Kokan Mladenović's "Elephant Man" in Purgatory: Research on the otherness and rejection of individuals

Tomorrow evening in Tivat, the Montenegrin premiere of the new theatrical co-production of the Tivat Cultural Center

3578 views 0 comment(s)
From the press conference, Photo: Siniša Luković
From the press conference, Photo: Siniša Luković
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

The theater play "The Elephant Man" co-produced by the Belgrade Drama Theater and the Tivat Cultural Center, after the premiere which was held in Belgrade on May 25, will be played for the first time in front of an audience in Montenegro tomorrow evening (Wednesday, June 7) starting at 21 p.m. on the summer stage in Tivat, as part of the international Mediterranean Theater Festival "Purgatorija".

Based on the text by Dimitrije Kokanov, the play was directed by Kokan Mladenović. In addition to them, the author's team of this play consists of costume designer Aleksandra Pecić Mladenović, scenographer Marija Kalabić, composer Irena Popović Dragović, while Andreja Kulešević and Dejan Sredojević are responsible for stage movement and stage speech. The play stars Ozren Grabarić, Mirjana Karanović, Jovo Maksić, Jana Milosavljević, Miloš Lazarov, Slađana Vlajović, Aleksandar Jovanović, Milan Kolak, Ivana Nikolić, Ivan Zablaćanski and Bojana Stojković.

As the organizers said yesterday at the press conference held before the Montenegrin premiere of "Elephant Man", this project deals with the research of different positions of social otherness, rejection, marginalization and condemnation of individuals. The starting point in the development of this piece was documentary data and writings about the case of John Merrick, suffering from an extremely rare disease and deformity, who was known as the Elephant Man. Merik's medical phenomenon is only a trigger for dealing with the topic of discrimination of various medical conditions by a "healthy" society.

In all ways a person's appearance, origin, hormonal status, illness affect the position that person occupies in society and in what way society abuses those who differ from the normed majority - these are the topics treated in the latest play directed by Kokan Mladenović.

"This is a topic that I wanted to work on for years. I think that it detects the phenomena of our time, that it says much more about us today than what was in England in the 19th century. In the play, we consider the phenomena of the different, the otherness, we consider the relationship to to everything that is different, the use and abuse of it. This false humane face of ours to protect something by expoating and destroying it - in principle, a lot in this play says about us today: what we have turned into after all, a society without empathy, a society eager for daily scandals and the exploitation of everything he does not understand," said the director of the play Kokan Mladenović, underlining the tragic fate of the main character who reaches for suicide, because in the end he realizes that "his physical monstrosity and deviations that are treated as monstrosities are much less than are freaks of the society in which he lives".

The elephant man
photo: Promo

The main actor Ozren Grabarić pointed out that "The Elephant Man" apart from the dimensions pointed out by Mladenović, also talks about "how much each individual wants to belong to one big herd, one tribe".

"This probably comes from that evolutionary moment in which every animal becomes aware that apart from the herd, it has much less chance to survive alone. So we all have the need to belong to some community, society. However, I find it interesting that the main character of the play was one an emotional and intellectually strong being, but the moment he wanted to belong to that community, he actually gave up everything that was beautiful in him from the inside and began to reject himself in order to fit into the society in which he lives," he said. Grabaric.

His colleague Jovo Maksić pointed out that today's times are even more challenging because through the general availability of information, "it has acquired another more bizarre dimension where you are either informed or you are uninformed or you are misinformed".

"We are trying to awaken people's empathy towards these facts that characterize modern society. A man who does not have his own 'self' begins to behave like a herd. It is very difficult to have one's own 'self' because a freak is essentially not an individual, but an entire society," he concluded. Maksic.

Director of the Tivat Culture Center Goran Božović emphasized that "The Elephant Man" is the first joint co-production of that house and the Belgrade Drama Theater and pointed out that the theme of this piece is important from both a sociological and psychological point of view "because it talks about the abuse, manipulation and exploitation of people who are different". Božović believes that "artistically, a very high-quality play that will be successful and have a long theatrical life" has been made.

Bonus video: