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Book & lyrics: James Rado & Gerome Ragni
Music: Galt MacDermot
Director & Song lyric's translation
Kokan MLADENOVIĆ
Choreography Mojca HORVAT
Dramaturgy
Gordana GONCIĆ, Jelena MIJOVIĆ
Set design Marija KALABIĆ
Costume design Maja MIRKOVIĆ
Music Arrangements Marko GRUBIĆ
Vocal scoring Milan NEDELJKOVIĆ
Assistant director Iva RISTIĆ
Lector Radovan KNEŽEVIĆ
Assistant Costume designer
Teona GRAHOVAC-LAZIĆ
Piano Accompaniment Miša CVIJOVIĆ
Sound design Dragan STEVANOVIĆ
Lighting design Radomir STAMENKOVIĆ
Organizer Ana MILIĆ
Premiere:
February 3rd 2010 |
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CAST |
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Berger |
Sergej TRIFUNOVIĆ |
Claude |
Branislav TRIFUNOVIĆ |
Woff |
Gordan KIČIĆ |
Hud |
Ivan JEVTOVIĆ |
Sheila |
Jelena GAVRILOVIĆ |
Jeanie |
Katarina ŽUTIĆ |
Joana Franklin, Sheila's mother |
Dara DŽOKIĆ |
John Franklin Jr., Shila's father |
Feđa STOJANOVIĆ |
Vivienne Bukowski, Claude's mother |
Tatjana BOŠKOVIĆ |
Claude Hooper Bukowski, Claude's father |
Nenad ĆIRIĆ |
Margaret Mead |
Gorica POPOVIĆ |
Hubert |
Mladen ANDREJEVIĆ |
Tribe |
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Linda Iskra BRAJOVIĆ / Jasmin Aleksandra ĐOKOVIĆ / Elizabeth Vederford Jelena ILIĆ /
Nicki Aleksandra IVANOVIĆ / Sara Ana JOVANOVIĆ / Crissy Sofija JURIČAN / Clara Nela KALUĐEROVIĆ /
Viktor Ištvan KEREŠI / Spidy Joana KNEŽEVIĆ / David Vladislav MIHAILOVIĆ / Danny Sanja MILOŠEVIĆ /
Tony Stefan MLADENOVIĆ / Diane Dušica NOVAKOVIĆ / Natalie Tanja PETROVIĆ / Carlos Nemanja PRAŽIĆ /
Rif Rifat RIFATOVIĆ / Suzannah Ana STOJANOVIĆ / Eddy Boba STOJIMIROVIĆ / Ruby Lućija TRAVIČIĆ /
Stevie Siniša UBOVIĆ / Hiram Ilija VEKIĆ / Blondie Danijela VRANJEŠ |
The band VROOM:
Branislav POTIĆ (drums), Aljoša VARGA (bass), Nenad KNEŽEVIĆ (guitar, trumpet), Marko GRUBIĆ (sampler),
Nenad PAUNOVIĆ (keyboards) |
Secretaries, security, special forces:
Aleksandar JOVANOVIĆ, Nemanja MILUNOVIĆ, Filip ŽARKOVIĆ, Đorđe STOJKOVIĆ, Ivan KOMAROV, Dejan ĆORKOVIĆ, Radomir NIKOLIĆ, 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). Former manager (from 1997 to 2009), actor Svetozar Cvetkovic, has been member of the theatre’s company for many years. Current manager is stage director Kokan Mladenović. Nowadays the Atelier has a permanent ensemble of 33 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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Sergej Trifunović: The Berger Case
What is your Berger like? - He is different than in the film version, the only common thing is that my Berger is also a leader. Here he is a Harvard philosophy professor, he is with students, colleagues and friends who are inclined towards change, revolution, and they are very willing to change the existing situation in every possible way.
How? - Unfortunately, in the definition of a revolution, it says that the use of force is the only possible way. There is a problem here, which is the theme of our Hair... Do you know the sentence of the First Among the Equal Revolutionaries, Vladimir Ilich Ulianov, called Lenin – that revolution eats up its children? When you take down from power the one you are not satisfied with and take his place, you become the same as he was, if not worse than he was. This is the point of our story. The idea seen in the character of Berger, a true love towards menkind, a true desire to help in every possible way, swallows the ego trip in a second, which results in an imminent fall. As my dad would say: When Simon lifts himself up from the ground, he falls, he falls and breaks into a million pieces. This is the case with our Berger, this is the case with many revolutionaries – one of them is Lenin, one is Stalin, and the other Josip has got away. (...)
 Sonja ĆIRIĆ, Vreme, Belgrade |
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S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T...... |
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This is not a happy and pumped-up hippy tribe of the naive ‘68ers,
here we are mostly talking about enlightened intellectuals, whose
leader is the reason-bound, albeit bold, philosophy professor Berger.
And a reasonable intellectual of the 21st century is inclined towards
dialogue and debate much more than action, because he knows action
leads to burning and destruction he is disgusted with. Thus this Hair, in accordance with the time it reflects, is a call for a dialogue
and programmatic confrontation, a list of themes that have to be initiated if one has conscience, a digested edition of a guide through
a list of global lies and deceptions: the influence of corporations,
world wars with the focus on the one in Iraq, a look back at ’68 and
its participants, school and church, family, the relationship god-fate
and god-church, flag, world tourist conspiracy…
Aleksandra GLOVACKI |
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KOKAN MLADENOVIĆ, director
Born in Niš, 1970. He matriculated from the High Drama School in
class of Mima Vukovic-Kuric and graduated from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, Department
for Theatrical and Radio Direction – class of Miroslav Belović and Nikola Jevtić (1993).
Directed (selection): Shakespeare, Bunuel, Miller, Hamlet; Harms, Incidents; Tirso de Molina, The
Seducer of Seville and the Stone Guest; Beumarchais, The Marriage of Figaro; A. Popović, The
Evolutionary Road of Bora the Tailor, The Spawning of Carp; Aristophanes, Maričić, Mladenović, Lisistrata; V. Lukić, The Affair of the Innocent Annabelle; V. Ognjenović, How to Make the Master
Laugh, Was There Ever Knez’s Dinner; Agota Kristof, The Notebook; D. Kovačević, The Marathon
Family, The Balkan Spy, The Meeting Point; S. Selenić, Scolding the People in Two Acts; Ibsen, Per
Gint; Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Taming of the Shrew; Lj. Simović, The Traveling Theatre Sopalovic; Goran Petrović, K. Mladenović, The Siege of the Saint Salvation
Church; Goran Stefanovski, Bacchanalias; Bulgakov, K. Mladenović, The Master and Margarita;
Mirjana Novaković, K. Mladenović, Fear and Its Servant; Goran Petrović, The Ferry; Tolkien, K.
Mladenović, The Hobbit; J. M. Barrie, M. Stojanović, Peter Pan; Enda Walsh, Disco Pigs, Maja
Pelević, Jumpgirl, Orange Peel, Marin Držić: Dundo (Uncle) Maroje, musical Hair.
Mladenović has directed Alan Ford by Magnus and Bunker at the theatre ‘Pozorište na Terazijama’
as well as Peace, after Aristophanes, by Maričić and Mladenović.
He has received the ‘Bojan Stupica’ Award as well as three Sterija Awards: in 1998, for adaptation, The Affair of the Innocent Annabelle (NT Sombor); in 2000, for adaptation, Scolding the People
in Two Acts (NT Sombor); in 2002, for dramatization, The Siege of the Saint Salvation Church, NT
Sombor) and a number of significant awards at festivals in Serbia and Montenegro. From 1st
July 2009 he is Artistic Director of the Atelier 212 Theatre, Belgrade. |
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The Song Aquarius, one of the symbols of this musical, is a call for changes. What changes in the conceptual aspect is offered by the new version of Hair?
– It will be a radical collision with reality in which we live, not only we in Serbia, but on the global plane. In this piece about rebellion, we have managed to add the material actors and I have made, the definition of our stance toward the time we live in. It is the stance about our social status, joblessness, about media manipulation, about the status of the basic lines of the society, and the stance about wars that are not ideological wars as during the time when Hair was made, but sad finales of multi-corporative conflincts or directed interests with the aim to make someone even richer. We tried to deal with global phenomena that are, fortunately or unfortunately, seen very clearly in Serbia. We tried to create today – outside of the hippy moviements from the old Hair fighting for peace, outside of nudity and their advocacy for the freedom of the body that turned into pornography, because we really don’t need it anymore – a cry of a new generation. I expect that the cry “Let the sunshine” at the end of the play will be a sublimation of our stances and a serious cry of rebellion of this new theatre generation, but also the generation of all the thinking people in this world. (...)
Sonja ĆIRIĆ, Vreme, Belgrade
“The Modern Do” of the old Hair
Kokan Mladenović: “We try today to speak out about everything that bothers us on the global plane, about the wars that are not ideological anymore, but have become sad finals of multi-corporative interests, about the pillars of society that are no longer that, such as the state apparatus, education, church, military… Hair is in 2010 still taking place in America, but only if you want to read it on one plane. Of course, fortunately or unfortunately, Serbia is already, as far as the deviation is concerned, part of the big world, so we, making a play that takes place in America, in New York during demonstrations, in fact speak about our time here or any other place in the world where young people are trying to change the world they live in.”
Which would mean we still need the sun today. Although it seems to us that the world in the late 1960s was much more simple, and problems clearer than they are today.
Jovan Ćirilov, dramaturge: “It seems to me that the youth at that time was closer to the fight for freedom. I think that our youth is pretty disoriented, there aren’t some great movements that are similar, as in the world of antiglobalism; they probably have their own problems of existence as the cause for this, but they are probably not aware of it. So it is very good that this play can remind us of it.”
Kokan Mladenović: “I am convinced that to show 50 nude bodies on the stage in the era of pornography doesn’t mean anything but a senseless pleonasm. At the time when it was made, Hair was a subversive play. Its aim was to motivate the young for a rebellion against the system that was destroying them.
Dragoljub Đuričić, musician: “I would like us to really attack with various Hairs and with various influences the young people so they can take things into their own hands and their freedom, but so that they don’t have to change what exists as healthy and good. I think it’s stupid to take out a healthy tooth, no matter how modern it is, right?”
(…) At that time long hair was a symbol of resistance and those who had it seemed suspicious both in the East and the West. Today we have a lot more suspicions related to the freedoms we fought for – we are still fighting for them, and we haven’t advanced too far
Olivera SIMIĆ, RTS, January 30th 2010 |
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Irony, melancholy, rebellion
(...) Then and today, Hair was not only “another theatre performance,” but also a theatre event, a fuss, a heave, a convincing proof that the world is a stage, a theatre. At that time I wrote in this place: In an attractive and seductive manner, Hair leads the viewer into the world that distances itself from the civil mentality and false security, from the “culture of shame,” from bureaucratic facelessness, a technocratic mindset, from slave psychology and irresponsibility, from state and party orders, from taboos of all kinds and colours, from restraints physical and mental, from life in which man is only indebted to duties and divinised fatherland. And then as today, Hair spoke and sang the language and melody of challenge, questioning, irony, spontaneity, freedom, melancholy, rebellion of the defence of life and human integrity as the highest values. Directed by Kokan Mladenović, Hair is exhaustive, intense, extensive, exuberant, passionate, imbued and carried by dynamism and black fervor, by kinetic and the energy of a threatened young being, a musical underlined with a revolutionary line of rebellion, resistence, non-conformity.
When the curtain is lifted (set design Marija Kalabić), we have in front of us a city palace adorned with flags of powerful countries, the financial, political, economic and technologic rulers of the world. There is a summit of a group of countries shaping the contemporary world and its philosophy of life, rule, existence. On the square in from of the palace, “a flock”, “a tribe” of young people protesting against the war in Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan, against the establishment of the contemporary world about which the new“prophets,” concealed better than ever, are trying to convince us it is the best among the good worlds. Kokan Mladenović and a tribe of young people are questioning, mocking and deriding, criticising the political, war, financial, philosophical, religious tricks of the new order, into which the life of the majority of the people is pressed and constrained on this threatened planet. Even today Hair is an undertaking of the defence of open spirit and life, love, beauty, light, an accusation, polemic and melancholic, of the “administratively rational machine,” a global, very layered and branched out stupidity, terror of all kinds, misery, poverty. Contemporary truths are small, hidden, but they are lies and prejudices of the contemporary way of man’s presence and action in the world, in Mladenović’s Hair large and pushed to distinctness. Hair by Kokan Mladenović is also a musical-dance daydream about a long and different life, emphasis of the model of a different reality and establishment, cruel unmasking of the reigning prejudices, a “philosophy without a philosophy,” the truth equated with the useful and penetrating, financial and other powers with which the minority terrorises majority.
The big business people clad by Maja Mirković into the recognisable crow suites, their menacing business-like attitude, rhetoric and image, with a cold thoughtfulness, sappiness and sentiment, are convincingly interpreted by Peđa Stojanović and Dara Džokić. The petty bourgeois couple, with much restrained humour, is played by Nenad Ćirić and Tatjana Bošković. The tourist couple of Gorica Popović and Mladen Andrejević completes this image of civil and tourist narrow-mindedness. Gordan Kičić as Woff, both in appearance and voice, convincing, powerful. Sergej Trifunović, relaxed, attractive, with a nice irony and dry humour, smooth, eloquent, suave, interprets the character of Berger, who searches for the dramatic heights, tensions and dimensions in the finale. Ivan Jevtović as Hud, strong, loquacious, clear, loud. Claude by Branislav Trifunović, pensive, restrained, melancholic, inquiring. Let us also mention Jelena Gavrilović as Sheila, and the unrestrained, witty Jeanny by Katarina Žutić.
The tribe is made out of a group of young men and women you meat everyday on the streets of Belgrade. That’s what they were clad like by Maja Mirković: as if everyone has come to the stage in his/her own suite. They sing with all their strength, from the heart, soul and body, and they dance the same way, to the last breath! (Choreography by Mojca Horvat). Arrangements and compositions by Marko Grubić, vocal arrangements by Milan Nedeljković. Translated by Jovan Ćirilov. Live music by the Vroom band.
Kokan Mladenović’s Hair is a passionate and informed critique of the world of cold perfection, big words and big business, the world without ideals, narrow philosophy of life, belligerence and enprisoned life. The cry worth hearing and seeing: give us life, freedom, love, bread and air, sun!
Muharem PERVIĆ, Politika, February 5th. 2010 |
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