54th STERIJINO POZORJE FESTIVAL 2009

Directed by MARKO MANOJLOVIĆ

Set Design JELENA NAUMOVSKI

Costume Design SVETLANA CVIJANOVIĆ

Music and Song Composer
VLADA PEJKOVIĆ

Stage Movement DAMJAN KECOJEVIĆ

Dramaturgy TIJANA MARKOVINOVIĆ

Premiere: February 14th 2009

CAST
Mihajlo	NIKOLA IVAČKOV
Kristina	JELENA GALOVIĆ
Danica	BILjANA KESKENOVIĆ
Stanko	RADOJE ČUPIĆ
Branislava	IVANA V. JOVANOVIĆ
Dane	SAŠA TORLAKOVIĆ

T H E A T R E......

NATIONAL THEATRE - SOMBOR

The first play in the building of the Theatre in Sombor was performed on November 25, 1882. The building was constructed under the initiative of The Society of the Share Holders of the Sombor Theatre, founded in 1879 made up of the citizens of Sombor. Since then, the Theatre in Sombor has been working continuously. A permanent professional theatre has been performing since 1946, and in 1952 it became National Theatre.
The best directors of their generations have directed in Sombor. On our stage, the most significant national and international theatre classics were performed, but we have also followed the new avant-guard dramatic literature.
In the last decade, our Theatre was one of the most mobile ones in the country. The plays of the National Theatre were performed in Hungary, Austria, Macedonia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Slovenia, Russia, Ukraine and Montenegro. Since 1993 we have been closing the season with the festival Theatre Marathon. During three days and night, one after the other, the plays of our Theatre performed during the last season and plays of other theatres, groups, and the faculty of drama students are performed.
National Theatre Sombor has the Big Stage and Studio 99. The audience of the Big Stage has 320 seats, and Studio 99 holds 99 spectators. The theatre has 53 workers, and the ensemble is comprised of fourteen actors.

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

The FLUTTERING OF MY LUNGS

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The new play by Uglješa Šajtinac, The Fluttering of My Lungs deals with the theme of family wrested in dark everyday life of a Serbian provincial town. The father is a loser without a real job and full fatherly duty, the mother is a female robot with an iron in one and a spatula in the other hand, and the son is turned to Nazi violence and the mercantile aspect of drugs. Under the attack of transition, the home ceases to be a home.

Runners with Leaded Legs - Director Marko Manojlović, dramarurge Tijana Markovinović and the extremely sincere, creative effort of the actors very skillfully focus this play on the theme and the plot. They confront us so bitterly, painfully, but also inevitably, with the real time we live in, as a reflection of the post-traumatised parents from the last decade of the 20th century. Their feeling of being lost in their own weekly constructed brave new world, their humane conscious or unconscious life story without the guilt of the guilty ones, is inevitably reflected on traumas of their children who are growing up, like weed, in the first decade of the 21st century.
N. MAŠIREVIĆ

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

In a dialogue with time and an already built-up aura of a young writer engaged in the troubles and dilemmas of his own generation, Ugljesa Sajtinac put together a piece made of characters who prototypically resemble real apparitions and made of the firm and painful sector of the Serbian everyday life we increasingly, conspicuously, directly experience in our neighborhood and indirectly through the media. In the decrepit family scheme that everyday life fills with a “dark substance,” the father is a looser stigmatized by a fatal moment without a real job and full of fatherly mission, the mother is a feminine house robot with an iron in one hand and a ladle in the other, and their son is a deeply hurt “character” turned to Nazi-violence and the mercantile aspect of narcotic vice. The world around us is not home to them anymore, therefore, and their home does not look like anything meaningful, while it all resembles a mainly precise stage effect with a Sombor licence (Radoje Cupic, Biljana Keskenovic, Ivana V. Jovanovic, Sasa Torlakovic), mostly reflectively active in the contribution of the younger actors (Nikola Ivackov, Jelena Galovic) until the moment of a genre transgression in which hitherto deconstructed sets out towards an (im)possible, theatrically effective vertical line. Imperfect as that to which it is dedicated, but with energy and zest of the step into the real as something important, into that which concerns us, even if it is not always wholesome nor pretty.

Igor BURIĆ & Vladimir KOPICL

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Marko Manojlović: Born in 1982 in Belgrade, where he is in his last year of studies at the Faculty of Performance Arts, in the class of Professor Slavenko Saletović.
In 2001 he made a debut as the assistant director to Darijan Mihajlović in the play Danton's Death, and after that he assisted many established theatre directors, among which Rahim Burhan (play White, white world), Jagoš Marković (Mrs. Minister), Jovan Ćirilov (The Uncalled), Gorčin Stojanović (Captain John Peoplefox), Loran Vanson (Holes) ...
He directed the play Death, based on the text by Woody Allen, in 2005 on the stage Studio of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre. The play Trap followed at the National Theatre in Sombor, Three Little Pigs at the Theatre “Boško Buha, Pokondirena Tikva, National Theatre Kikinda and Belgrade Drama Theatre, Without Mask Atelier 212, In Eden in the East, Belef 2007, The Night of Murderers, Yugoslav Drama Theatre, Eling, Belgrade Drama Theatre, Liers, City Theatre Podgorica.

D I R E C T O R ...

In this piece by Uglješa Šajtinac we meet some more or less familiar actors such as the father returnee from the war, mother alcoholic whose brother was killed in the same war and the son skinhead who moved to that side because of parental neglect. The text talks about the return of communication within the family and if it is possible at all, and whether a reunion of the family is possible. This is not realism in the full sense of the word. Uglješa Šajtinac wrote a short piece, with eight or nine scenes, and within each one we tried to extricate the emotion characteristic for the phase, or a certain psychological moment of the hero, and for that purpose we used something that is not realistic means ...

Marko MANOJLOVIĆ

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Uglješa Šajtinac: Born in Zrenjanin in 1971. He graduated from the Faculty of Performing Arts in Belgrade, at the department of Dramaturgy, in 1999, when he became the recipient of the award “Josip Kulundžić” for the best student of dramaturgy, as well as the award “Slobodan Selenić” for the best graduation text - The Right to the Russian. Since 2005 he has been teaching dramarurgy at the Novi Sad Art Academy. From 2003 to 2005 he was the dramaturge at the Serbian National Theatre (SNT) in Novi Sad. In the same period he edited two collections of new dramatic texts of young authors “Project 3,” whose plays were performed at the festival of the same title in May 2005 in SNT. For Huddersfield he received the prize “Jovan Sterija Popović” for the best contemporary dramatic text at Sterijino Pozorje 2005. Member of the Bitef jury in 2005. Laureate of the award “Biljana Jovanović” for the prose work Walk ON!. Member of the Literary Association of Vojvodina.
Author of plays: The Right to the Russian, Huddersfield, Do You Speak Australian?, Keeper of the Props, Banat, Vetruška’s Clearing, The Fluttering of My Lungs. Plays based on his texts were performed on stages across the country and abroad (Republic Srpska, UK, USA).
Radio Dramas: The Deacon of Notre Dame (1999), dramatisation of the novel by Isidora Sekulić; In the Well, 1998.
Co-author of the screenplay for the film Huddersfield, based on his own text.
He has been publishing prose works in numerous national literary journals, and consistently in Severni Bunker. Other works: Walk ON! (Narodna Knjiga - Alfa, Belgrade, 2007), novel; Vetruška’s Clearing (Dirty Books / SKC Novi Sad, 2006); Pre-fatal Youth: Anthology of New Serbian Drama / 1995-2005 (Novi Sad, Sterijino Pozorje, 2006), drama Huddersfield, Nada Lives on the Edge of Town (SKC, Belgrade, 2002), novel; Stories for the End of the Century (Kikindske Novine, 2000), story: “In the Lift,” “Dogged Age” - Six Storytellers (Beopolis, 2000), the title story; Rut (“Jefimija” Kragujevac, 1997), short-story collection, Miracles of Nature (KOS, 1993), novel.

A U T H O R ...

Here is the moment when the author has to say something about his work. Cynics would say that it would be better if writers did not write and the world would be spared from double trouble - no work, no commentary! But I am a much greater swein than any cynic who does not write, so I will say that The Fluttering of My Lungs is another play I wrote, with which I am satisfied, as well as with the collaboration with the people from Sombor in whose theatre its first performance was set. I would like to thank Biljana Keskenović, from whose personal wish for mutual collaboration everything originated - it is not a secret that madam Keskenović and I are respected representatives of the secret society Artists With Their Front Teeth Set Apart, a very powerful clan withing the international association of performance artists.
What is this play about? Why did I write it? Am I aware? Where is all this leading to?
There is no answer.
So, here I am, the author of the piece that was turned into a play of the Sombor National Theatre, the one who has nothing left but to wish the actors and all the ones responsible for a successful performance good luck at Sterijino pozorje.
Thank you for coming and watching the adventures of my tormented heroes. Thank you for being free to testify about it for whosever sake. To everyone who comes to see this little piece, and to whom it is not important who wrote it nor who is playing in it, I offer a sincere Thank You.

Uglješa ŠAJTINAC

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

In the colors of swastika
With the play of unusual title, The Fluttering of My Lungs, Šajtinac confirmed his status as a powerful, modern, contemporary, and not a prematurely old-fashioned author in charge of passé themes, as certain individuals tried to discriminate him in the beginning. With the performance of The Fluttering, after Gossip by Nebojša Romčević, the Sombor Theatre stands out this year as the only theatre that based its repertoir exclusively on the texts of Serbian authors. Nice and, thanks to the quality results, justified!
The Fluttering of My Lungs is a play dealing with family, therefore a narrowly personal plane, but thematically still incepting many collective landscapes. In the centre of attention there is the young baldy Mihajlo, a skinhead, whose parents are alive-dead, and he is “somehow” the same. In the background, or at least in its implicit hints, there is the state of the nation, society, state, and the world, deeply stuck in “injustices” for which “others” are continuously blamed. Latently, the theme of the internet “communication virtualisation” is present as well, which significantly determines the social habitat of the members of the younger and middle generations. Šajtinac occupies an uncompromising, critical position towards all this, but with an enviable dose of emotional intimacy, i.e. distance with which one yearns for a more beautiful, better and happier reality.
The melodramatic and the tragic is found in an equal, good and interesting ration here. Although ultramodern, the author’s language, which does not shy away from sharpness, still belongs to the old school, almost “straight” (punk-rock) dramaturgy, with a lot of blues. An extreme measure of authenticity belongs to the legacy of naturalism, inherited in great measure by the director Marko Manojlović, insisting on the atomisation and accuracy of the psychological/emotional and physical expression. Therefore, the play is dramaturgically painted in the colors of swastika - black/white and red. Alarming! From the concentration of the material and the additional atomisation of the already atomised dramatic frames of Šajtinac’s manuscript, a full dose of suspense is in order - that wonderful uneasiness produced in the spectator/participant of a theatre act. The functionality of silences, transparencies and voids (set design by Jelena Naumovski), contribute in great measure to that feeling.
A lot of credit for a successful and quality realisation of the National Theatre Sombor goes to the actors Biljana Keskenović, Radoje Čupić, the interpreters of Danica and Stanko, Mihajlo’s faltering parents, but also to Ivana V. Jovanović (an impressive supporting role as Branislava, a lonely, but, in contrast to the great majority of characters, hardly resigned biology professor searching for a Man), as well as to Saša Torlaković (Danica’s lover, businessman Dane), who skillfully knew how to develop the scenes, sometimes rather tense, toward illustration and explanation/motivation. The result is a more balanced dramatic flow of the piece. So, realistically, female characters, wounded by machismo (some are killed in war, some “die” in prison or career, and the youngest follow the path of hopelessness), enter more effectively the central axis of the tragic thread of the piece. Jelena Galović (Kristina, Mihajlo’s “girlfriend,” but not sympathiser) and Nikola Ivačkov (Mihajlo, the kid in the open and at a dead end) succeed in the role of the lost youth very solidly. Although the basic motif of the play (opinion, speech and hate actions, in the moments of crisis) is delivered in clichés and little programmatic tenseness in the written, and then performed part, although the theatre play is delivered in certain segments impotently and rustically, the play The Fluttering of My Lungs represents a significant effort to draw the marked problems closer and to shed light on them from the other side - from the side of love, understanding, and possible solution. Bravo for the choice!
Igor BURIĆ, Dnevnik, February 24 2009