Dalibor FORETIĆ, theatre critic

The play “Somebody has Killed the Play” performed by the group “Maska i Pokret” from Sarajevo reminds of the famous MESS research days

The only event at this year’s Festival of Small and Experimental Stages that reminded us of those great and glorious MESS days of passionate research into the essence of the theatre phenomenon and the limits of its possibilities as a medium – took place on Thursday at the Collegium Artisticum in Skenderija. It is even more surprising that the protagonists are from Sarajevo, which, despite being the seat of the most important Yugoslav festival of avant-garde theatrical aspirations, has not been very prominent in theatrical research so far, although there have been attempts. They are called Iva Kostović-Mandić and Petar Mandić, spouses and theatre lovers: their group is entitled “Maska i Pokret”, and the play “Somebody has killed the Play”.

This play, which lasts barely forty minutes, belongs to that dedicated, Craigian space of the theatre, in which, with the help of a mask and movement, in the rhythm of music, an attempt is made to stage a poetic image and metaphor, a living theatre. There are no words in their theatre. The two of them animate alternately a dozen large masks that cover only the head or the whole body. Music is the rhythmic driver of events, so although not a single word is uttered, the structure of the play is eminently dramatic: it is neither a musical nor a ballet theatre but above all a dramatic event.

In terms of animating the mask, their play bears some resemblance of research conducted by Peter Schumann and his group “Bread and Puppet”. In terms of exploring the possibilities of movement as a dramatic means of expression, their stage results are closer to the postulates of theatre advocated by the German Pina Bausch.

But, despite that, Iva and Petar Mandić are independent. Their play introduces us to a somewhat mystical sphere of theatre in which a pure, carefully crafted poetic symbol is the only value, with which the theatrical act in its ephemerality seeks to correspond with eternity. The story they evoke with their mask, movement and music is simple but full of emotions and poetic meanings. It talks about Agava, a noble puppet, perhaps a great goddess, perhaps the progenitor of the Dionysian cult of dance and song, and in any case a symbolic primordial of human instinct and the need for poetry, which is destroyed by her own children, but despite being mutilated, killed, tortured and buried she remains alive, even on the dump of the world.

The play does not want to produce any precise and literal meanings, it works on this mysterious fluid that flows between the performer and the spectator, passing on its meanings to decipher and interpret in his intimacy, and, most importantly, to experience. Iva and Petar Mandić evoked this unadulterated moment of stage poetry with the suggestiveness of their grotesque, large masks, their touchingly simple animation, strictly controlled, and yet more natural than ballet-rendered movement, amazing music that we were informed was a reconstruction of ancient Greek music which accompanied their theatre performance.

The main event of MESS on Thursday was to be the performance of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre from Belgrade with Ödön von Horváth’s play “Don Juan returns from the War”, directed by Paolo Magelli. We can’t say much about that play, because something happened to it that is unheard of in our theatrical practice – more than half of the text could not be heard even by those spectators who were sitting in the front rows.
We don’t know what happened to the actors, what was the real reason for such an unprecedented careless attitude towards the festival audience. Those who watched it in Belgrade claim that the performance is much better. But even from what could be discerned from such a performance, from her sluggish, dull, and limp play, she hardly needed a place at the festival.
I don’t remember when it happened that the otherwise patient and dedicated Sarajevo audience finally accompanied the performance with booing. Rightly, just as only an hour or two later, in the night program, she applauded the satirical “One Man Show” by Paja Ninćić, a genuine histrionic moment of a real actor and real theatre, who does not flirt with any modernism, but that’s why corresponds perfectly with the audience, feeding it what a person needs most – healthy and juicy laughter.

DALIBOR FORETIĆ