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..Serbian National Theatre /
..Srpsko narodno pozorište - Novi Sad, Serbia

The roots of the Serbian National Theatre reach back to 1861, when, on the meeting of the Serbian Reading-room, held in Novi Sad on July 16 (28), with Svetozar Miletic as a chairman, the decision of founding the Serbian National Theatre was made. Novi Sad became the cradle of the Serbian theatre, and was, with good reason named “The Serbian Athens”. The theater’s actors were also the cultural missionaries, who made a fundamental influence to the cultural identity and conscience of the nation. The principals aims of the Serbian National Theatre are to promote and preserve the national and international theatrical and cultural heritage, and to present the most valuable contemporary creative practice. Therefore, we stage large, ambitious production. The Serbian National Theatre has represented our culture throughout the country - we have played in more than 300 venues with around a thousand performances - and abroad, with about a hundred performances in Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria, Italy, Netherland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Iraq, Egypt, Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina... The theatre has presented its work - and gained many awards - at the main festivals in Serbia, and at many European festivals too.

NEW EUROPE, OLD TRAUMAS

Exaggeration in any direction, both positive and negative, is the characteristic of the time we live in.
It is probably because we have lived for too long as outcasts and, anguished by that, we learned too late who we are, and decided which direction to take too early; we kept quiet about important and overemphasised unimportant issues.
Thus, as it seems, one can cover the entire mental state of our nation with the ‘too’ and ‘over-’. What we lack is moderation in everything, constant re-examination, balancing our own reactions to the actions of other people, calming down the spirits, quieting the noise… In the language of politics, what comes in the future is a harmonisation of our dimensions with the standards of the European way of life. But adaptation, adoption, each intervention in the spheres of human thought, conventions, customs, and traditions, can be a nucleus of the dramatic, which can subsequently be given a theatrical form.
Therefore, in the 2008/09 season, the Serbian National Theatre intends to focus its artistic activities to a direct or indirect confrontation with the traumas, fears, and hopes of a man who has found himself in front of the door of a home he once rightfully considered his own. Our theatre is ready for such a goal: in 2006 it became a member of the European Theatre Convention, and this autumn SNT will host the first edition of the “Quartet” Festival – a joint project of four European theatres carried out under the patronage of the European Commission.

PhD Milivoje Mlađenović, General Manager of the Serbian National Theatre



..QUARTET FESTIVAL - 4th edition - Ancenis (France) - 10 - 14.3.2010.

..QUARTET FESTIVAL - 3rd edition - Eger (Hungary) - 27 - 31.10.2009.

..QUARTET FESTIVAL - 2nd edition - Cheb (Czech Republic) - 24 - 28.3.2009.

..QUARTET FESTIVAL - 1st edition - Novi Sad (Serbia) - 30.10. - 3.11.2008.

..Milena Marković - THE DOLL SHIP / Brod za lutke

THE POWER OF POETIC TRUTH
About the drama The Doll Ship by Milena Markovic
The dramatic structure of Milena Markovic's texts appears more intensive from play to play, corresponding with the sensibility of her poetry (the collections of poems The Dog That Ate the Sun, The Truth in Heat, and The Black Spoon). Even her early plays (Pavilions, or Where I Am Going, Where I Come from and What’s for Dinner; or God Had Mercy on Us - Tracks), to say the truth, had a strong poetic charge. Both are characterized by the author's ability to create a significantly poetic atmosphere additionally enforcing the impression of cruelty of the world she wrote about.
However, in her latest dramatic opus: White, White World, The Doll Ship, and Simeon the Foundling, what at first appeared as extrinsic, as being imported into drama from the sphere of poetry, now ever more clearly establishes itself as an authentic poetic principle, a specific literary procédé to which the form of poetic drama no longer serves as an alibi or immediate association.
Nevertheless, the trail that starts in her poems can lead us, but only to a certain extent, towards an understanding of this author’s dramatic method. Namely, on the one side there are the unusually constructed lines corresponding to the apparent roughness and rawness of her verses, as if they were exact replicas of everyday talk, just like her (quasi)Brechtian usage of songs, while on the other side is the author’s ability to authentically destroy from the inside and modify again the particular elements of reality (sometimes taken over from so-called life, in this case based on the commonplaces from fairy tales).
In the case of The Doll Ship, a specific collision occurs between the archetypical model of the intricate world of fairy tales, and the bare essence of a reality we know all too well – a reality freed from crumbling crusts that give an educational purpose to fairy tales as reading material.
The result offered by Milena Markovic is the truth, and a painfully frightening one at that. We can agree with it but we don’t have to, yet it is powerful, provocative, and convincing, and on stage potentially strong in a way that is understood in the kind of theatre in which everything becomes possible. In this drama we can recognize what we all (consciously, or more often – unconsciously) search for; we can get entangled into the obscure depths of psychoanalytic groundwater, we can get amused by the Jungian distinction of the opposite side of the archetypical, we can read interpretations in the path of new European drama into its scenes, but those interpretations will surely chip off the poetic power of this drama – as always happens when trying to interpret good poetry.
"This is not a world for children. I don’t want children", says Hunter, a dramatis persona from Milena’s drama The Doll Ship; but this statement here does not function as a banal - today even pathetic, largely worn-out slogan ever since Hamlet’s advice to Ophelia – as a manifest stated by one of the conscious representatives of an unconscious world. For, just a few lines later, the same Hunter will say this as well: “I don’t care. I don’t care to be sixty and have a ten-year-old, I don’t care about kids at all, I couldn’t care less about this one of mine until I’m able to sit and talk with him”.
And that, in fact, is the knot. It is just there – in conversation – where the real trouble and real pain begin. No matter how crudely open and cruelly sincere it was, no matter what language was used, it repeatedly reveals the old secrets of the world, those that the author, in a seemingly innocent, yet in fact frightening way, sublimates in every song of the drama.
And because of all that, The Doll Ship carriesa hidden (poisonous) rhythm of energy characteristic to the perception of the world immanent to the authentic and darkest romanticism, a weltanschauung that gave up on diagnosing the state of matter in this world, which is not amazed by anything, or disgusted over reality, does not bother enjoying its own (fruitless) irony, and at the same time does not give up the right to talk loudly, to tell (its own) the truth. It does not waive its right to rebel. Punk!
Aleksandar MILOSAVLJEVIC

Director - Ana Tomović
Composer - Darko Rundek
Dramaturgs - Vuk Ršumović and Svetislav Jovanov
Scenographer - Ljerka Hribar
Costume Designer - Momirka Bailović
Choreographer - Saša Krga
Masks and Make up - Vladimir Radovanović
Organizer - Elizabeta Fabri    
Sound Designer - Marinko Vukmanović

 

The Cast:
Little sister, Alice, Snow White, Goldilocks, Thumbelina, Princess, Woman, Witch
- Jasna Đuričić

Mother (of Woman), Mama Bear
- Draginja Voganjac

Big sister (of Woman), Gretel
- Milica Grujičić

Doc, Papa Bear, Frog
- Radoje Čupić

Grumpy, Hunter
- Nenad Pećinar

Dopey, Baby Bear, Eaglet, Eagle, Hansel
- Radovan Vujović

The Musicians - Ksenija Bašić, Milan Nenin, Lazar Novkov, Lav Kovač, Siniša Mazalica

Stage Manager: Vladimir Savin
Prompter: Snežana Kovačević
Light Engineer: Mirko Čeman
Sound Engineer: Тodor Savin

Sceneplay:
1. Shack - Little Sister, Big Sister, Mama
2. Road - Alice, Big Sister
3. Forest - Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Snow White
4. Cave - Mama Bear, Papa Bear, Baby Bear, Goldilocks
5. Swamp - Frog, Thumbelina
6. Nest - Hunter, Princess, Eaglets
7. Dark Borough - Eagle, Woman
8. Hansel and Gretel - Hansel, Gretel, Witch

Premiere:  September 24th 2008, Serbian National Theatre ,"Pera Dobrinovic" Stage

Duration: 1 hour and 25 minutes

Stage, costumes and all the acompanying material were made in the workshops of the Serbian National Theatre.

MILENA MARKOVIĆ - Born on April 9th 1974 in Zemun. She finished the primary and secondary school in Belgrade. She graduated from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, Dramaturgy track, with her play Pavilions, or where am I going, where do I come from and what's for dinner, in June 1998.
April 2001 – Her play, Pavilions, or where am I going, where do I come from and what's for dinner, directed by Alisa Stojanović, was preformed for the first time in the Yugoslav National Theatre in Belgrade. Her collection of poems The dog who ate the Sun was published by Flavio Rigonat. The collection had three more editions.
June 2001 – Her play Pavilions... directed by Srđan Janićijević, was preformed in the Macedonian National Theatre.

December 2001 – Milena Marković was awarded by the M.B.H Theatre from Vienna for her play Pavilions...
June 2002 – Jaka Ivanc graduates at the Faculty of Drama in Ljubljana, with the play Pavilions... written by Milena Marković.

Јuly – August  2002 -  with her play God help us all - Rails she took part in the summer residence of Royal Court Theatre in London

October 2002 – The opening night of her play God help us all – Rails, directed by Zijah Sokolović, in the M.B.H Theater in Vienna.

November 2002 – The premiere of her play Rails, directed by Slobodan Unkovski, in the Yugoslav National Theatre. With her collection of poems she took part in a public reading at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm.
May 2003 – The same plane was performed in Poznań, in Poland, directed by Rafal Sabara.
October 2003 – She publishes her second collection of poems The horny truth, published by LOM/ Flavio Rigonat.
Јune 2004 – The play Rails, directed by Rafal Sabara, is performed at the Sterijino Pozorje theater festival. Milena Marković received a Special Award for her play.
Rails, in the performance of the Yugoslav National Theatre takes part at the Festival of the New Drama in Wiesbaden. Her play, Rails was published in the German theatrical magazine Theater Heute.

September 2004 – Milena Marković takes part in the project SWITCH, an exchange programme between the Scandinavian and Balkan countries; poetry reading in Stockholm and Göteborg.
In December 2004 and January 2005, she was writing a script and also took part in the making of the documentary The Mine Opera, in Bor. The film was directed by Oleg Novković.
In February, her play The Happy forest was preformed for the first time in the Schauspielhaus in Zürich.

October 2005 – Milena Marković is the first winner of the Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz Award for drama, for her play The Doll Ship.
Her collection of plays was published by the First Serbian library in Irig.

November 2005 – Premiere of her play Rails, in Aachen, Germany.

Milena Marković wrote the script for the movie Tomorrow morning, which was directed by Oleg Novković and produced by Zillion Film, Belgrade.

May 2006 – Premiere of her play The Foundling Simeon, written at special request of the Serbian National Theatre, for the celebration in honor of Jovan Sterija Popović. The play was a co-production of the Serbian National Theatre and Sterijino pozorje. The play was directed by Tomi Janežič.

Јune 2006 – The first performance of her play The Doll Ship, directed by Slobodan Unkovski, at the Yugoslav National Theatre.

June 2007 – Milena Marković obtains the Sterija Award for her play The Foundling Simeon.

CRITICAL CONFRONTATION WITH THE ARCHETYPE OF FAIRY TALES

The first two plays written by Milena Marković Pavillions and Rails, show the characteristics which testify of the maturing of an autonomous mode in the landscape of the New Serbian drama. The most important characteristics are certainly the rejection of the world set by ideological rules (through the intimate confessions about spleen, anger and the overall confusion of the urban youth) and the transfer of the characters from (most commonly psychological) levels of the representation to the world of the circumstantial, sensory being. 
The author's third play: The Doll Ship (2005) expands this inovative charge, entering the critical and the eruditely based confrontation with the archetypes of the fairy tale; the author shows that the focusing on the rhetorical inheritance (variation, paraphrase, pastiche or commentator's destructuralization of the motifs, plots and functions in the play) does not in any case exclude neither further stylistic/linguistic research, nor the articulations of the new type of the postmodern theatrical illusion.  However, the dominant strategy of this play can be discovered in the development of the relations between the matrix of the story (to which the plot points) and the absolute request of the Heroine to discover herself. From that urge, a new drama age marked by allegory was born. On the plot stucture level, the multi-formed and multi-named heroine is, at least in the first seven varieties of the archetype of the fairy tale, at the begining set as a seemingly passive figure with a strictly given function. If each of the marked narratives would be shaped all the way, we would find ourselves standing in front of a relatively simple case of experiental maturing of the modernist drama subject, by the means of (certainly ”ritual") initiation. Milena Marković, however, in each of these varieties disrupts the logical order of the plot, as well as the symbolical hierarchy of meanings; the story stops, bends, it comments, turns into meta-theme, or redoubles. And, last but not least, it changes the archetypical, and most commonly, the passive, augury of the female protagonist. With this act, the initiation is gradually transformed into it's own opposite, and the closed time chain of the archetypical story becomes a place of the fragmentary embodiment of one (potentially) absolute Desire, or more precisely, the always unique and never enough possesed moment:

FROG - So, who was your first love then?
THUMBELINA - A few of them...
FROG - Did you suffer?
THUMBELINA - No...
FROG - How come?
THUMBELINA - Dopey was there.
FROG - And the boat?
THUMBELINA - My father made the boat. He'd make a boat every year and put the old toys in it, once it was a teddy without an eye, then a doll without her head, them some panths that were so old that you could see right through them, and lots of other stuff. I couldn't bear parting with those things, so he'd make a boat, put the things in it and say that the teddy bear is going to his mama bear somewhere far away, and that the doll is going to see the doll prince who would then put her head back on and  it was a real ceremony...
FROG - So, that figure you've been dreaming of was actually your father...
THUMBELINA - My father was no figure, my father was my father... What are you talking about...

With the strenghtening of the "cycle" of the associative scenes, we see that it is not about maturing (or even encouraging stories, contraposing, or about analogical branching) but about the re-positioning of the dramatical figure. That is also one of the Marković's strategical components, the variety of places on which the figure moves are enabled by the genre metamorphosis. The transition from the cinical melodrama (Snow White) to a satirical parabole about small town mentality (Goldilocks) and then the moving away from the expressionist tragedy (The Dark Land) towards the grotesque (Hansel and Gretel), and maybe even more the incompatibility of their ilusionistic levels, makes each time continuity of the archetype-ritual-initiation, but also the possible Bildungstück (as a product of such figures) become accidental: The time is merely the tension between the formula and desire.
Moreover, that tension is irreversible and ironic: if not so, why would the heroine cross over the allegorical and not the biographical distance between the Girl in the first and the Witch in the last variety? Instead of using a ritual to get to the Same, by means of the allegorical montage one gets to the Other; that kind of embodiement in the fragmentary allegorical time – where re-birth is only a new, temporary death – which only supports the sufferings of the heroine, but it doesn't allow her to identify herself with any kind of well-rounded, final meaning.

Svetislav JOVANOV

ANA TOMOVIĆ - Born in 1979, in Belgrade. She graduated Theater and Radio Directing from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, with professor Egon Savin and TA Dušan Petrović. She directed several plays: Creeps , written by Lutz Hübner (Belgrade Drama Theatre), The Duck, written by Stella Feehily (The Kraljevo National Theatre), Halflife, written by Filip Vujosevic (Atelier 212), The return of Casanova, by Arthur Schnietzler (The Serbian National Theatre), Monogamy, by Stella Feehily (The National Theatre in Sombor); she was the author of the projects Trtmrtzivotilismrt (BELEF, 2007) and Norway. Today, by Igor Bauresima (a co-producton between the Belgrade National Theatre and the National Theatre in Krusevac). She won the award as the best director with her play The Duck, at Joakimfest in 2005, and in 2006, the play Halflife, directed by her was performed at the Sterijino Pozorje Festival. From 1998 up till 2005 she was the editor of the BITEF bulletins. She was assistant director at the project Fast sicher at the "Theater am Neumarkt" in Zurich in 2007, and she was granted a scholarship by the Goethe Institute and spent time on studies at the "Thalia Theatre" in Hamburg in 2008.