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Adapted, Directed by TOMI JANEŽIČ
Costume Design MARINA SREMAC
Composer and Sound Design TOMAŽ GROM
Light and Set Design TOMI JANEŽIČ
Assistant Director BORIS LIJEŠEVIĆ
Assistant Director ŠPELA TROŠT
Assistant Set Designer SAMO JUREČIČ
Dramaturgy MILAN MAĐAREV
Premiere:
October 28th 2008
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CAST |
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Maca, a bar singer, pretty with hoarse voice, the voice and beauty melting and disappearing |
JASNA ĐURIČIĆ |
Coach, former coach of a local club, alcoholic, bar tender bouncer, thug, in love with Maca |
BORIS ISAKOVIĆ |
Srećko (Lucky), changed under the wing of the church, survived but ruined |
VLASTIMIR-ĐUZA STOJILJKOVIĆ |
Lole, young beast with white teeth he breaks bread crust with, has feelings only for children he is raising with the invisible mother |
SRĐAN TIMAROV |
Girls. Caught by the road, went to see something, to experience something, to make some money |
Blonde |
ANĐELA STAMENKOVIĆ |
Blonde |
MILICA GRUJIČIĆ |
Black |
MILENA PREDIĆ |
Black |
VIOLETA MITROVIĆ |
Black |
LIDIJA ANDONOV |
Brown |
SOFIJA JURIČAN |
Brown |
ANA MARKOVIĆ |
Child |
SUZANA LUKIĆ |
Child |
JELENA PETROVIĆ |
Owner of the bar, mini-market, junk yard, late in life came his life joy cut short the night we are talking about |
NENAD ĆIRIĆ |
Manager |
LADO LESKOVAR / PREDRAG CUNE GOJKOVIĆ |
Worker |
DUŠKO AŠKOVIĆ |
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| ATELIER 212 THEATRE - BELGRADE |
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| The life of the Atelier 212 Theatre began on 12th November 1956 in the small theatre hall of the old ‘Borba’ before the audience of 212 chairs, with the premiere of Faustus directed by Mira Trailovic. It was founded by a group of actors, directors, writers and musicians at the moment when a need was felt for a theatre which would stage new avant-garde drama which had a major influence in Europe of that time. The Atelier 212 was the first theatre in Eastern Europe to play Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, 1956. This play’s great success opened the door to a number of other avant-garde dramas and authors to come: Sartre, Faulkner, Ionesco, Camus, Pinter, Adamov, Rożevicz, Joyce, Jarry, T. S. Eliot, Vitrac, Schisgal, Kopit, Genet - they all saw their first staging before the Yugoslav audiences here. The Atelier 212 Theatre discovered new Yugoslav authors and staged plays by Brana Crncevic, Aleksandar Popovic, Dusan Kovacevic... Mira Trailovic had been leading the Atelier 212 Theatre since the very beginning - at first, when Rados Novakovic and Bojan Stupica were at the helm of the theatre, she worked as the assistant manager, and then as its manager for many years to follow. Led by her, the Atelier brought down the boundaries of Yugoslavia and, in time, became a theatre known all over the world. Together with Jovan Ćirilov and other associates, Mira Trailovic initiated the establishment of one of the greatest European theatrical festivals, the BITEF festival, which was founded in 1967 in the Atelier 212 Theatre, where its now three-decades-long life began.
After Mira Trailovic, Ljubomir Draskic, who had joined the theatre as a young director almost at its beginning, became the manager of this theatre. For the twelve years of his rule, the theatre took on new young artists enlarging its company, and got a new house. In 1992 the Atelier, with its adapted building, became one of the best equipped theatres in the Balkans. Its Great Stage now has 385 seats in the auditorium and the Theatre in the Basement Stage has 141. Its fifth manager was Nebojsa Bradic, who didn’t hold his position for long (not even one whole season). The current manager, actor Svetozar Cvetkovic, has been member of the theatre’s company for many years. Nowadays the Atelier has a permanent ensemble of 32 actors and actresses, but it keeps its doors open for artists who aren’t permanently engaged here. The greatest actors and actresses still perform on the Atelier stages, and the best domestic and international directors work with this company. New dramas by contemporary Serbian and foreign authors are staged here, where the theatre leaves its own recognizable mark on them. In the recent years this theatre’s plays have been tearing down the newly established geographical boundaries conquering the world once again. At the moment, side by side with the old, already anthological plays, new plays are performed on its stages ... |
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P E R F O R M A N C E...... |
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Milena Marković has irretrievably expelled Benjamin’s angel of History from the stage, focusing on that which remains after “the great carnage of Myths”: on sheer presence, on her domineering sights, on those who will (some day) with their numbers resists marginalisation, using very, very cruel means. (...)
In “the bar by the road,” from dusk till dawn, lives take their course, through conversations, in which the almost mythical exchange of replicas (short questions and even shorter answers) are alternating with long passages, rather a monologue (but words directed toward an interlocutor), from which a “dreary joy of remembering” breaks out. In those lives there are no plans, because there is no perspective nor the rationality that comes from it, consciousness is mildly dimmed by cheap drinks and blunted by fatigue, insensibility to others is only an answer to the other’s insensibility, outbursts of cruelty are either unmotivated or totally disproportional to the occasion, decisions are sudden and without a possibility to be realised. The vulgarity of speech and shamelessness of behaviour are the only way to express proximity, promiscuity is a form of “barter,” bragging a naive comfort. The remains of the world of beauty appear only in images of retold dreams, in memories of sights from nature, themselves deformed ...
 Mirjana MIOČINOVIĆ, Close to the Glowing Forest |
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By the road, life (floats)
(...) By blending “the mythic place” of the Serbian/Balkan ethos, the bar, with the metaphor Road, the paradigm of the stage movement, but at the same time the “basic unit” of metaphysical thinking, Milena Marković, with the drama The Forest is Glowing, sets out into that sphere of dramatic adventure for which only the bravest are capable - read: the calmest - creative spirits. In a bar, abandoned by the owner, devoid of customers, lacking in musicians and voices, “nothing is happening”; i.e. as we can expect form the authorial poetics that truly starts from the consequences of Chekhovian dramatic revolution, less than nothing happens, more precisely, a big Nothing rules the events. At first sight, the bouncer/bar tender Coach and the bar singer Maca are close to Beckett’s ruins, from which only primary and primal knots of emotions have remained, floods of life defeats: they, just like the roughened idealists from Rails, through adventure suffer the waiting. The difference is established, nevertheless, in the field of allegorical: that which rarely and on the border of imagined, the subreal, even reaches, through the lost ones, them and their empty bars - Lole’s van with (bought) women, Owner in his last barren attempt to run from the assigned life-as-calculation, Lucky, the fugitive from Desire, as well as from Renouncement - all this unreliable, fragmentary dreg of the everyday represents the already experienced Life which rejected them and which is, also, on their side, denied and atomised, balanced and demystified. And still, that same life has not even remotely finished with them, the Road which is challenged/denied/despised is not terminated, although its contours are barely recognisable in the world of the ruined, dried out, hopelessly dirtied and (self)despised reality. (...) In the souls of the protagonists of The Forest is Glowing, it is empty down there - among the floods of memories, defeats and losses from which they flee into dreams - as well as up there, in the cold heights of superhuman Ideas supposed to offer comfort... LUCKY: Now I am an empty man, like a God’s angel.
Svetislav JOVANOV |
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S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T...... |
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Tomi Janezic obviously has a very strong artistic connection with the recent opus of Milena Markovic by which his directorial interest becomes sublime if not in the best, then at least in the most intriguing edition of controversial proportions. Seemingly with a light ease and to everyone's joy, but in fact in a labouring, child-delivering manner, The Forest is Glowing offers and does not haste but delivers it all: a little sound, a little image, but that “little” that can be seen can sometimes be more than enough not only to be credible but also to make one wish to be different. Interpretation, play, or in this unique case the mere Presence of actors on the spastically empty and dark stage - Jasna Djuricic, Boris Isakovic, Vlastimir-Djuza Stojiljkovic and others - and with great power enlivens people worn out by weakness, which Milena Markovic almost always poeticizes endowing them with the power of speech so they can spit out from their lungs much and far, even more importantly, the truthful and the truth-creating. All this sheer grotesque treatment of the text, the thing itself, and the actors and the public, of course, implies the opening of a field of different and heterogeneous structures and realities, and this play opens so much that it could easily be praised and chided, as one wishes, so it is like a pub-based “Solaris.” Yes, pub as destiny on some borderline, in cosmos probably, or in the black hole, intimately, “transitionally” and according to the other questions correctly. This is sung by a glowing forest adorned with simplicity, this probably touches All and only this action is ultimately tolerated.
Igor BURIĆ & Vladimir KOPICL |
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Tomi Janežič: Born in Šempetar near Gorica, on the Slovenian-Italian border. With a few students of acting, he founded in 1995 Studio for Art of Acting Research.
Directed in Slovenenian Youth Theatre Ljubljana: Sophocles, Kind Edipus, Chekhov, Seagull, Three Sisters (Bitef 2004), No Acting Please. Directed in Croatia: E. Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac (Split), Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Peter Shaeffer, Amadeus (Rijeka). He continued the research he rounded up with the controversial presentation of the project No Acting Please in SMG Ljubljana with the play Without Acting, Please! - Part Two, in Zagreb &TD.
In 2001 he completed his master’s degree at the AGRFT in Ljubljana intensely engaged with the method of physical acts and demonstration of Dibuk, based on the piece by Anski. He taught at post-graduate studies at the Academy in Novi Sad, he led the class of acting at the Osijek Academy.
The Forest is Glowing is Janežič's third directing work in Atelier 212 Theatre after W. Shakespeare, King Lear, Lj. Simović, The Traveling Troupe Šopalović (2007). In Serbian National Theatre (Novi Sad) he set the pre-premier of Simeon the Foundling by Milena Marković. The play received ten prizes at the 2007 Sterijino Pozorje Festival - Tomi Janežič, Sterija Prize for directing and Sterija Prize for set design.
For his work, Janežič was awarded many times in Slovenia and abroad. |
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Milena's texts have a surprising psychological accuracy. It is constantly revealed deeper and deeper how accurate they are. But in an unpredictable way. They are not superficially accurate. They are not accurate in some evident, obvious way. The deeper you are engaged with them, the more you realise how irrationality in those texts is consistent. Psychologically accurate... Milena says that she writes from the guts, from the stomach. She is commanded by the feeling, the unconscious, where creativity is found. Her texts are arranged and planned out and clever and have various frames and contexts, but what is fascinating and attractive and exciting for me is that those are not mathematical texts, these are not texts that come exclusively out of some rational structure, a scheme. What is powerful in them is that it seems like they come out of the earth, from the source of life or deep out of the human.
Tomi JANEŽIČ - Boris LIJEŠEVIĆ, Interview
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Milena Marković: Born in 1974 in Zemun. Earned her degree at the Faculty of Performing Arts, department of dramaturgy, with the play Pavilions, or Where am I Going, Where am I Coming from and What’s for Dinner (1998).
Stage: Pavilions: premiere in 2001 in the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, directed by Alisa Stojanović; Macedonian National Theatre, directed by Srdjan Janićijević; In the competition of the Vienna m.b.h. theatre, Milena received the special prize for this play, Jaka Ivanc at the Ljubljana Drama earned her degree in directing with this text; God Has Looked at Us - Tracks: Milena participates in the summer residence of the Royal Court Theatre in London; Premiere in the Vienna m.b.h. theatre, directed by Zijah Sokolović; Premiere in the YDT, directed by Slobodan Unkovski; Polish Theatre in Poznan, directed by Rafal Sabara - In 2004 at Sterijino Pozorje, Milena receives the Special Sterija Prize for the text; Tracks by YDT at the Festival of New Drama in Wiesbaden; The play was published in the German journal Theater Heute; Premiere in Aachen, Germany; Forest in Glowing: Premiere in Schauspielhaus in Zurich; Milena becomes the first winner of the prize for dramatic creation “Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz,” for the play The Doll Ship; Book of plays by Milena Marković published by Prva srpska čitaonica from Irig; Simeon the foundling , the text commissioned by the Serbian National Theatre on the occasion of the anniversary of Jovan St. Popović (co-production between SNT and Sterijino Pozorje), directed by Tomi Janežič - 2007: Milena receives the Sterija prize for this play; The Doll Ship: Premiere in YDT, directed by Slobodan Unkovski. 2008: Milena and Tomi Janežič are collaborating again - Forest is Glowing, Atelier 212 Theatre.
Poetry: The Dog Who Ate the Sun (publ. Flavio Rigonat); The Truth Has Compelling (publ. LOM / Flavio Rigonat), Black Spoon (LOM).
Film: Wrote screenplay and participated in the shooting of the documentary film The Mining Opera, in Bor, directed by Oleg Novković. After Milena’s screenplay the film Tomorrow Morning, directed by Oleg Novkovic, was shot, production by Zillion Film, Belgrade. |
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Life, level zero
(...) The big stage of Atelier 212 is almost during the entire play in half-dark and it is almost completely empty, only with a few details which, very discreetly, suggest the dramatic space and the general emotional atmosphere: a single, remote table of a road bar, a few full ashtrays and empty bottles, a handful of red balloons in the shape of a heart, fatally nailed to the ground and without a possibility of ever flying. Janežič himself is responsible for this excellent set design. In this large empty space, full of faces unnoticable in the dark, a group of people is moving aimlessly, faltering, sitting and lying, and the text reveals these are complete societal outcasts from a Serbian province. This realisation of dramatic situations and characters from the play by Milena Marković flows in two parallel lines: the text can be heard, naturally, from the stage, but it can be read from subtitles!
This idea that the text, without translation, is read from subtitles is not (only) an extravagant directorial solution, as it may appear to a careless spectator. On the contrary, it points to the main feature of Janežič's poetics we encounter in his every play: to level zero of stage naturalism, to the relativism of all acting conventions and techniques, to the complete naturalness of the play - the one in which the actor is allowed not to be heard by the audience (thence the need for subtitles). This approach can be justified esthetically, but the question is posed what is its meaning if it produces peculiar autism, if it makes communication with the audience more difficult, or even cancels it, and it weakens the effect of the text: all this happened in this play.
(...) If we measure the actors’ play by earthly measures, having in mind that the director’s demands are vertiginously high - as if they come from heavenly, esoteric areas - then we see a gallery of excellent creations: the life of a weary, but somehow divine-faced Lucky, played by Vlastimir “Đuza” Stojiljković, the drunk, miserable, lethargic, but proud and good Coach, played by Boris Isaković, and, above all, ruined from alcohol and life, cruel and cynical, but still desirous, ready for a new start, Maca, brilliantly played by Jasna Đuričić...
Ivan MEDENICA, Vreme, November 13 2008
Collect-let go of life, let the water (vodka) flow
(...) Rarely in theatre today one writes about a different world, like the twilight zone parallel to the one where great topics are discussed and important questions are exhausted. About the village, silence, disintegration, and not integration into some kind of currents. Even fingers of one hand are too much for that number. Milena can do it, just like Tomi, in the fast company of spectacle, can slow down the play, to let time flow, to let the blood flow, to cut down the forest, to “collect-let go,” as Milena’s Maca liked to play when she was little. Now she is a big girl, a bar singer: a promise - joy to the insane and/or the desperate, plus female constitution and she gets life. Prison is the mother to the law reigning in Milena Marković’s glowing forest. What law, in Maca’s bar there is nothing, no law, zero. There is a black hole, that mesmerizing super-gravitational void-fullness in which a drop of sweat of a bar customer is for Milena, and for many like her, Tomi, Jasna, Boris, worth more than all the drops of perfume spent to make all the guests at the premiere in Atelier 212 smell nice. (...)
Igor BURIĆ, Dnevnik, November 2008 |
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