If you have ever had the fortune to visit
Dubrovnik, the likelihood is that you have probably crossed paths with at least
several guided tours crisscrossing the tiny centre of the old city. Perhaps you
even took part in one. You might have taken a walk along the city walls and
down the polished cobbles of Stradun, or marveled at the Gothic-Renaissance
splendour of its main square – the Sponza and the Rector’s palace, the statue
of the Knight Orlando standing guard in between them.
If you happened to be in Dubrovnik between 13-17th
August this year, you might have had a chance to cross paths and even embark on
a slightly different kind of city tour. Your trip would have started at 9.30pm,
from one of the five locations inside the city walls – ranging from the famous
Sponza palace to a lesser known playground under the Minčeta tower or even a quite unnoticeable primary school in the heart
of the city – and you would have needed a theatre ticket for it. Depending on
which of the five actor-guides you chose to follow, you would have heard
stories of a house being moved brick by brick along Stradun, the exact
locations of the dwelling places of the Evil Witch and the Sleeping Beauty, some
cheeky gossip concerning Orlando’s male love interest, and my favourite – the
tale of a trainee pilot performing avio-acrobatics above the city walls while throwing
love letters for a woman he loved…
For those of us who grew up in Yugoslavia, Dubrovnik
has always had a special kind of magic. Though most of us will have at least
one or two of the same kind of holiday snapshots in our family albums – feeding
the pigeons by the Onofrije’s fountain, posing on one of the staircases towering
over Stradun, eating a massive ice cream or strumming a guitar against the
backdrop of shiny white stone and crystal clear blue sea – our personal
memories of the place would always be invested with a sense of uniqueness and a
specific kind of nostalgia. Some have made friends for life, fallen in love or
had their heart broken here for the first time – but most have taken away with
them some unforgettable memory. The very first time I have ever seen the sea was
by the walls of the old city. I was three years old, we had driven from Serbia through
Bosnian mountains in a yellow 2CV, my parents in the front, me and Katica (my
imaginary friend) at the back. We were received in the old city with maternal
warmth and extraordinary house pride by a woman who had been my father’s landlady
when he was a student. As we sank into cool white sheets behind the thick walls
that night, I remember feeling that it was all indeed nothing short of a
fairy-tale, and no other summer holiday thereafter ever came quite close to
that.
Many things have however changed radically since
then, not least the fact that the city was shelled and heavily traumatized
during the cannibalisation of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s – the first time in
its centuries-long history that it ever suffered any military damage. And since
then worldwide cruisers have found their way into the city too. There is a
palpable kind of neurosis you find among the citizens of Dubrovnik nowadays,
who seem as though they’ve had enough, riding on overcrowded local buses,
wheeling their worn out supermarket bags around idle thrill-seekers, selling
trinkets and day trips in mid-day heat on some measly commission, cursing under
their breath. According to one statistic, in 1955 there were 15,000 people
living inside the city walls. Since the invasion of foreign investors in search
for holiday homes in the last 15 years, this number has dwindled to less than 700.
In winter time, when the show is over and all the cruisers have departed,
Dubrovnik becomes a ghost town.
It is no wonder then that when the new
Dubrovnik Summer Festival artistic director Krešimir Dolenčić took over the annual event in its 64th year of
existence, he made it part of his mission to return the soul to the city. This
was also the brief that director Boris Bakal (co-founder and leader of the
multimedia platform Shadow Casters) received when he was approached to create a
piece for this year’s programme. Bakal’s commission was appropriate, though
somewhat unusual in a number of ways. Traditionally, much of the theatre, music,
dance and film repertoire of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival takes place in
outdoors venues so site-specificity has been a major feature of the festival
programming since its beginnings in 1950. However, the city’s Renaissance/
Baroque ambient seems to have always predetermined the programming in favour of
the classics – Shakespeare, Goldoni, Moliere and Dubrovnik’s own playwright
Marin Držić (1508-1567) forming the core of the repertoire. In its six decades
of existence international artists have taken part too, including Helene
Weigel, Peter Brook and even, more recently, Jan Fabre. Bakal’s own work has
been truly international too, especially since the early 1990s when he left
Croatia to work in Italy, Belgium and Austria, eventually reaching the US too.
However, his output, characterized by an interest in non-building-based
performance, has often been closer to artistic activism, even when it is
initially inspired by a classic text. Shadow Casters’ trilogy Process_City, for example, created between 2004-2008, was loosely inspired by Kafka’s The Trial, but mostly motivated by a
desire to radically challenge the existing critical reading of the text as
being about victimhood, in favour of personal agency.[1]
Bakal’s satirical city tour/promenade
performance around Dubrovnik – named Father Courage in a paraphrase of the title of Brecht’s famous classic – is, as pointed out by
one of the local reviewers,
a kind of Shadow Casters’ ‘best of’. In keeping with Bakal’s previous work,
this too is a project driven by a desire to wake up and activate the audience
in relation to its everyday reality.[2]
This tour is consequently aimed predominantly at the locals, inviting them to
participate in a creation of new urban myths. Initially declared ‘dead’ at the
beginning of our journey, we are equally arbitrarily declared ‘alive’ again at
its end. Whether or not anything has fundamentally changed in this process is
entirely up to us – and this is perhaps where the theme of courage ultimately
resides. According to Bakal, what connects Brecht’s Mother Courage and his own Father
Courage is the question of survival. Mother Courage loses everything in
order to survive, she is a conformist, a ‘parody of courage’, claims the
director. Father Courage is Dubrovnik itself, who must make his own choices.
The five chosen locations are populated
with the total of 14 performers (including the show’s designer Leo Vukelić) who have collecively devised the content of the piece. Five of them
– Goran Bogdan, Ivana Krizmanić, Jelena Lopatić, Zrinka Kušetić and Silvio Vovk – are the ‘guides’ while the others remain in each
location as the ‘place keepers’. Lasting for over three hours, the five
simultaneous stories snake up and down the stairs and through the narrow
passageways of the city knitting together intimate confessions, facts, fictions
and occasional jokes. Theoretically the audience could choose to follow one of
the guides or to stay for the duration of the performance in a single location,
thus being given at least 10 potential narrative journeys through the piece
(although the latter option would inevitably result in some repetitiveness and
perhaps fatigue with the seemingly trivial nature of some of the protagonists’
conflicts). I managed three different journeys between the dress rehearsal and
the final night, thus witnessing different strategies the guides had taken in
tackling the format and the thematic content of the piece. Eye-candy and TV
star Goran Bogdan had chosen to fuse the story of his lost love Cvijeta of
Dubrovnik, with the story of a historical figure, a Dubrovnik poetess and
salonniere Cvijeta Zuzorić (1552-1648),
within a format of a guided city tour. Elfish and thoroughly enticing Jelena
Lopatić, on the other hand, takes the concept of our shared experience of being
dead for the duration of the show as her departure point and turns her journey
into a series of joyous and touching farewells with her beloved family members,
played by the audience as unsuspecting stand ins. Though it was not unusual for
some uninitiated sleep-deprived residents to heckle the performers through
their open windows on account of the ‘accuracy’ of their utterances, Lopatić’s
routine also had a nice touch of generosity towards them – such as collecting
some cigarettes from the audience members into an envelope and posting them en
route through the letterbox of an impoverished local resident called Koke, who
she had got to know in the course of her research. While Bogdan’s journey was
probably the most entertaining, Lopatić’s was simply the most moving in its
humanity. However, it was Ivana Krizmanić’s
tale that I found narratively the most satisfying. Originating from the book Curiosities of Dubrovnik, the
story revolves around the 1936 real life event of a tragic death of two trainee
pilots from the Mostar academy – Slovenian Vaclav J. Helmih and Serbian
Svetozar Pantović Panta – as their plane hit the Minčeta tower and then crashed. Krizmanić’s
reimagining of this incident focuses on the love story between Helmih and an
unknown Dubrovnik girl who she names Marija Miletić and casts as a local primary
school teacher. Skillfully and convincingly, Krizmanić
weaves all five of the show’s locations as well as the itinerary between them
into her historical detective romance, giving us the hope that love may prevail
in the end, no matter how painful the losses and how deep the wounds.
Ultimately though, for those who see it,
the show has the capacity to adorn the city with a whole new collection of
mental snapshots and lyrical imagery: a glimpse of the starry summer sky as you
lie on a camp-bed in Sponza, some white laundry air-drying gently in your view,
a dance in the square, a marriage proposal by the statue of a peeing lady, a
lovers’ bed under the palm leaves in the Jesuits’ church courtyard, a chance to
leave your own love message to the city on a mortar wall discovered by this
show… It’s a kind of experience that makes you see differently, or a kind that,
by taking you off the beaten track, perhaps just makes you see – through your
own eyes, like a child again, the simple unspoiled beauties of a place.
[1] More detail about Shadow Casters’ work is available in two of my
recently published books The ContemporaryEnsemble and Theatre-Making.
[2] The show was also programmed into an AHRC-funded Network project
entitled ‘Porous Dramaturgy’ and formed a basis for a two-day discussion between the core members of the
team: PI Cathy Turner (University of Exeter), Co-I Duška Radosavljević (University of
Kent), Hanna Slattne (Tinderbox Theatre, Belfast), Boris Bakal and Katarina
Pejović (Shadow Casters) as well as network members
Lena Šimić (HOPE University
Liverpool) and Synne Behrndt (University of Winchester).
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