THURSDAY, 25 May, 2023

Croatian Cultural Center in Sušak

BADco.: The Stranger

Photo: Tanja Kanazir / Drugo more (Flickr gallery)

– inspired by the novel “The Stranger” by Albert Camus

Departing from the problem of the absence of (com)passion and expected emotional reactions, The Stranger project, using Camus’s antihero Meursault, provides a view of the social and systemic hypocrisies that are hidden behind relationships based on transparency. This stage reading of The Stranger focuses on three dominant images borrowed from the novel: the situation of confession, prison, and the moment of the murder itself as the point where all of the novel’s forces accumulate. Shedding light on a narrative and discourse as an attempt to explain what happened generates the level of confession, the law of transparency.

Constructing a transparent choreographic score examines, in terms of mise-en-scène, the performative potency of the situations and atmospheres inscribed in the novel. Finally, with light literally shed upon it, the murder, as the central point in the narrative, is presented as a tableau of a continual threat and a stage image that constantly remains incomplete in the spectator’s eye, in its poetic character, always incomplete in waiting for a visual release, unclear because too clear.

BADco. is a collaborative performance collective based in Zagreb, Croatia. The artistic core of the collective are Ivana Ivković, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš and Zrinka Užbinec. As a combination of three choreographers / dancers, two dramaturgs and one philosopher, plus the company production manager, since its beginning (2000), BADco. systematically focuses on the research of protocols of performing, presenting and observing by structuring its projects around diverse formal and perceptual relations and contexts. Reconfiguring established relations between performance and audience, challenging perspectival givens and architectonics of performance, problematizing of communicational structures – all of that makes BADco. an internationally significant artistic phenomenon and one of the most differentiated performance experiences.

Direction: Goran Sergej Pristaš

Dramaturgy and text: Goran Ferčec • Choreography and performance: Nikolina Pristaš, Zrinka Užbinec, Ana Kreitmeyer • Textual contribution and performance: Petar Milat • Music and performance: Alen Sinkauz, Nenad Sinkauz • Drawings and stage design: Siniša Ilić • Costume design: Silvio Vujičić • Light design: Alan Vukelić • Sound design: Jasmin Dasović • Mask: Iva Dežmar • Production: Lovro Rumiha • Special thanks: Maria Tsitroudi, Anders Paulin

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Excerpts from the following texts were used in the performance: Albert Camus: The Stranger • Albert Camus: Summer in Algiers • Mahmoud Darwish: Identity Card

Books refered to in the performance:: Akira Mizuta Lippit: Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) • Georges Didi-Huberman: Survivance des lucioles • Alexander Garcia-Düttmann: Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood

The film Juke box (1966) by Ante Verzotti is screened during the performance

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Premiere: June 27th and 28th 2015 @ Zagreb Dance Center, Ilica 10, Zagreb, Croatia • Project supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia, Zagreb Dance Centre • Project is coproduced by Perforations Festival (Domino)

FRIDAY, 26 May, 2023

Filodrammatica

Žiga Divjak: Crises

Photo: Tanja Kanazir / Drugo more (Flickr gallery)

In life, we are constantly facing different crises – be it personal, professional, social, political, refugee, health, existential, etc. Behind them lurks maybe the biggest one in the history of humankind: the environmental. But in spite of its magnitude we are losing energy to solve other, ever new crises, trying to just restore the current situation … and forgetting that a crisis can be an exceptional time when seemingly impossible ideas become possible. The key question is: Which ideas? Those that would ensure more security, protection, health and well-being to everyone, or those meant to make the already unimaginably rich even richer?

In Crises, Žiga Divjak and his team tackle all these questions and explore the human capacity for collaboration and the need to re-discover natural world not as a source but as our kin.

Žiga Divjak entered the Slovenian cultural domain (still as a student) with the series of events and performances entitled Right Before the Revolution (2013–2015) which brought him the Academy Prešeren Award and with which he toured to Germany and Croatia. Even after his studies, he remained loyal to his socially engaged position in his work, which has so far led him to direct at the Mladinsko, Maska Institute, Prešeren Theatre Kranj, Cankarjev dom, SNT Drama Ljubljana and Ljubljana City Theatre. His sensitive way of approaching social questions brought him a Borštnik Award for direction for The Man Who Watched the World (Mladinsko) in 2017, while the project 6 (Maska nad Mladinsko – The New Post Office programme), which he directed, won the Borštnik Grand Prix for the best production. The same goes for The Game (also The New Post Office), which received six more awards (for direction, acting, young actress, dramaturgy, set design, music and sound design). In 2020, he directed Fever, a project that contemplates the theme of climate change.

Directed by: Žiga Divjak

Cast: Sara Dirnbek, Iztok Drabik Jug, Klemen Kovačič, Draga Potočnjak, Katarina Stegnar, Vito Weis, Gregor Zorc • Narrator: Blaž Šef • Dramaturgy: Goran Injac • Set design: Igor Vasiljev • Costume design: Tina Pavlović • Music and sound: Blaž Gracar • Lighting design: David Orešič • Narration recording and postproduction: Silvo Zupančič • Working material translation into Slovenian: Tina Malič • Language consultant (Slovenian version): Mateja Dermelj • Language consultant (English version): : Nataša Hirci • Producer: Tina Dobnik

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Co-production: Slovensko mladinsko gledališče, Maska Ljubljana, Bitef (Beograd) i Udruga Domino (Zagreb) • The co-production is a part of the project ACT — Art, Climate, Transition, a European cooperation project connecting art and activism with ecology and just transition

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Based on motives from Jason Hickel’s Less is More and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World

SATURDAY, 27 May, 2023

Filodrammatica

Olga Dimitrijević & Maja Pelević: World Without Women

Photo: Tanja Kanazir / Drugo more (Flickr gallery)

Women and work – that is the major topic of the project World Without Women. The authors start with research on structural inequalities in Serbian theatre: gender inequality, unequal wages, normalized violence, reproduction of patriarchal capitalist patterns. The research opens up the questions: who has the right to work, under which conditions, and how much should they be paid for it? The performance examines the extents of engaged art today, and how love (for art) represents the most insidious source of social repression.

With all its regulations, specific features and status, theatre might seem displaced from “normal” life, but it still does represent a good case study for wider social processes. Therefore, the question of women and work is not only treated within the context of theatre but also as the key motive for the deliberation about some future emancipatory policies. If we are unable to overcome the power relations and come up with some new models in theatre, in which we create different and new worlds, how could we expect to do it in the real world? The performance goes beyond counting, quotes, and the frames of liberal feminism, and is trying to open the space for visualizing political and affective actions which intervene in the existing system and the structures of inequalities. Can we again imagine union struggle in theatre? How about women’s union? What if the women in theatre went on strike? Would it be caused by low wages or by sexism and misogyny they are constantly exposed to? A slalom through those topics takes us to an attempt to search for a new language, a political, theatrical and poetic one – a new language of women, work, and the left for the days to come.

Maja Pelević has obtained her BA at the Faculty of Drama Arts in Belgrade and a PhD at the University of Arts in Belgrade, Department of Theory of Arts and Media. Her plays (Orange Peel, Me or Someone Else, Bollywood, Belgrade-Berlin, Maybe We Are Mickey Mouse…) have been translated into many languages and staged throughout Serbia and Europe, and also published in numerous anthologies. Since 2012, she has been active in directing, auteur projects (They Live, Consequences, Hopelessness, Freedom: the Most Expensive Capitalist Word, Lonely Planet), and performing in her own plays. She has received numerous major awards, among which are “Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz” for playwrighting, and Sterija Award for the best contemporary play for Orange Peel and The Last Little Girls. She lives and works in Belgrade and in Bečići. She wishes for the apocalypse.

Olga Dimitrijević was born in 1984 in Belgrade, SFRY. In her work, she explores the topics of social struggles and injustices, female friendship and solidarity, queer histories, borders of political imagination, and the possibilities of a better world. She is the author of many plays (My Dear, The Folk Play, Workers Die Singing…), and auteur projects (Red Love based on the novel by Alexandra Kollontai, Freedom: the Most Expensive Capitalist Word, Lepa Brena Project/with Vladimir Aleksić/, Lonely Planet / with a group of authors/, Radio Šabac, Drama about the End of the World). She has worked as a dramaturge on many performances in Serbia and abroad and has received several awards for her work. She participated in the International Forum – Theatertreffen in 2019. She lives and works between Belgrade and Rijeka. She often dreams of revolution.

Concept, text, performance: Olga Dimitrijević & Maja Pelević

Choreography and stage movement: Igor Koruga • Music: Anja Đorđević, Vladislav Rac • Video: Deana Petrović • Costume: Selena Orb • Light design: Nikola Zavišić

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Texts used in the performance by: Silvia Federici, Angela Dimitrakaki, Valeria Graziano, Katja Praznik, Danielle Child, Helena Reckitt, and Jenny Richards • Song used in the performance by: Lira Vega – Posledice rada

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Premiere: Centre for Cultural decontamination on the 27th September 2022 • Won the Audience award at the Bitef festival

SUNDAY, 28 May, 2023

Filodrammatica

Christian Guerematchi: NAM – Non-Aligned Movement

Photo: Matija Zanoškar / Drugo more (Flickr gallery)

The dance theatre solo NAM – Non-Aligned Movement is the artist’s search for the black European identity and study of the codes of the black and queer body. Christian Guerematchi explores gender fluidity using movements and sounds from the African diaspora. The title is inspired by the 1960s movement of non-aligned countries that played a role in the independence struggles of the so-called third world countries. Josip Broz Tito, the president of Yugoslavia, was one of the founders of this movement. An important source of inspiration is the book Tito in Africa: Picturing Solidarity (2017), which describes Tito’s attempts to decolonise the world. Deriving from Tito’s Afrofuturistic utopia, Guerematchi uncovers the embodiment of cultural codes that were lost through space and time.

Guerematchi keeps changing his identity, but none of the roles seem to really suit him, his body seems to want to run away from the form in which his movements are cast. The double consciousness requires a perfect technical mastery of the dancer, who seems to get entangled in his physique yet he always gives us the feeling of being in control.

–Theaterkrant NL

Christian Guerematchi was born in Maribor, Slovenia – former Yugoslavia. He has Eastern European and Central African Roots. After graduating from the Ballet Conservatory, he worked with the National Ballet in Maribor, Ballet Kiel (Germany) and Compagnie Thor in Brussels (Belgium). In 2006, he moved to the Netherlands where he now lives, working with choreographers like Nicole Beutler, Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten. He followed a propaedeutic year at the University of Amsterdam in Theatre Studies. In 2012 he was nominated for De Zwaan Best Dance Performance for his role in ROCCO by Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten. His first original production was White Noise (2019) in collaboration with Otion, followed by his solo performance N.A.M. – Non-Aligned Movement (2020), the first part of the broader research project Epistemologies of the Body, focused on the narratives of the black body. His latest performance is Hissy Fit – An Echo Between Bodies (2022).

Choreography & performance: Christian Guerematchi

Sound design: Shishani Vranck • Text & dramaturgy: Gita Hacham • Costumes: Jonathan Ho • Light design: Mathisse Coornaert

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Producer: ICK Amsterdam • Co-producers: Tour production, DVMSCO