The Serbian audience knows director Tomij Janežič for his artistically and productionally ambitious theater projects, and this is perhaps one of the most ambitious. A performance 1981. The Novi Sad Theater is part of a large international project directed by director Tomi Janežič, and the producer is connected to Nova Gorica, which will be the European Capital of Culture next year. The idea is to create 12 performances in 12 European cities, each of which will have as its theme the memory of one year of the twentieth century, starting from 1972 and ending in 1984. All these performances will be played in one of the spaces in this city during the 12 months of the year when Nova Gorica is the European capital of culture. In this way, Nova Gorica will gather around itself various European theaters and various memories of the 20th century. And what does the part of the project that we had the opportunity to see in Novi Sad consist of?
photo: ujvideki szinhaz...
The work on the play/project started with a team of actors gathering around the director, they told their family stories and in this way got to know each other and collected material for the play. The motive base is the year 1981: What happened to each of them that year? What happened in their families then? How did these events become the culmination (or denouement) of some kind of event that started much earlier? How did the processes that began then unfold and/or culminate in later times? The emphasis was on personal experience and personal processes, and political events and processes (the conflict between the police and demonstrators in SAP Kosovo and Metohija in 1981, the economic crisis, the political disintegration of the SFRY, the wars for the Yugoslav heritage, the NATO bombing of Novi Sad and the demolition of the bridges over the Danube ) are present to the extent and in the manner in which they determined the fates of the participants in the project and their family members. At the same time, we must point out that the year 1981, seen from the wider social context, was very well chosen because then some important processes escalated in our society which are still not finished and whose consequences we still live with every day. However, we will not develop this topic further because Tomi Janežič and his collaborators focused on what is the essence of theater, which is the unity of a community that shares time and space and is connected by common stories.
So, Tomi Janežič and his actors started the project by telling their family stories and then acting them out on stage through improvisations. As the work progressed, the actors got to know each other's family stories better and better. The better they got to know each other, the more their stories intersected, mixed and became the stories of a new, theatrical family. They were no longer the aunts-grandmothers-aunts of actor so-and-so, but those relatives became relatives of all of them. As the family stories grew into each other, so did the material for the play. The structure of that play was organically linked to the process of its creation. The overall impression of the play has something of the structure of a novel One hundred years of solitude - the individual stories intersect in such a way that the reader in the novel, and the viewer in the play, can hardly "grasp" all its branches, but feels the whole very well. No matter how "crazy" some stories seem, the audience has no problem accepting them as believable because they have retained the flavor of life in the artistic processing. Thus, personal materials became a believable artistic fiction. The actors and the director assured us that these stories are life itself, and we in the audience had no problem going from scene to scene, from genre to genre, laughing and crying and connecting their family stories with our experience and our memory of 1981. . a year.
photo: ujvideki szinhaz...
The stage and costumes contribute a lot to the believability of the play. Namely, the performance does not take place in the auditorium of the Novi Sad Theater, but in a space consisting of two rooms that are connected by an opening the size of a double door, so that the whole space is associated with an apartment. At one end of the "apartment" the audience sits on improvised bleachers, and at the other end is a real window that looks out onto the street. The stands are arranged in such a way that they are not very comfortable, but they allow everyone in the audience excellent visibility and the feeling that everyone is sitting together. The floor on the stage is covered with real parquet, which looks (and maybe is!) taken from a hall from 1981. On the ceiling is a wooden structure with reflectors behind it, which strongly resembles the ceilings of various public spaces from the era of socialist modernism. Certain details in the scenography, e.g. chairs, they look like chairs really looked like in that era. The mentioned window "plays" in the play - the actors often open and close it at the same time letting fresh air and real life enter the theater. The costumes and shoes of the actors and actresses look exactly as we remember our parents and relatives dressed in those years. The whole set up created together by scenographer Branko Hojnik and costume designer Marina Sremac very convincingly recreates the spirit of the socialist citizenry, whose true features we have forgotten or drowned in sugary memories of the so-called better times.
But the theater community is not only the actors and the director, but the actors, the director and the audience. It takes time and energy for all of us who have gathered from different sides to "breathe" together and become one community. The lights in the hall are always on - the audience and performers can be seen. Actors often sit among the audience and directly address them as each of us would address a stranger whom we want to introduce into our world. The management of the theater and the director have a feeling and understanding for the needs of their community, ie. audience. They know that it is not easy to sit for five hours patiently and concentrated and participate by watching and reacting. That is why the play has well-balanced breaks after 90 minutes, i.e. after two school hours, which is the time after which concentration begins to decline (at least in school desks). They also keep in mind that a human being during five hours of living in one place has different physiological needs, which if not satisfied, disturb the concentration. That's why the audience is greeted with free coffee, water and some candy at the break. The audience naturally gathers around those tables during the break and talks about what they saw and what they associate with what they saw. Then they go to watch the play again, then go out again for a break and share experiences by continuing the conversations started earlier or opening new ones. As a result, we in the audience also begin to feel like part of a community that shares a unique theatrical experience together with the actors.
We have that feeling thanks to the acting of the actors. They really look like some kind of our cousins from 1981. At the same time, thanks to the wigs that they consciously wear carelessly and occasionally exchange, they "message" us: we present to you our common relatives who are part of our overall experience, who made us who we are today and are therefore an authentic part of us. This is the reason why, watching this play, we can accept that Teresa Figura simultaneously plays her grandmothers and great-grandmothers Teresa, herself as a girl Teresa, and the actress Teresa who tells us about all these Teresas. "The Case of Teresa" makes us think about how we got our names and how the fates and genes of our ancestors determine our modern life. The members of this wonderful, dedicated, harmonious and believable theater family, in addition to Teresa Figure, are: Aron Balaž, Gabriela Crnković, Deneš Debrei, Jasna Đuričić, Emina Elor, Agota Ferenc, Daniel Gomboš, Daniel Husta, Boris Isaković, Silvia Križan, Arpad Mesaroš, Gabor Pongo and Bence Salai. There are no main or secondary roles, but if we had to single out some of our new "relatives", then they would be Aron Balaž, Jasna Đuričić, Boris Isaković and Denes Debrei. Aaron Balazs plays that grandfather that almost every family has. Grandpa is at times lucid, at times senile, at times old and wise, and at times childishly playful. Everyone wrote that grandfather off a long time ago, but he "saw off" many who were thought to surely outlive him. He is the one who constantly annoys and annoys everyone around him, but whom we remember with sadness when he suddenly leaves us, and that at the very moment when you thought he would live forever. Jasna Đuričić is one of the few Serbian actresses who never stops growing as an actress. What we will remember this role of hers for is that she believably played aging for us. From scene to scene, looking at her, we realize how old women who for years do not change their hairstyle, their way of dressing or their character - only their lips slowly curve, their gait becomes more and more uncertain and their whole body withers under the burden of years. Boris Isaković plays the caring father of the family who "handles" the numerous demands of his household with constant grumbling. In the depths of his soul, he is an oversensitive bastard, terrified by any sign of his own physical weakness. If any other actor had played the "ingrown toenail surgery" burlesque scene, we in the audience might have had a blam transfer. But Boris Isaković found such a comic measure that we all simultaneously screamed with laughter and sympathized with his excessive suffering. Denesh Debrey plays Jasna's "friend" in the nursing home who is completely dispossessed and vegetating in a wheelchair. This actor, a master of stage movement, apparently "does nothing" - he just sits there on the stage and stares with an inward-looking gaze. However, his "nothingness" is exactly what is needed to play the last scene together with Jasna in the life of the character Jasna, who devoted her whole life to caring for her loved ones.
A performance 1981. it testifies to what is the greatest strength of good theater always and forever - the magical and unique meeting, now and here, of actors and audience. Through the theater, they become one, unique, unrepeatable and tightly bound human community that lives its life intensively in those few hours that the play lasts.
