16

 

16.10. / 20:00 / Princely Serbian Theatre

Production: Serbian National Theatre Novi Sad, City Drama Theatre "Gavella", Zagreb, National Theatre Sarajevo and MESS, Sarajevo / Serbia / Croatia / Bosnia and Herzegovina

Duration: 120’

Photography: Marija Erdelji

Author's word

It is unusual and great, and terrible, and strange to be on stage the one who wrote the novel staged by the masterful Kokan Mladenović. Being with your own characters, awakened from romance, talking with those who came from both imagination and reality, laughing, crying, touching them is an incredible and crazy experience, which only the theatre can still forge in the world of illusions that devour documents... Sometimes I think that they exist more than I, who only represent myself. Darko Cvijetić ... Cvijetić does not allow these bodies to be mere numbers for future historians to argue about, to remain merely as letters engraved in marble for politicians to spew falsehoods over. He does not allow them to be killed again and again. When the cannons, hymns, processions and funerals fall silent, a silence most dear to death ensues, for oblivion follows it, the ultimate nothingness, its utter triumph. In that silence Cvijetić speaks, giving the dead a voice unheard while they were alive. Selvedin Avdić  

Dramaturge’s foreword

What may seem like the most challenging (or at least the most unusual) part of the process of working on the performance Why Are You Sleeping on The Floor - the presence of the writer Darko Cvijetić in the author's team and acting ensemble - turned out to be one of the most beautiful aspects of the dramaturgical work. Devising the text of the performance meant listening and establishing trust between the author of the novel, the ensemble and the author's team. This experience could not have been easy for the writer, who also plays himself in the performance, but it soon became clear that an internal engine had started working in all of us - which otherwise forces us to expose ourselves to artistic work - to unearth ourselves and persevere where it hurts, which is the desire (or duty!) for the story to be told. The novel Why Are You Sleeping on The Floor is a brilliant and complete prose work, and we gave ourselves the freedom to frequently move away from the text of the novel in order to get closer to it in the translation from literary to theatrical language. And we were actually interested in the world of the novel. Hence the director's key intervention - the presence of the writer in the role of the Writer who records, arranges and alters his memories before us. Mina Petrić