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Director Aleksandar POPOVSKI
Translator Zdravko DUŠA
Dramaturge Darja DOMINKUŠ
Set design NUMEN
Costume design Jelena PROKOVIĆ
Music FOLTIN
Language consultant Tatjana STANIČ
Light design Milan PODLOGAR
Premiere:
April 24th & 25th 2009 |
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CAST |
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Little Sister. Alice. Snow White. Goldilocks. Thumbelina. Princess. Woman. Witch |
Barbara CERAR |
Big Sister |
Iva BABIĆ |
Mother. Mummy Bear |
Katja LEVSTIK |
Doc. Frog |
Igor SAMOBOR |
Sleepy. Hansel |
Matevž MÜLLER |
Grumpy. Little Eagle. Eagle |
Klemen SLAKONJA |
Baby Bear. Gretel |
Tina VRBNJAK |
Daddy Bear. Hunter |
Valter DRAGAN |
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| SLOVENE NATIONAL THEATRE, LjUBLjANA (Slovenia) |
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SNT Drama Ljubljana is the the largest drama theatre in Slovenia. As the oldest theatre in the country, it was a result of the very first endeavours to establish a professional Slovene theatre (the Slovene Dramatic Society was established 140 years ago) and heir to a tradition which dates back to the foundation of the Provincial Theatre in Ljubljana in 1892. Faithful to tradition and to the mission of a national theatre, SNT Drama strives to be a contemporary and open artistic organization which knows how to communicate with current aesthetic and intellectual challenges. In the last thirteen years in particular, under the direction of general manager Janez Pipan, SNT Drama has won recognition as the strongest and sometimes also the most daring theatre in Slovenia. SNT Drama Ljubljana is a repertory drama theatre. The repertory is constantly refreshed by new productions of classical dramas (usually in new translations). The small stage also allows presentations of jewels like Tchrimekundan, the first production of a Tibetan mystery play in a European theatre. SNT Drama Ljubljana pays special attention to Slovene drama, new plays in particular, though the repertory regularly includes Slovene classical authors. |
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P E R F O R M A N C E...... |
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Bleak “Fairy Tale” about Contemporary Existential Fragility
(...) In the plays she has published so far, Milena Marković demonstrates refined dramatic writing, at the same time founding contours of poetics with an evident developing potential. The basic features of her writing are: deviation from the ideological/historical world as paradigm and a focus on intimate stories about urban youth from the bottom of the social ladder or from the social margins; original use of genre paradigms on the level of action as well as on the symbolical plane of meaning; functional use of various, completely cleansed linguistic idioms of the youngest urban generation.
Boat for Dolls offers a brilliant confrontation of the archetypal richness of fairy tales with the sensibility of a contemporary individual. Themes that subtly blend the individual and the universal are gradually revealed in the play. The action of her third play replays and slants the famous Grimm brothers’ fairy tales: Snow White, Three Bears, Thumbelina, Goldilocks, Hansel and Gretel... Those scene are fairy tale-like only seemingly, nevertheless, and in fact represent a contrast to the fairy-tale archetype about goodness, beauty and justice. (...)
The play carries seven incarnations of the heroine, seven metamorphoses of her passive, female principle. All the time it is the same Woman, she just changes the existential statuses with unbelievable lightness. The change of roles takes place suggestively and attractively, and it looks from afar as a type of expressionist “play of hints,” written by Reinhard Sorge and Walter Hasenklever in the 1910s. But only from afar (...)
The author presents us with a polyphonic dramatic space, made up of seven plots in seven different ambiences. Her forced intimate story in which hopelessness, cruelty and absurdity have a symbolical power takes shape in front of us.
A particular element of the specific dramatic expression in Boat for Dolls is an exciting effect of genre blending. In our case, the genre matrix of a fairy tale and melodrama; its characteristics do not work only as variations of the repeated (typified) plots, but they are interwoven and blended. Apart from the ironic scenes, colored with black humour, there are naturalistic parts of dialogues in the fragmentary Female story. They, through melodramatic turns, lead to the area that, according to their absurdity, can be compared to Harold Pinter’s plays. Not to mention the Brechtian songs in the final part of every scene.
Briefly, allusions to the European dramatic tradition of the 20th century in Boat for Dolls by Milena Marković are powerfully interwoven with an original, pregnant poetics. The diagnosis of the state and spirit of time offered by Boat for Dolls is a painful, horrifying, passionate, and still poeticised view of the existential emptiness of a contemporary urban person from the margins, who, completely desperate, lets the buses go by, and doesn’t believe anymore in the possibility that the world could be sent in the right direction.
 Tea ŠTOKA, The Play Programme
The Glamour of the Cruel Human Tissue
(...) In the plays by Milena Marković sounds have an important role. In Pavillions, the author does not dedicate a special attention to them, although they will be an integral part in all the following texts. In Tracks, at the very beginning Sounds are mentioned as one of the dramatis personae and, with its unseen presence, they literally participate in the play. Every scene finishes with them, the author describes them as a combination of pig slaughter, accordion, laughter, cry and lament. “Everything is so mixed, it is not possible to make out what’s happening.” The first part starts with an innocent children song, the military is led in by a popular rock song by the Zagreb band Prljavo Kazalište (Dirty Theatre), the war part is accompanied by a Serbian song sang by soliders on the front, and the end of the war is accompanied by an even shorter song by the author. In that text, songs have a function of atmospheric changes and time limits, by establishing elipses they separate the unity of time and place.
(...) if we go once again over the building of the story, the architecture of space, the increasingly evident role of songs and sounds and the characters in the dramatism of Milena Marković, we will notice numerous genres the author plays with. From realism, naturalism, the absurd to surrealism. A deviation from the so-called reality is at the same time a deviation from the narrow, concrete themes, spreading of the field to general humanity. A gradual entrance into the world of surreal and fantastic influences the choice of spaces that almost instinctively distance themselves from conventional sights. The songs and sounds combined with the structure and manner of storytelling lead us to the feeling of something powerful, at the same time horrible and beautiful, something the ancient Greeks called deinón, found in the tragic being from the time before the appearance of tragedy. Among the first three texts, Boat for Dolls in that respect is mostly cleansed, and it is not surprising that the next play in the author’s opus is Orphan Simeon, called by Milena Marković her Edipus. In that play, as in Boat for Dolls, we witness a trip through thoroughly chosen experiences, in which the protagonist is forged, questioned, revealed and discovered, she meets helpers and adversaries, and through the fantastic form of a “road trip drama” sails thorugh life periods. The symbolism of the navigation in the song of the Witch at the very end of the play surprises with its circular structure, demonstrated by a desire for reincarnation, reintegration. A tendency toward the drama of the absurd is shown in that desire, both in content and form.
Dramatism of Milena Marković is a look through a kaleidoscope in which the pieces of a cruel human tissue make up images, shapes, shadows and reflections. The dramatist’s view often flows through a dissection of a family, the smallest cell of a society, through a partner relationship i.e. through the dynamism of a relationship in smaller (marginal) communities representing a source of life. With her poetic stance, she tells us stories about the world taking place here and now, and with her sincerety she opens up the door to ourselves.
Eva KRAŠEVEC, The Play Programme |
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S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T...... |
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This interpretation of perhaps the best play by Milena Marković is defined
by a relaxed stylisation, moving towards a fiercer caricature of
characters and plot, reduction of the tragic and emotions, and highlighting
the grotesque aspects of the plot. Popovski found a number of
particularly imaginative solutions, lucidly used the set design by fluently
flirting with the possibilities of its transformation. Demystification of
fairy tales, its other side and the eternal, inerasable need for love were
shown unusually accurately and purely, and the credit goes to all the
actors, whose play is mesmerizingly convincing, homogeneous, simple,
natural.
Ana TASIĆ |
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ALEKSANDAR POPOVSKI was born in Skopje, Macedonia in 1969. He graduated from the University of “St. Kiril and Metodij” with a BA in Film and Drama. He studied under such luminaries as Stole Popov and Slobodan Unkovski, both esteemed and internationally recognized directors from Macedonia. His directorial debut was in the theatre for the first time in 1992, where he directed a drama written by Dean Dukovski (Macedonian author). He has also directed texts by Lorka, Harms, Dean Dukovski (again), Koltes, Stefanovski, Kosi, Vencelj and Popovski according to the Servantes`incentives, later on. Than he directed texts from the following authors: Dukovski(again), Bram Stocker, Biljana Srbljanovic, McDonough, Molier, Ana Aleksik, Elena Pega, Slavko Groom. To date, Aleksandar’s plays have been shown on the scenes of theatres in Macedonia, Denmark, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Austria, United Kingdom, Italy, Sweden, Greece...
Productions: Marius Ivaškevičius Close City (Teatro Stabile Sloveno, Trieste) Shakespeare Midsummer Night’s Dream (City Theatre “Gavella,” Zagreb); Metamorphoses, adaptation and dramatization of the work by Ovid (KUG, Graz); Slavko Grum Events in Goga (SNG Celje); Elen Peg New Friends (National Theatre of Northern Greece, Thessaloniki), Ana Lasić Antrides (SNG Ljubljana); Moliere Don Juan (Drama Theatre Skopje and Ohrid Summer Festival); Biljana Srbljanović Alice in Wonderland (Atelier 212); A.P. Checkhov Three Sisters (National Theatre Bitola); Shakespeare The Tempest (Turkish Language Stage of Minorities’ Theatre in Skopje); Martin MacDonagh Pillowman (SNG Celje); A.P. Chekhov The Cherry Orchard (National Theatre Belgrade); Georg Buchner Danton’s Death (Teatro stabile di innovazione del FVG – Udine); Dracula, based on the novel by Bram Stoker, adaptation and dramatization by Aleksandar Popovski and Dejan Dukovski (SNG Maribor); Don Quixote, based on the novel by Cervantes, adaptation and dramatization T. Kosi / J.Vencelj / A. Popovski (SNG Maribor); Dejan Dukovski Balkan Is Not Dead (Drama Theatre, Skopje); Dejan Dukovski The Powder Keg (Satirist Theatre “Kerempuh); A.M. Coltes Roberto Zuccho (Atelier 212 Theatre); Goran Stefanovski Wild Flesh (Drama Theatre, Skopje)...
He received Sterija Prize at Pozorje 2009 for directing
the play Candide or Optimism (Yugoslav Drama Theatre Belgrade). |
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MILENA MARKOVIĆ -
screenwriter, dramatist, poet
Born in 1974 in Zemun. Graduated with a B.A. at the Belgrade Faculty of Performance Arts, department of dramaturgy, with the play Pavillions, or Where am I Going, Where Do I Come From and What’s for Dinner? (1998).
Pavillions – 2001: Special Prize for Drama in the Viennese theatre m.b.h; premiere in Yugoslav Drama Theatre, directed by Alisa Stojanović, staged in the Macedonian National Theatre Skoplje, d. Srđan Janićijević; 2002: Jaka Ivanc in Slovenian National Theatre in Ljubljana graduated theatre direction with this text; premiere in the Viennese theatre m.b.h., d. Zijah Sokolović.
Published a collection of poems, The Dog who Ate the Sun (Flavio Rigonat, 2001; three editions). God Has Looked at Us – Tracks (play) – 2002: participation in the summer residence of the Royal Court Theatre in London; premiere in YDT, d. Slobodan Unkovski (participation at the New Drama Festival in Wiesbaden 2004); 2003: set at the Polish Theatre Poznan, d. Rafal Sabara (at Sterijino Pozorje 2004, Special Sterija Prize for the text); 2005: set in Aachen (Germany); 2007: set in the theatre TUTA in Chicago (USA); the text of the play published in the German journal Theater Heute.
She participated in Stockholm (2002) with the collection of poems in the public reading at the Royal Drama Theatre. A swedish publication of that collection of poems is expected.
The second collection of poems, Truth Has Driving, is published (LOM, Belgrade 2003).
Participants in the exchange of Nordic and Balkan countries, project SWITCH – poetry reading in Stockholm and Goeteborg (2004).
In 2004/05, writes the screenplay and participates in the shooting of the documentary The Mining Opera in the city of Bor, directed by Oleg Novković.
2005: A book with three plays published in French: Tracks; White, White World and The Doll Ship (publ. Dominique Dolmieu).
Orphan Simeon – 2006: first performance in SNT, directed by Tomi Janežič, SNT and Sterijino Pozorje; at Pozorje 2007, the author received Sterija Prize for the best text, the play received almost all the awards.
The Doll Ship – 2005: award for performance art Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz for the text; 2006: premiere in YDT, d. Slobodan Unkovski; 2009: premiere in SNT, directed by Ana Tomović – at Pozorje 2009, the author received Sterija Prize for the best text. The play staged in many place as part of the festival Quartet (Bratislava, Anseni etc.).
The film Tomorrow Morning was filmed (director Oleg Novković, Zillion Film, Belgrade) according to her screenplay – awards for the screenplay in Alexandria, Minsk and Vrnjačka Banja.
A collection of poems The Black Spoon is published (LOM, Belgrade 2007).
In 2007, she received the prize Miloš Crnjanski for the first book Three Plays.
The Forest is Glowing – 2005: part of the new play The Forrest is Glowing performed in Schauspielhaus Zurich; 2008: premiere in the Theatre Atelier 212 Belgrade, d. Tomi Janežič – participated in Pozorje 2009, the author received Sterija Prize for the best text, the play received Sterija Prize for the best performance.
A book of play The Forest is Glowing is published (National Library Zrenjanin, 2009).
Recipient of the prize Todor Manojlović (2009).
The fourth collection of poems, Cat’s Eye on the Fence (LOM, Belgrade 2009) is published. Recipient of the poetry award Biljana Jovanović for this collection (2010).
The performance of her play Wire is expected (YDT, season 2010/22), staging of The Doll Ship in Wiesbaden and the play The Forest in Glowing in Vienna. Staging of The Doll Ship is expected in Nantes. |
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AN ARTIST ALWAYS SEES HIS/HER LIFE AS A MYTH |
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Why do you write plays?
(...) I studied dramaturgy and I am a professor today. I teach others who want to write, who are eaten by the same worm, as the Woman in Boat for Dolls says. I conceive drama in the manner of ancient Greeks, as an arena of human passions, where people watch, cheer, cry, laugh, fall into a trance and then bear their difficult life easier. In Greece drama was like a rock concert. (...)
Your dramatic characters are often people from the margin of the society, for which forceful communication is part of everyday life. Is thematisation of violence one of the factors stimulating your motivation for the question?
In the first two texts I mainly used slang, which is, I think, the main weapon of the exploited class, it is poetic and developed. When it entered literature, it was a cry and a curse and a swear word, and that’s how I use it. Social margin is for me a source of life. I am not the only one among writers fascinated by this. Better and older writers than I am have dealt with the social margin. It is for us perhaps an area of freedom, as Bataille would say, the free are both scum and kings. I wouldn’t like the people to look at me as someone who thematises violence. I thematise different things and at the same time they are choreographed so that violence is felt. People are also born in violence, in mucus and blood. (...)
In at least two texts (Orphan Simeon and Boat for Dolls) you use the mythic or the fairy tale paradigm in an original manner. In Orphan Simeon a Serbian Epic Poem, and in Boat for Dolls fairy tale paradigms.
I think that great plays, which I like very much, are exciting because of archetypes. Archetype is what excites everyone, because it is universal and it gives a picture of death and life renewal. The poem Orphan Simeon speaks about the search, which is an archetype, Boat for Dolls on the other hand, about unfinished search, which is renewed, which is also an archetype.
While I was reading Boat for Dolls, I had a feeling it was a very intimate text...
I have dealt with fairy tales for a long time, and with them I understood high poetry and ritualistic initiation into life. Fairy tales are like that, but commercialisation has made them worthless. Besides, the artist always sees his/her own life as mythic, because it always looks at it from the side, that’s why I put the life of an artist into a fairy tale. (...)
Eva KRAŠEVEC, The Play Programme |
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Life is a Sea
(...) All the scenes in the play are powerful, complete and, in accordance with the text of the young Serbian poet and dramatist Milena Marković (Boat for Dolls is her fourth play), they follow the line of developmental logic, which makes a good and even internal dramaturgy of the whole. The director Aleksandar Popovski occasionally follows that too much in a confessional way (for example, in the use of the red light between the poetic numbers), really extraordinarily, so he ties the events to the stage changes (set design is signed by Numen). Both the concept and realisation of the set is really extraordinary, and it is certainly one of the best parts of the play. It is made out of shabby massive tables of different sizes, and that’s about it. The direction takes care they are all used, and that the space, which changes all the time, represents a suitable biotope for all the events. The set component cleansed in such a way certainly offers a plethora of possibilities for the development of dramatic situations in the play, which is excellent both for the gradation of tension and for the play.
Milena Marković sets the drama in sharply separated scenes with different characters (they are mostly names from well known children’s fairy tales), played by the same actors. That connected series of characters from fairy tales, whose characteristics are rather unambiguosly determined, is explicitely explained in the text, and the title of the drama comes out of it. Behind a metaphorical backdrop, the ascerbic story of a woman is revealed (in an entire arch, from the Younger Sister to the Witch, it is brilliantly delivered by Barbara Cerar, the only actor present in every scene), who could be universal, at least in certain parts, which gives an additional value to the Boat for Dolls, and thus the text, through the protagonist, but through other characters as well, reflects very precisely the atmosphere of everyday life. The present performance is interesting and worth seing because of the manner in which it deals with that atmosphere; it is a mix between performance and interpretation, which allows subtly open states, so they are not additionally burdened with violent (unique) interpretations. In this kind of set, actors mostly manage well, the acting is convincing, the transformation of characters well emphasised. The combination of topical set realisation and a valuable dramatic material is surprisingly convincing, so the whole seems particular and interesting, and the periods and atmosphere in it are worthy of a more detailed analysis.
Anja GOLOB, Večer, Maribor, May 22nd 2009
On the Occasion of a Premiere
Dramatic works of the contemporary Serbian poet, award-winning dramatist and screenwriter, Milena Marković, were first discovered in Slovenia by theatre academy students. Out of her seven plays, they have already set two, the first one, Pavillions, and Tracks. The premiere of the play Boat for Dolls (written six years ago), translated by Zdravko Duša and dramaturgy by Darja Dominkuš, is thus not the first encounter with the author, but it is the first performance of a Marković play on Slovenian professional stages. As far as the team of collaborators is concerned, it is truly a Yugoslav production. Th set designer is Sven Jonke from Croatia, director Aleksandar Popovski from Skopje (Macedonia), the music was arranged by the Macedonian band Foltin, the costumes by Jelena Proković. Some impressions from the premiere were summarised by Dušan Rogelj.
Dušan Rogelj: Boat for Dolls is a very ambitious text about an entire arch of existence, searching for meaning and self-realisation, about the road and its end, finished in only one stroke. This can be undertaken and brought to the end only by real poets. On the one hand, this is a text about self-interogation, growing up and maturing through trials that enable a person, an artist, to go forward with the help of the intimacy of expression. For a woman, the hope that the road is leading to a goal, to maturity, reconciliation with one self and the world, toward wisdom. And you always remain the same, emprisoned in one of the elementary feelings, paradigms. Those that have been simplified and coded in fairy tales for a long time, and in Boat for Dolls the fairy-tale frame has eight crucial scenes from a life of a woman, placed into fairy tales according to the size of her roads and the searches of Alice, Snow White, Goldilocks, Thumbelina. The director skillfully and effectively connected them and separated them by songs. The demanding leading role of the woman, the heroine of all the stories and herself was personified penetratingly and virtuously by Barbara Cerar. She is a girl who does likes neither her body nor the world, the loner-squatter, the mother of a troublesome son and a rejected woman, a painter, father and son’s lover, an old woman, magician of the art of life who plays with her pupils. The basic and unique element of the set is tables, they shape the space, the verticals, highlight the relationship between characters. The cleansed stage speech and partially stylised costumes underline the textures of meaning. The result of the effort of the director, collaborators and the suitable acting cast is a contemporary, imaginative, sensible and multi-meaningful play with subtle characterisations. Certainly one of the summits of the season.
Radio Slovenia 1, April 25th 2009, Events Echoes |
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