy operating costs (needless to say, fixed ensembles tend to be a sacred rule). In fact, and given the lack of resources, theatres are tangled in complex financial gymnastics, juxtaposing highly volatile public and private funds, said Boris Yukhananov, Stanislavsky Electrotheatre’s artistic director. “Government is very much for the establishment of benefactor councils for every theatre, and that’s how many companies survive. As for the municipal funds, they too tend to fluctuate according to the mayor’s preferences… But Voronezh is a fine example—and there are others—of the renaissance of a contemporary culture”, he mentioned. In this “gradual transitioning context from centralization to decentralization”, theatre is still overwhelmingly non-commercial: “Some commercial theatres try to be self-sufficient, but normally they don’t succeed.”

The Stanislavsky Electrotheatre is one of those examples of cross-pollination between public and private dotation. Established more than a century ago, in 1915, it was one of the first grand cinemas in Moscow before eventually becoming Konstantin Stanislavsky’s studio; since 2013 it’s Boris Yukhananov’s new home, a multidisciplinary venture where theatre, opera and music converge. “In early 2013, the theatre was in a very delicate situation and the city of Moscow ran a public competition for the post of artistic director; I applied and got appointed. In theory, the city would provide all the funding, but I would never choose that kind of slavery to the authorities, if only for the fact that our artistic visions don’t match. Presently, the city feeds our budget with one million euros while the remaining five or six million euros come from benefactors”, the director went into detail. Total investment in the reconstruction of the theatre is in the vicinity of one billion rubles, he added. “If we manage to prove we double as an opera theatre, we may double the current dotation”, Boris Yukhananov said, highlighting “the important work” that the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre has developed with contemporary composers.

The eye of the crisis

Although in the Eastern countries the cumulative effect of the ongoing paradigm shift and the economic crisis has aggravated the inevitable growing pains, no European country has been more deeply affected by the financial decay than Greece. Stathis Livanthinos, National Theatre of Greece’s artistic director, came to Belgrade to tell us about survival in the eye of the crisis, with less than half of the good old days’ budget to manage (the institution’s dotation declined from 12 to six million euros), and no chance of easing the burden of its expensive staff structure (250 workers and a permanent ensemble of one hundred actors), whose salaries currently consume all the available funds—ticket sales are the only source of funding for theatre production itself. “It’s a feature of the National Theatre of Greece Basic Law, which has been approved in the 90s. I tried to change that rule, because, as you can imagine, it’s extremely difficult to survive given these conditions, but the idea is that in times of crisis there should be at least a place where Greek actors can work and get paid”, he explained.

The budget’s drastic downsizing threatens the National Theatre of Greece’s main mission, since its ability to reach beyond the city of Athens and to penetrate the whole country is now weakened: “The National Theatre of Greece is in danger of becoming just the National Theatre of Athens; the current financial situation makes it very hard to be present on a national level.” Besides, the crisis has also undermined the State’s ability to support theatrical activity: “The Ministry of Culture used to subsidize theatres across the country. It’s over now. Only the National Theatre of Greece and the National Theatre of Northern Greece [A/N also a member of the UTE] are State-financed. In fact, the percentage of the national budget that is available for culture is so low that I’m ashamed to quantify it.”

Relying on ticket revenues to finance new productions, and at the same time seriously constrained by the audience’s declining purchasing power (which eventually forced the institution to implement a new reduced price policy, so the common Greek could still afford going to the theatre), the National Theatre of Greece can no longer guarantee its quality standards. And that’s also due to the fact that the legal framework does not suit the attraction of new, alternative sources of income: “A few years ago I started looking for sponsors and benefactors, but we need more adequate legislation. Some companies did give us money because they like what we do, but all that we can give them back is some publicity in our programmes… and so the National Theatre of Greece risks seeing its name being swallowed up by private companies and losing its public character”, Stathis Livanthinos argued.

Not everything is tragic in the country where tragedy was invented, though: the crisis years were also, paradoxically, years of theatrical abundance, with an average of a thousand new shows per year just to mention Athens (even if in many cases the artists did not get paid) and finally, “for the first time in too many years”, the Ministry of Culture could hand out about 100 million euros to independent theatre companies.

Over the rainbow

But there is a parallel universe in this story—and it belongs in Europe, too. A parallel universe where talking about theatre doesn’t necessarily mean “talking about money” (“which, besides being unpleasant, is incorrect”, as Stathis Livanthinos pointed out). Luxembourg, for instance, whose young national theatre was established in 1996 after the overwhelming success of the European Capital of Culture of the preceding year. Frank Hoffmann, director (and founder!) of Théâtre National du Luxembourg, did not come to Belgrade to speak about funding but to discuss issues of mission and identity in a small country of 500 thousand inhabitants where almost half of the population is of foreign origin and speaks another language.

Vienna’s Volkstheater is also a world apart—as is the entire theatrical landscape of Austria, a topic that another article of this online magazine will further develop. So apart from that, somewhere over the rainbow, many million euros away, as Theatre and Dance Unit Chief at the Arts and Culture Department of the Federal Chancellery, Andrea Ruis, and Volkstheater’s artistic director, Anna Badora, described “the best system in the world” (Badora’s words) the remaining speakers finally found the good news they were so desperate to bring back home.

 

Published on 29 September 2017 (Article originally written in Portuguese)

Talking theatre and changing socio-political landscapes with Gorčin Stojanović

Talking theatre and changing socio-political landscapes with Gorčin Stojanović

Sundays are meant to be calm and relaxing. Yet, the third Sunday of September wasn’t that at all in the capital of Serbia, Belgrade. Instead it was a day, charged with anxiety, hope, fear, politics, and visions for the future. The day concluded with the FIBA’s EuroBasket 2017 finals, where the Serbian national team lost to the Slovenians; and everyone was watching, including everyone in the theatre. At the same time, since the early morning, the city centre had been preparing for the Pride Parade, which later made it to the headlines as the first event of its kind in the region, led by Serbia’s prime minister. Last but not least, the second part of the UTE’s Conference on Theatre Structures took place at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre (A/N Jugoslovensko dramsko pozorište in Serbian, wildly known as JDP).

In the middle of this busy Sunday, when the thickness of the boundaries between politics, society and theatre happened to be so tangible in the context of this city, I talked to Gorčin Stojanović, since 2001 the artistic director of our kind host theatre. And since it seemed to me that his position required a great ability to link what happens on the stage, inside the theatre, to what is going on outside of the building, on the street or into the stage of politics, without letting it harm the artistic autonomy and esthetics, he felt like the best person to speak to this day.

© Nebojša Babić

Let’s start with the most obvious questions: Yugoslavia as a political entity is gone but the Yugoslav Drama Theatre is still standing and its name as it was declared by Josip Broz Tito in 1947, when it was established, remains unchanged. How come and what is the message behind that?

Gorčin Stojanović: It’s very simple: this theatre is too much of a brand to be easily renamed. I don’t like using the word “brand”, and I am not doing in ironically, but I need to in order to explain this. And I am talking as a businessman on purpose. It’s just that you don’t rename good products. There are two big brands in the field—the Yugoslav Drama Theatre and the Yugoslav Cinematique, the third cinema factory in Europe and the fourth in the world in terms of funds. And it’s also still called Yugoslav Cinematique because if you changed the name you’d have to start all over again, and you’d delete a 70 year-old  tradition.

In the case of JDP, there was some public discussion regarding its name, though not all too much and there hasn’t been any strong pressure to change it. But it’s probably interesting to note that those comments into that direction were not coming from the far-right but from the moderate nationalists instead. And when nationalists ask this question, I always answer one and the same thing: you know that in Berlin there is a Maxim Gorki Theatre. Probably they could have called it Leo Tolstoy or Fyodor Dostoyevsky but they didn’t and named it after Maxim Gorki because he represented an ideology as well. And after the Berlin Wall came down no one thought of changing its name. Because it is a brand and very famous. You don’t rename it simply because the state has changed. So the Yugoslav Drama Theatre will not be renamed either, at least not during our time.

What you just said also exemplifies the complex relations between nations, as imagined communities, culture, political representation and various structures. That naturally leads to the next question, which might be slightly politically incorrect. But, omitting crucial contextual factors and focusing on structures only, you have this experience of living in a transnational union like Yugoslavia, where different nations coexisted. Today we have the European Union, which in a very broad sense also tries to create a larger, overarching structure, covering many different nations, though the process of becoming part of it is completely different. Given your experience, what are the lessons learnt—for good or bad—which should not or should be repeated?

Gorčin Stojanović: Absolutely! And the politically incorrect questions are my favorite ones. Four years ago we held a small conference at the JDP, at the same place where we are today, particularly on this question. Its intention was precisely this: to explore the question of this multinational, multicultural, multi-whatever bodies. And the main thesis was very simple: the Austro-Hungarian Empire was demolished due to nationalism—and here I am talking only about the structures, not about political systems. The Austro-Hungarian state, as we know, was reaching out to some parts of our world, and some of the roads and the railroads that we still use were built back then. The modern infrastructure came with them. Afterwards came the first Yugoslavia (n.b. Kingdom of Yugoslavia) and then the second Yugoslavia (n.b. Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). And it developed everything further. The building that we are sitting in at the moment was erected during this period. So, in terms of structure, Yugoslavia bears resemblance to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And it also collapsed. So what makes us believe that European Union will stand forever?

That is why in 2013 I brought three people together—Dubravka Stojanović, a great historian specialized in the Serbian history after the Vienna Congress in 1878 till the First World War, who is leftist in her political views; Predrag Marković, another great historian, who is more right in his political views, you might even say a mild nationalist, but a great scientist and would not make any compromises with the facts; and Milica Delević, an economist and European Union expert. And on the grounds of what had happened before from a historical perspective and what was the situation at the moment, they were able to predict a lot of what happened later: the rejection of the EU Constitution in The Netherlands and France, also Brexit. All of the things that people knew of and preferred to ignore.

Even some early origins of the Conflict Zones project were envisioned in this conference. The UTE president during this time, Ilan Ronen, even suggested that Belgrade should be the headquarter of this project, but the Serbian Ministry of Culture did not realize its potential. And this is the long story, trying to say that of course there is always something good and bad in these structures. But what the Yugoslav Drama Theatre still stands for in the region is that we do collaborate and have always collaborated with each other. We may not have invited that many Croatian directors during the war, for instance, but still the JDP was the first theatre which went to Croatia and Bosnia without any mediation.

As a matter of fact, that was the second part of my question that you already started answering—what is the role and place of arts and theatre in particular in these structures, and how are they implemented through representative institutions such as the Yugoslav Drama Theatre?

Gorčin Stojanović: In 1995, the JDP had this production “Powder Keg”, a play by Dejan Dukovski from Macedonia, directed by Slobodan Unkovski, which was invited all over the world, from Colombia to Rome. But the most important thing is that the first time something ever went from Serbia to former Yugoslavia, to Croatia and Slovenia, it was “Powder Keg”. And the first time a major theatre went to a festival in Sarajevo, again without any mediators, it was again the Yugoslav Drama Theatre with “Powder Keg”. Later, Slovenians came with seven productions to two theatres in Serbia. We were joking that this was a Slovenian invasion. And one of their main actors told us, “Well, we had to come to Belgrade, as Belgrade is the main city”.

What is more, I have calculated that in the past 15 years, the JDP has gone to Zagreb more frequently, and Croatian theatres have come to Belgrade significantly more than before, when we were, so to say, one. And that tells you something. Everyone needs their state and that’s politics. But culturally we are so much connected and that is something different.

And when you prepare the artistic programme of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre today, who are the envisioned audiences? Or, if we go back to business language, who are the target audiences?

Gorčin Stojanović: I can give you a very precise answer. Our audience members come here not only because of the sensuality of theatre but also for its intellectual dimension. I strongly believe that whatever JDP does it has to unite those two dimensions. In different proportions, but both have to be present. Sometimes I really like to laugh and to direct bedroom farces which do not keep me alert that much. However, the audience at the JDP comes for something more. If we try to do something stupidly commercial, they would not be interested. And our directors, actors, set designers… everything is too good for that. Which means that we cannot do cheesy theatre even if we want to.

And this is because the tradition of the Yugoslav Drama has always been a combination of several things. First of all, a high-level of performance skills, meaning the best actors. JDP was based on the model of The Moscow Art Theatre and conceived by taking the best actors from all over Yugoslavia. That was the model but it changed rather quickly. The first premiere of the JDP was on April 3rd and by the end of June we broke up any relations with the Russians. So the model was not maintained from here on in, but the elite of actors and this idea stayed. Secondly, it has always been a director’s theatre with strong directorial figures, doing daring work. Some of our most daring and politically engaged productions, like “Powder Keg”, lasted on stage for more than 10 years.

In 1969 the only official ban of theatrical performance happened. It was a performance on the dramatization of Drajoslav Mihailovij’s book “When the Pumpkins Blossomed”—one of the best Serbian novels turned into a very artistically and not politically daring piece of theatre at that time. It included one sentence—the kid is addressing the Communists, who came in 1948 to arrest his father and says, “You are worse than Germans” and adds something like, “Russia sucks”. And Tito, who never saw the production, referred to it in a speech and it was banned. And from this moment on something was broken for the next four or even ten years inside the theatre. Not artistically but internally.

In 1985, Jovan Chirilov, a very prominent figure in our theatre history, was elected by the younger members of the troupe and became part of the second management of the JDP. And he was part of the theatre before, thus always working for the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF), so he was quite knowledgeable. And what he did was to formulate four pillars, that were already there, but he stated them clearly and made them part of the official structure of the repertoire: foreign classics, domestic classics, foreign contemporary plays and domestic contemporary plays. Yet, the requirement was that the classics should always be done in a daring way. It should be a new reading of a classical piece for theatre. Thus, he insisted on bringing in young people—I was one of them. And I did my first production when I was in my 3rd year of the Theatre Academy.

So now you are paying it forward?

Gorčin Stojanović: Yes, exactly. My only mission for the past 17 years that I have been around the JDP artistically has been to do that: to enable young people to develop. And the idea of excellence is always there. No doubt that you cannot always reach it but you definitely need to strive for it. Even more so in time of crisis! In good times, when you can have seven or eight openings per season, you can probably sacrifice one or two of them. Of course, even then you still do your best, though it might not turn out to be the best. You just cannot limit yourself to trying to fulfill someone’s very specific need but you have to try to do your best. Every compromise is good except for the main compromise of doing something without an artistic reason. The artistic reason could also be wrong sometimes. For instance, I may not agree with everything we have produced artistically, yet I still stand behind everything, even the greatest fails. Luckily, due to this very precise planning, we haven’t had many of them. So my idea is very simple: I am trying to pay forward the chance that I was given as a young director by Jovan Chirilov. This means that directors now come to my office and we talk and talk and exchange thoughts, ideas, and plays. Because, like in soccer, if you do not do well in this team you will end up in some other, group “B” club, which is not Manchester United. So I try to keep that from happening, young people being sacrificed that way. Because this is what we had with Jovan Chirilov—this care and concern, pushing us to make good productions and not to have time to sleep.

And what is next? What should we be looking forward to seeing on the stage of the JDP in the upcoming seasons? And what are future directions that you are envisioning?

Gorčin Stojanović: Right now, we are working with Slobodan Unkovski, a very well-known director in this part of the world—from Athens to Ljubljana. He is working on, what I call a fifth column in our repertoire that appears from time to time, the experimental stuff. The production is called “Einstein’s Dreams” and is based on Alan Lightman’s book, which is not necessarily a piece of fiction, as the author himself is a scientist.

The second upcoming production is “The Mercy Seat” by Neil LaBute, staged at the Studio JDP by the young director Jana Maricic.

Then we will have a new premiere by Iva Miloshevic, who is staging Ivan Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country” with the very renowned Mirjana Karanovic. Then we will do a play by Ivan Cankar, a Slovenian classic, “The King of Betajnova”, which actually was the first performance done at the JDP in 1948. And I think this is a nice illustration of what I have said earlier because this production will be staged by a young, promising director whom I invited to talk to. After a while he told me that he wanted to stage this play. I asked him whether it was because of the anniversary, but he did not know about it and got embarrassed. And I told him, “Even if you lie, I don’t mind because the play is a great choice, and the JDP is the place to do that.”

And the dream is always the same: to have and keep what I called our three “Es”: exclusivity, excellence and esthetics.

 

Published on 26 September 2017 (Article originally written in Bulgarian)

An Unfortunate Tale Of Not Finding the Truth

An Unfortunate Tale Of Not Finding the Truth

It was on Sunday, 17th of September 2017, when several incidents changed the daily routine in Belgrade. The streets of Serbia’s capital were full of police guarding the area where the Pride Parade was about to start, and by noon Kralja Milana Street was already filled with loud beats and pop music. All passers-by were met by countless colorful balloons, rainbow flags and the generally positive vibe of the relatively small gathering outside the Yugoslav Drama Theatre.

PetrovićAt that time, in the same building, the UTE held the second part of its Conference on European Theatre Structures, which was attended by directors, cultural journalists, politicians and artistic directors from theaters of Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Luxembourg. An evening performance of Luigi Pirandello’s Right You Are, If You Think So, directed by Jagoš Marković, was also part of this two-day programme. The theatre production had already premiered earlier this year in July to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of this Italian Nobel Prize laureate for Literature. The play itself, as for its interpretation, greatly corresponds to our current post-truth society, and provides a considerable potential for communicating directly with the audience. In short, life in a post-truth world represents a kind of an existential model, where a person distortedly perceives their surroundings due to the overwhelming amount of information or their own laziness to think critically.

Right You Are, If You Think So, directed by Jagoš Marković | Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade © Nenad Petrović

Regarding the characters of Pirandello’s drama, it is certainly their laziness that drives them into the wheel of sensational suspicions and scandalous wishes that mask their lack of identity and absence of personality. As they are trying to find out the truth, which—from their perspective—stands for a clear resolution, a simplified solution or just a clarification of the storyline they’ve plotted (and which therefore has no solution), their actions are used to demonstrate something disturbing about the human mentality and men’s weakness. Pirandello’s characters are so-called prominent citizens from an unspecified town who have the permanent need to pester someone, and to define others solely because of their changing mood, desires and suspicions. The trigger for this social fuss is a strange married couple and a mother-in-law that newly moves to town, awaking its citizens from their daily apathy. Once they are awake, so is their nosiness, and they are adamant about finding out personal details about their new neighbours.

The theme of identity is symbolised by a huge golden standing mirror, placed unwieldy to the left side of the forestage, vertically to the audience. However, considering its size and symbolic meaning, it’s odd that it’s only used once by a single character, a rather provocative old man Lamberto Laudisi. The scene where he’s staring at his own reflection, doubting not just his clarity but also identity, serves as a manifest of the incapability to recognize the truth. Other characters ignore the mirror with great confidence and, instead of looking at themselves in the reflection, they intensely aim their focus on somebody else.

Besides the mirror, there are only a few other objects on stage, such as several upholstered chairs and a chandelier, once used as a secret microphone. At the very end of the performance, Laudisi climbs on the chandelier, then he’s lifted up a few meters and hangs there as a sign of insanity that took over all of the characters. At the same time, the upset group of citizens is having a fight; meanwhile the stage walls made of green velvet screens collapse, revealing the backstage and the theatre machinery. This abstract scene, designed by Jagoš Marković himself, may at first evoke an interior of a distasteful parlour or a forest, where the characters are lost. After the breakdown, it may then refer to the general chaos and inability to distinguish between reality and illusion.

The costumes designed by Bojana Nikitović support the stylized caricature form of acting, reminding us of Gogol’s collective of small-town officers from The Government Inspector, similarly trapped in their own idiocy. A rather traditional caricature approach strengthens the comedic nature of the characters’ actions; however the form of conversational salon comedy is quickly exhausted, especially on such a big stage. The spectator promptly follows the narrative based on the constant changing of “facts” and their negations. It’s difficult to stay focused , even in just about 90 minutes. Sadly, the show doesn’t offer a vision of the idiocy of society in a contemporary context. It follows the original story without any adaptations that would attract the viewer’s attention, nor does it provoke them to ponder the content. Regarding the production’s aesthetics, the abstract set rather reminds us of socialistic theatre productions from the late 50s than a space related to today’s reality. In the end, this theatre piece keeps its distance to today’s spectator and real life, despite its very lively and topical message.

 

Published on 25 September 2017 (Article originally written in Czech)

Theatre in Serbia today: the resilience of the socially engaged artists

Theatre in Serbia today: the resilience of the socially engaged artists

Theatre has always been, more than any other art, influenced by social circumstances due to the complexity of its production and to its presence and immediacy of experience which are created through a direct communication with its audience, in real time and space reflected on stage. In that respect, a set of particularly adverse economic circumstances, which have been ruling Serbian society for the last six or seven years, and which had been caused by the global economic crisis, have led to a dramatic decrease in theatre production. Still, one should also bear in mind that economic circumstances in Serbia are generally way below the European level, and that in times preceding the financial crisis, when the conditions were somewhat more favourable, the production in Serbia was still significantly below European standards.

© Damjan Dobrila

The System

Institutional theatres in Serbia receive basic funding by the Ministry of Culture and by the regional and municipal governments for their ensembles maintenance, while the finances for new productions have been noticeably reduced. Each theatre has two to three premieres per season, which is at least two times less than they used to have until six or seven years ago. The situation applies to the country as a whole but in particularly to the theatres south of Belgrade. All the major Serbian cities have their own theatres which enjoy the status of national institutions, and are mostly financed by their local governments. In terms of production, the most favourable situation is in Belgrade, after which comes Vojvodina, namely Novi Sad, Subotica, and Sombor.

In Belgrade, there are eleven institutional theatres – the National Theatre, Yugoslav Drama Theatre, Atelier 212, Belgrade Drama Theatre, Terazije Theatre, Zvezdara Theatre, Little Theatre Duško Radović, Boško Buha Theatre, Puppet Theatre Pinocchio, and Theatre Puž (the latter four are theatres for children and young people). Most of the theatres have their own ensembles.

There are currently four privately-owned theatres in Serbia – Slavija, Madlenianum, Carte Blanche, and Le Studio, whose repertories are predominantly commercial, made of comedies, which are well-accepted by the general audience. One exception is Le Studio which offers a more varied programme with more distinct artistic aspirations. In addition to those, there are several multifunctional stages in Belgrade, i.e. cultural institutions which organize theatre, film, music, and fine arts programmes – Cultural Centre Vuk Karadžić, Akademija 28, Cultural Centre Palilula, among which the first one has had the most significant theatre productions over the last several years.

Outside Belgrade, most major towns have national theatres that are financed by local municipal governments, while still remaining eligible for applying for the Ministry of Culture’s individual projects calls. South of Belgrade, towns which have one professional theatre each are Šabac, Zaječar, Kragujevac, Kraljevo, Kruševac, Niš, Leskovac, Pirot, and Vranje. North of Belgrade, there is the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina which, generally speaking, prides itself in a more developed and worthier theatre life and cultural tradition altogether that the south of Serbia. The capital of Vojvodina, Novi Sad, has three institutional theatres—the Serbian National Theatre, the Hungarian Theatre of Novi Sad, and the Youth Theatre. In Subotica, there are also three theatres—the National Theatre with two ensembles, a Serbian and a Hungarian one, Kosztolányi Dezső Hungarian Theatre, and Children’s Theatre. The other towns in Vojvodina which have professional institutional theatres are Sombor, Zrenjanin, Kikinda, Vršac, and Sremska Mitrovica.

The Autonomous Province of Vojvodina is a unique space in Serbia with its inhabitants’ multi-ethnic and multicultural identity, and with many established minority integration projects. According to official records, there are more than twenty-five ethnic groups and six official languages in Vojvodina where, at present, there are professional theatres of the Hungarians, the Romanians, the Slovaks, and the Rusyns. In terms of artistic value, Hungarian theatres in Vojvodina are very significant among Serbian theatres— they could easily be put on the top of the Serbian theatre art. It primarily applies to Kosztolányi Dezső Theatre from Subotica, then also Újvidéki Színház from Novi Sad, and Hungarian drama of the National Theatre in Subotica.

Slovak theatre of Vojvodina, based in Bački Petrovac, has been created as the leading cultural institution of the Slovaks from Vojvodina, with an idea to develop theatre culture on a professional level. That theatre does not have its own ensemble but relies on professional actors from Slovakia. The theatre is obliged to perform in the areas inhabited by Slovaks in Vojvodina, so it often visits small Slovak places. Romanians also represent an important ethnic group in Vojvodina, with a significant number of cultural institutions in Novi Sad, Zrenjanin and Vršac. The Romanian National Theatre acts as an independent theatre within the Sterija Theatre in Vršac.

Repertories

In terms of repertories, the last couple of years have led to the loss of distinction between institutions. Apart from the Belgrade Terazije Theatre, which has remained true to its repertory of musicals and comedies, almost all the other theatres in Belgrade and in Serbia choose random plays, without any clear distinction in programme or in style. This leads to a mixture of classical and contemporary plays by Serbian and foreign authors. Apart from Terazije Theatre, yet another exception is the Kosztolányi Dezső theatre, which has, since 2006, attracted attention by its experimental, powerful performances that express a venture into a new, authentic, unrestrained theatre expression. Among them is a successful, and already cult performance, Urbi et Orbi (2008) by the director András Urbán, who has also directed Turbo Paradise, The Beach, Dogs and Drugs, Passport Europe, while many other excellent plays have been directed by Borut Šeparović (Bikini Democracy), Zlatko Paković (Capitalism), Selma Spahić (4a.m.). Moreover, this theatre has established an annual international festival Desire, which takes place in November. The festival promotes the authors who explore theatre poetics, and has an immense significance not only in its surrounding but also in Serbia as a whole.

Although small in number, the productions that are artistically most valued are still mostly created in institutions, by authoritative directors, strong ensembles, and sensibly chosen plays (on average, just a few artistically relevant performances are presented per season). In terms of artistic value, contemporary Serbian theatre prides itself on several directors and playwrights.

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The most significant directors in Serbia today are András Urbán, Kokan Mladenović, Boris Liješević, Miloš Lolić, Igor Vuk Torbica. In the past couple of years, one performance which has reached the highest artistic value was András Urbán’s The Patriots (2015), produced by the National Theatre in Belgrade, and which had a rich theatre life (Bitef, Sterijino Pozorje, Mitem). Taking the play The Patriots, the best work by Jovan Sterija Popović, the classic Serbian comedy playwright, Urbán has staged it as seen from the present viewpoint. In this new reading, the main plot, which condemns false patriotism, is accompanied by contemporary debates on national issues, political and war songs, but also church songs, all critically approached. Last year, Urbán staged another artistically successful performance in the National Theatre in Sombor, Gogoland, based on the novel of the same name written by János Herceg, a Hungarian writer and academy member from Sombor. The new text has an open, developed and fragmentary structure. It was a basis for a forum-like, documentary-music performance which tackles burning social issues head-on—the position of national minorities, debt bondage, political marketing, and social roles of theatre.

Yet another performance which has lately left a significant mark on theatre in Serbia is The Bridge over Drina (produced by the Serbian National Theatre from Novi Sad in 2016), directed by Kokan Mladenović, another successful director in the region. The play is based on the novel of the same name by the Nobel Prize winning author Ivo Andrić, and represents a visual spectacle with the elements of music, drama and epics, the plot of which spans several centuries describing the bloody history of Bosnia in a multilingual fashion—apart from Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian, the protagonists speak Turkish, German and Hungarian, all of which is surtitled. In terms of ideas, Mladenović is consistent in his criticism of incessant evildoing. In that respect, Bosnia is a space which speaks volumes both literally and metaphorically, since it represents an area of antagonism and intense passions, a volcano of multinational conflicts. In Belgrade and in Novi Sad, we have recently seen another successful performance by Mladenović, Jami District, written by Milena Bogavac and co-produced by the Centre for Culture Tivat (Montenegro), the Bitef Theatre (Belgrade), the Think Tank studio from Novi Sad, and the Maszk Festival from Szeged. The story is based on a pseudo-documentary and satirically-absurd situation of discovery of Jamena, a village between Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina where, allegedly, the oldest Palaeolithic settlement in the history of mankind has been discovered. The plot tackles the social and political issues between the three countries, but also vigorously confronts the global cynicism of neoliberal capitalism.

Boris Liješević is another regionally acclaimed director who works not only in Serbia but also in Montenegro, Bosnia, Macedonia, Croatia, and Slovenia. In the past couple of years, he has become famous mostly for his excellent projects that often fall into the realm of documentary theatre. Created through the protagonists’ true stories, they have raised some socially relevant issues—corruption, false morality, privatisation, the effect of political changes on personal lives (Waiting Room, Fertile Days, The Fifth Park). Igor Vuk Torbica, the youngest among these directors, has achieved a tremendous regional success by his staging of Ernst Toller’s Hinkemann, produced by the Zagreb Youth Theatre. Taking Toller’s expressionist, anti-war play (1923) as a starting point, Torbica has developed a post-dramatic piece of art, multi-layered both in structure and in meaning, creating it by means of an amazing confrontation between fragments of drama, cabaret, physical, and epic theatre. The story is set in war-torn Europe tortured by social spectacles which entertain the masses to exhaustion, even when the topic of that entertainment is tragedy. In Serbia, Torbica’s successful performances are The Broken Jug by Heinrich von Kleist (Yugoslav Drama Theatre, 2015), and The Power of Darkness by Tolstoy (the National Theatre in Belgrade, 2017).

 

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Some of the most significant playwrights of the younger generation are Olga Dimitrijević, Maja Pelević, Tanja Šljivar, Vuk Bošković, Milena Bogavac. Olga Dimitrijević, who has received the Sterija Award for her play Workers Die Singing, has established herself as a “total” theatre author. She dramatized but also directed the play Red Love (Bitef Theatre, 2016) based on the novel Free Love (1923) written by the Russian revolutionary writer Alexandra Kollontai. In the performance, the love story between Vasilissa and Vladimir represents the basis for a wider exploration of burning issues, the relationship between private and public, love and politics, the problems of social revolutions, and the abandonment of those. The play New Age, by Vuk Bošković, was staged this year in Bitef Theatre and represents a piercing contemporary analysis of the current social and political circumstances. The fragmented structure and the interlacing of two sequences of events brings forth current torments of social transitions. The author raises the question of privatisation and grey economy, the doings of untouchable tycoons, political marketing manipulation, post-war trauma, and the most current problem of immigration and the overall chaos in Europe.

Independent scene

The independent scene in Serbia has recently been artistically weaker than it used to be during the nineties, when it exuded more power both in terms of quality and of quantity. Nowadays, very few performances find their way to the audience and positive critique. Those are usually the productions by Zlatko Paković in the Centre for Cultural Decontamination, or in the Student Cultural Centre in Novi Sad – To Kill Zoran Đinđić, Don Quixote or What Are the Windmills Today and Where the Wind Comes from, Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People as a Brecht’s Didactic-Play. All of those performances are socially engaged, post-dramatic type of lecture-performances which bring forth the clashes between elitism and populism, literary-historical and documentary-modern. The most successful among the aforementioned is Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People as a Brecht’s Teaching-Play (2014), in which Paković problematizes denotational closeness between Ibsen and Brecht in terms of creating a critical, political theatre. By creating links between Brecht’s songs to drama scenes in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, but also to scenes based on real political and social life, actors and musicians have made a powerfully engaged theatre. Its purpose is to instruct the audience on how to discover and prove (hidden) truth in society, but also to make us aware of the necessity of fighting for personal freedom, without which we are nothing.

Festivals

Festivals play an important role in the Serbian theatre system. It is often discussed whether we have too many of them in Serbia today. Given the fact that almost every major city in Serbia has its own theatre festival, and some more than one, the discussion is justified, especially since the programmes are often very similar, sometimes even overlapping. All of the festivals are, undeniably, locally relevant since they enliven local communities, which does represent an argument for their survival, but at the state level, they are less important.

The relevance of the two major festivals, Bitef and Sterijino Pozorje, is unquestionable, since they enjoy international acclaim as well. Bitef has been a Serbian cultural brand for decades – it is a festival which has always been presenting the most relevant international theatre authors who rely on the avant-garde. On the other hand, Sterijino Pozorje, annually held in Novi Sad, is the most significant national festival. It has undergone various transformations in the past couple of years, trying to redefine its identity after the breakup of Yugoslavia. Since its inception in 1956, it was the most relevant festival of Yugoslav drama. The breakup of the country reduced the space and gave rise to the necessity of its reinvention. For a few years, Sterijino Pozorje featured as the festival of the best national drama and theatre, but this year, it returned to its original concept of being the festival of national plays. The festival Days of Comedy, held in Jagodina, has an almost five-decade long tradition and the festival is given great local and national importance due to its uniqueness. The programme is highly national given that is only consists of theatres from Serbia. Other festivals worth mentioning are Infant, held in Novi Sad, which is international and focused on experimental works, and the festival Desire in Subotica, mentioned earlier, which also promotes theatre of the avant-garde heritage.

Criticism

Theatre criticism in Serbia is present and influential but not in a favourable position due to the general lack of interest among the media to engage the critics. Another trend is the disappearance of theatre criticism in the media, while it has not fully become present on the Internet, yet. When it comes to daily newspapers, it still exist in Politika, Večernje novosti, Dnevnik and Danas. In weekly magazines, it is still published in NIN and Vreme, while it is also present in the electronic media, at Radio Television of Serbia (the public broadcaster), and at Radio Television of Vojvodina.

Criticism does influence the public opinion in Serbia, although artists and producers often negate its impact, pronouncing it irrelevant or non-existent. As expected, what causes this attitude is the “negative” criticism, which makes the authors relativize the influence. If the criticism were not important, it would not be talked about; if the critics were not important, they would not be insulted and belittled. Therefore, since criticism and critics are often talked about in Serbia, since “the criticism of criticism” is as strong as ever, there is no better proof of its influence and its necessity.

 

Published 19 July 2017 (Article originally written in Serbian)