53rd STERIJINO POZORJE FESTIVAL 2008

T h e...N A T I O N A L...D R A M A...A N D...T H E A T R E...S E L E C T I O N

Sterijino Pozorje Festival

Novi Sad

May 26th - June 5th 2008

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MONDAY - MAY 26th 2008

Grand Stage, Serbian National Theatre

20:00

Biljana Srbljanović

BARBELO, OF DOGS AND CHILDREN

Yugoslav Drama Theatre, Belgrade

www.jdp.co.yu

Director DEJAN MIJAČ

Set designer JURAJ FABRI
Costume designer ANGELINA ATLAGIĆ
Composer ANjA ĐORĐEVIĆ
Video BORIS MILjKOVIĆ
Lighting designer MILAN TVRDIŠIĆ
Sound designer ZORAN JERKOVIĆ
Choreographer ISIDORA STANIŠIĆ
Stage Speech LjILjANA MRKIĆ-POPOVIĆ
Animal trainer MIRKO SIRKOVIĆ

Premiere: December 4th 2007

Milica	ANA SOFRENOVIĆ
Mila	JASMINA AVRAMOVIĆ
Milena	JELENA ĐOKIĆ
Dragan	GORAN ŠUŠLjIK
Drago	TONI LAURENČIĆ
Zoran (sometimes Marko)	NIKOLA RAKOČEVIĆ
Marko (just Marko)	NIKOLA ĐURIČKO
Dog Lady	MIRJANA KARANOVIĆ
A Doctor, two times	MARKO BAĆOVIĆ
Two Bums, only once	NEBOJŠA GLOGOVAC, Žujka
A Dog, Another Dog, Four more Dogs, at least

P E R F O R M A N C E......

(...) A play about a woman and her dog, a man and his ambition, a child who gains weight and who, as another child from the previous work by the same author, continues the tradition – not of growth, but of growing old and fat. A play about those who failed to persevere and those who persevere still. About our and their troubles. About the desire to exist. About the possibility to vanish. A play about a Bum in golden robes and a mother. About an arrogant policeman and the aging father who she treats like a dog. About the love for dogs. About a doctor with finger nails. About sex among dogs, but not people. About a mother who takes her innocent child into her lap, and this hers, and that...
A play about the good (...)
Svetozar CVETKOVIĆ

Stage fantasy: Biljana’s stage directions
In her latest play Barbelo, Of Dogs and Children, Biljana has invented such stage directions not yet written by any living contemporary or dead classicist. Though, it is true that Poe used to write indications that are a pleasure to read. Krleža also followed in his footsteps. But, as far as I know, no one else has ever written confessional indications in a drama, as Biljana has done here. In the YDT programme she unhesitatingly says that she does not write to offer a political picture of the world: ‘I write about myself and about the consequences that the world ordered in this way leaves on me.'
Jovan ĆIRILOV (Blic, 15th December 2007)

S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T......

Barbelo, or God, the first thought, the womb of the world or love
Barbelo is a notion with a strong religious, metaphysical dimension.
Biljana Srbljanovic’s drama speaks of elementary particles which give meaning to life and engender sense. It is built and developed on that miraculous edge which separates poetical-philosophical state of wonder, expressed in the essential questions: ‘who am I, where am I going, why do I exist?’, from banal simplifications of life through a story of a young woman Milena who is in search of the women within, of the feminine power of creation and healing through a pro-creative feminine principle. Other characters in the play also tell their stories in a real and imaginary world, which intertwine, exist parallel and touch upon each other. For the director Barbelo is a Mozartean requiem for a wasted life which is exaltation by joy that is coming.’ And the most important aspect of the play for the director is linked with the love theme. Stage space of a pronounced, powerful visuality is actually materialised metaphorical feature of the title: pulsating womb in which one can come to life and become a human being, while one is never born in the dimension of love, for a human only gets born through this principle. Those who can do it can attain friendship, gain power to cross the borders of individual selfish ego and touch upon the miracle of the world, the miracle of the loneliness of another being, human or animal – dog, all the same. In this drama, like in the previous ones, Biljana Srbljanovic is moving within her fixed thematic circle and actually speaks of family relations. With this drama too, she reveals the truth that new contemporary holy family is created from those who recognise their loneliness and wish to share it, that family is not blood, but recognising the desire to share. What? Love. Elementary particle. Direction by Dejan Mijac is gentle, subtle, oneiric; it links different facets of the drama into a singular, emotional, metaphorical narrative.

Tatjana MANDIĆ-RIGONAT

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DEJAN MIJAČ
Dejan Mijač graduated from the Department of Directing of Theatre Academy in Belgrade.
He worked as a director with the National Theatre in Tuzla from 1957 to 1961, and with the Serbian National Theatre (SNT) in Novi Sad from 1962 to 1974. Pokondirena tikva (ENG) by Jovan Sterija Popović represented one of the milestones of contemporary Yugoslav Theatre. Dejan Mijač taught acting at the Drama Studio of the SNT (1964–1972) and at the Academy Of Art in Novi Sad (1978–1980). Since 1974, he has taught directing at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, and since 1976 directed a number of productions at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre. Dejan Mijač has directed both classic and contemporary plays at all significant theatres of former Yugoslavia. He has also introduced a series of innovations into contemporary interpretation of Jovan Sterija Popović and Branislav Nušić.
Dejan Mijač has received numerous professional and public awards. He lives in Belgrade as a retired university professor and is still active as a director.

D I R E C T O R ...

(...) Through an intermediary of Barbelo, God enters into this drama, although it is not religious. Biljana, somewhere near the end, insists on setting a parallel with da Vinci’s painting of the Holy Family, portraying St Anna, Mother of God, little Christ and a lamb. In our case they are Mila, Milena, little Zoran and a dog he has found somewhere in the street.
This is the first of Biljana’s plays to end up in reconciliation, even happiness...
Yes, it is. It’s a requiem for a failed life, but a Mozartean one, which means the exaltation in the approaching happiness. Forgiveness, i.e. reconciliation is the threshold hardest to step over, because once you have forgiven and reconciled, the tension is gone. Giving up is crucial, and it is the essential part of giving away. [Contemporary society] rests upon success, and to succeed means to take, grab, destroy everything around you, only to acquire more for yourself, to be better, stronger...

This play is not so much about death as it is about what remains after death, about what is more lasting than the death itself, resembling the hereafter. The most important aspect of the productions is linked to the theme of love. The production is supposed to speak of the first impulse of love, of motherly love, of a mother's love for the child and that of a child for its mother. Here too, as in Locusts, there is a child, a disabled child at that, making it even more a child seeking attention, affection, a special treatment, a child who is sensitive and wounded if the attention is lacking. It is a child abandoned by its mother, a child condemned to a father who doesn't understand it. Barbelo is about a point one can rely on, found in motherly love.

Dejan MIJAČ

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BILjANA SRBLjANOVIĆ
She graduated in dramaturgy from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, where she now works as docent at the Department of Dramaturgy.
Plays: Belgrade Trilogy, Family Stories, The Fall, Supermarket, America part II, Locusts.
Four times she received the Sterija's prize for the best play, and she also has been awarded with Slobodan Selenić prize, Erns Toller prize, Joakim Vujić prize, Winning Freedom and European Award New Theatre Reality for 2007.
She lives and works in Belgrade and Paris.

A U T H O R ...

Barbelo (Barbello) is a notion which in the history of Christianity refers to the first emanation of God, his proto-origin, the First Cause, the first principle, some metaphysical space which is the source of everything, even us. In a strictly religious sense, Barbelo means god in Hebrew, in old Greek it means ‘forethought’, while its most important translation is - the womb of the world. In medieval paintings the birth of Jesus is often depicted as happening in some kind of a womb-shaped cave, as if the entire world starts from there. For me Barbelo is a mother’s womb, a safe, warm place, outside of time and before the beginning of everything, for instance the womb of Mother of God, but every other mother as well.
Those who want to find out more can do so in Gnostic gospels, but its religious dimension is by no means essential, quite the contrary. Barbelo is where we come from and the place many would like to return to and hide in, and everyone should decide what it is.
Biljana SRBLjANOVIĆ

(...) I think that a Serbian family portrait gives a clear picture of our society… and it is reflected in the most private segments of our lives. The decay of society is only followed by the decay of family.
Parents relinquish their children, they decide to have no children, or they don’t let them grow up, and children cruelly rebel and clash with their parents – these are all consequences of the situation in our society. Political and social dimensions interest me only as far as their consequences on our personal lives go. (...)
What can dogs give us that people can’t, even the ones closest to us?
Man can be a worse beast than any animal. Rarely can any man be as loyal as a dog. I’m turning more and more to nature, and into some kind of isolation from people, I speak the language of dogs better –it seems that lately I haven’t been able to understand the language of people at all.
I think that in our countries of transition, the state of our society can best be observed when you see the lives and sadness of abandoned dogs. Here, people are the ones who live like stray dogs. Or they are tired like dogs. Or they are rabid like dogs. Here, man are born by bitches, people are sons of bitches. People are abandoned like dogs. Sick, mad, lame, wounded. They bark at the passing cars, at people passing by. A wound on a dog, heals on a dog, nobody cares about that.
Here, show dogs with hairdos mix with stray dogs, with us, ordinary curs, who find phony pedigrees only a burden. That’s what the country’s like too, glamour and the worst poverty - all together in the same street, in the same house, in the same graveyard. That’s why this metaphor and the obsession with dogs. (...)

Biljana SRBLjANOVIĆ–Marina MILIVOJEVIĆ-MAĐAREV (From the programme of the play)

R E V I E W S......

Starting with life
As always until now, the staging of a piece of Biljana Srbljanović does evoke massive and, of course, deserved attention. In the process of theatrical “bringing to life” of her latest story about a woman, her dog, husband, mother, an over weighted boy, a doctor... a respectable group of artist are involved, led by the director Dejan Mijač. If we also take the specific weight of the scene of the YDT into consideration, it is clear that the play Barbelo... however it is, that most important which the Serbian drama theatre is able to create in this moment.

Željko JOVANOVIĆ (Blic, 6th December 2007)

A mosaic of life
What is left when we shake off our arrogant vanity, what truly stays with us and after us in life? If we consider it fair and square - only love (...) Without a twinge of sentiment, but full of sympathy, cruelly all-seeing and honestly without reserves, Biljana Srbljanović collects pictures of different emotional relationships, with emphasis on the one between parents and their children, tearing down all we think goes without saying, and developing where it is unexpected. Out of superficial, gossamery everyday life, stone by stone, she composes a firm mosaic of life, which envelops everything, from birth to death. Even within the death itself, without any restrain and fear (...) The exact point where Biljana’s text stops and Mijač’s direction picks up is not easy to discern, neither is it necessary. The same unsentimental, but pleasant bareness is present on the stage too, a subtly aesthetecised loftiness; in scenery – Juraj Fabri, in costume – Angelina Atlagić. I would say that for Mijač ‘Barbelo’ from the title, translated as the forethought and the womb of the world, is the very human soul, which both living and dead go through or where they stay ‘united’ by the sfumato that cancels borders.

Aleksandra GLOVACKI (Večernje novosti, 5th December 2007)

A dog’s life
Keeping in mind the character of the piece, in which the verbal dominates the scenic, Mijač requests the actors to transform every, even the smallest, expression of the dramatis personae into an important emotional confession, which shows how the initial impulse in a man to get to know the important things about himself slowly begins to numb out, strengthening the longing to step out of life in which he is thrown, to return into the peace of the mothers womb. And they, especially the female part of the ensemble, Ana Sofrenović, Jasmina Avramović, Jelena Đokić and Mirjana Karanović, are playing the roles of Milica, Mila, Milena and the dog-woman, but also one extraordinary actor, Nebojša Glogovac, in the role of one of the Vagabonds on a churchyard’s micro cosmos, bring that about. In the same time, Dejan Mijač uses circular repetition to show life as a night mare in which people are and are not alive or dead.

Vladimir STAMENKOVIĆ (NIN, 13th December 2007)

Are we humans or beasts?
(....) The stage stripped of all that is human, almost without as much as shadows, speaks of and suggests the power and depth of a wasteland, misery, loneliness, but is simultaneously hard and demanding on the actors who can only rely on their own power of imagination and expression. In this all-enveloping metaphor, without vividness, in semi-light and at a semi-distance, unfolds a drama about the lack of love as the primary dimension of human state. That’s it, that and nothing else, as Momčilo Nastasijević would put it - the poet who Biljana’s evocation of love and mothers reminded me of. Barbelo, a drama in eighteen scenes, is written in a concise dialogue ripe with emotions, widened with a rare monologue, for Bum given by Nebojša Glogovac, for instance. Director Dejan Mijač almost does not grade these pictures at all; he rather strings them, certain that their homogeneousness broadens, strengthens and supports the space of a monotonous wasteland; of greyness where all original human values and feelings have become extinct. (...)

Muharem PERVIĆ (Politika, 6th December 2007)

.The management preserves the right to change the schedule