Liješević: The theater doesn't have to do anything and it has to do everything

At the jubilee, 30th Grad Theater festival, Boris Liješević presented himself as the director of the first opera in his career, "Two Heads and a Girl", to the music of Isidore Žebeljan, which was composed in 2012 by a composer who now collaborates with world music institutions, commissioned by the Italian academic foundation and the festival. Weeks of Musical Seneza". In two premiere evenings, on the stage of the "Witches" in Bečići, and then on the square in front of the Old Town, Isidore Žebeljan's unusual, provocative music performed by thirty top musical performers led by conductor Premil Petrović, actors Mihailo-Miša Janketić and Milovan Filipović supported by Rambo Amadeus, they somewhat surprised the Budva audience. Those who expected light notes, a fun and fluffy summer fairy tale about the search for love, were probably left disappointed. Because Liješević placed Borislav Čičovački's libretto, written based on the motifs of an ancient Indian legend and Thomas Mann's philosophical novel "Swapped Heads", in the context of our time.

Thus, the director who was born in Budva, who today lives in Belgrade and is one of the most respected and employed in the region, but is largely still from Budva, remained faithful to his commitment - he brought his fellow citizens a serious story that makes us think and we wonder.

"Several important things coincided with this opera - I experienced Isidore Žebeljan's invitation as an honor, and her work is one of the most important things that I have been offered to direct so far. There is also the anniversary of Grad Teatr, a festival that intimately means a lot to me, and the fact that it is a regional co-production in which, in addition to Budva, Ulysses Theater from Brion, the National Theater from Subotica, and Belgrade's "Testament FilmS" is also not negligible. And although I don't like to work in the summer, because theater work during the summer is very tiring and exhausting, this was an offer that I couldn't refuse", says Liješević in an interview with "Vijesti".

The audience in Montenegro who knows your work in the plays "Waiting Room", "Fathers are the City(s)", "The Wizard"..., believes that "Two Heads and a Girl" are in many ways a logical continuation of your understanding of theater. Should the opera also have an engagement?

Drama theater is not only a space where we can talk about important things that concern us, but it is also opera, because opera is not just fairy tales that need to be attractive, popularized and "stirred up". That's why I didn't go that way at all. On the contrary, we have placed a love legend in the turbulent contemporary milieu of our world, in the milieu of political and social emigrants, refugees and refugee camps. In this piece, according to legend, two heroes go on a journey looking for love, but I couldn't shake the impression that they are today's travelers. Travelers of the XXI century who cross thousands of miles to move from their continents to countries where there are no wars, and where a better life and existence can be found. These trips are all or nothing for them, they put their whole lives on the line by going on a completely uncertain journey. Many of them, unfortunately, experience various tragedies, personal and family, on their way to a more beautiful and safer life, and these are all very poignant images that we see, and which found a place in this play.

This story has many layers, how challenging was it for you to play with the myths and fairy tales that we see in the play?

I think that every myth is a kind of "hole" and an endless field of research, because it carries many meanings. But, in itself, every myth, no matter whose - Montenegrin, ancient, Kosovo or Indian, carries in itself something that has been created for many years, like a polished stone that has been rolled by the sea for thousands of years, and it can be seen on it. That's why the myth gives room for all kinds of meaning, loading and play. And while reading the libretto for "Two Heads and a Girl" I wondered where the incident was, because I think there must be some incident in the theater, at least in some segment. I felt the same way when performing Jasmina Reza's text "Bella Figura" at the Croatian National Theater in Zagreb. I thought that there should be some strong incident that will "move" the story in some way. We did this in the space - we played the play in a rehearsal hall, which we completely "dressed" in blue and changed the "character" of the entire story. In this opera, I knew that a fairy tale should not be treated as a fairy tale, and that I had to do something else. Because, in my opinion, if the director "hits" the fairy tale, then he gets kitsch. I didn't want that at all, although maybe this show would be more commercial and more receptive to a certain part of the audience. That's why I consulted with set designer Aleksandar Denić, with whom I recently collaborated in the play "Drunken". Today, Denić works a lot abroad, he also gives an "impulse" to great directors such as Frank Castrof, and I managed to persuade him to collaborate on this opera as well. That's how we "came out" of the fairy tale together, and created something that is a difficult metaphor about the world in which we live.

Does our time have its own fairy tale?

Fairy tales are not created in the time they talk about. I think that fairy tales and time have no direct connection with each other, that time is not a property of a fairy tale, and that no time has its own fairy tale. A fairy tale somehow always comes later than the time in which it supposedly takes place, and who knows what kind of fairy tales will arise from these present-day travels and great migrations of people from the south to the northwest, which are terrible. And fairy tales are bloody. Just as the fairy tale about "Two Heads and a Girl" is in some way bloody, because fairy tales are born in blood. That's why I think that this blood that is spilled on the Mediterranean Sea from where emigrants arrive, or from the trucks they travel in and in which they often suffocate, will one day find a place in some fairy tales that will tell about this time and events.

To those who remember your small plays on the Budva city beach when you were a high school student, your professional biography seems miraculous today - there is almost no major theater award in the region that you have not won. You have the Bitef Grand Prix, three Sterija awards, the MESS festival award in Sarajevo, the "Anđelko Štimac" and "Dalibor Foretić" awards in Rijeka, the "Ardalion" in Užice, the awards "Bojan Stupica", "Ljubomir Muci Draškić"... Is demagogy that awards are not important?

Of course it is demagoguery. But all that happened to me since 2010, and it started with the play "Waiting Room". If someone had told me before that I would receive such confirmations, I would have really thought that it was a pipe dream and that it would not happen. Those awards made me so happy, and they make me so happy, because I went through a painful period of growing up in this profession when you expect something and it doesn't come, and you feel marginalized. The period of breaking into that world started much earlier for me, I have been in the theater since I was a child, from high school, and then that period of about six years when I graduated in directing, was very tense. I always had work to do, but I didn't have a firm feeling that I could express myself, I didn't have the feeling that I had made a good play before "Čekaonica". I entered each project with great desire and with great inspiration, but then somehow it started to get out of hand, and in the end I ended up making some conventional play. My work was not recognized for years, maybe there was nothing to be recognized, and maybe it was, I have no idea anymore. But I went through that difficult phase when there is no reward, no confirmation, no real success. Then suddenly everything started coming, and coming, and coming. I became so happy in my work, so grateful to God for giving me all that, as well as to the people who recognized my work. That's why I feel a kind of obligation towards the awards to go further in my creative work, to research, dig, learn... In the past, the award changed my mood for the better for up to twenty days, now that elation somehow lasts shorter and shorter, but from some grayness and misery always raises.

Today you direct from Triglav to Đevđelia. How do you feel about playing your plays in Budva? In addition to the opera "Two Heads and a Girl", you also had the premiere of Goldoni's "Servants of Two Masters" at the City Theater in 2012?

Stressful, in a way. Budva is my city, the city of my family, my origin. My fascination with the theater and my dream began right there, at the Grad Theater, and all of that evokes some special emotions in me. Of course, I'm very happy when my fellow citizens accept what I've done, I'm aware of the support that some people in Budva have given me from the very beginning, when I showed interest in doing theater, that's why I'm perhaps too sensitive when I'm here. Like when a child comes home from vacation and then expects too much attention, that's how I feel somehow. I often show hypersensitivity to the question of my presence at this festival, which can also be heard from some people. My presence here is not small, it is even frequent. It's not exactly every year, but I come to the Grad Theater. Nevertheless, those performances with which I was a guest played and were invited to other festivals in the region, they were noticed even before arriving in Budva. But, considering that the Grad Theater is a kind of home from which I started, I have a special relationship with it, and some perhaps excessive expectations that are not always fulfilled.

The "helpers" of humanity bring nothing but a dirty canister

In "Two Heads and a Girl" we see emblems of many "helpers" of humanity, such as UNICEF, USAID, UNHCR, "Coca Cola"... How cynical, manipulative and vain has that humane idea of ​​the world become today?

It's like when "Coca Cola" comes to a country and buys a source of clean water, like in Vlasina, for example, so in order to pay back the citizens of that area, this corporation builds an amusement park, and then people become happy that it robbed them of drinking water. . Those "helpers" of humanity, those lovers of human misfortune, who are shown with folded hands on their marketing emblems, do not, in fact, bring anything. Apart from the dirty canister from which they give unfortunate people a drop of water, and they also fence it with barbed wire. This cynicism of the world powers finds a place in this story that enters the myth, reshapes it and adapts it to take on a new form with a new idea.

When we say the obligation of the theater, I think it depends on the time - sometimes it has one obligation, sometimes another. At the time when Feydo's plays and Eugène Labis's plays were performed in front of audiences and were the most popular in France in the XNUMXth century, I don't think there was any obligation for theaters to refer to contemporary events. Even before the Second World War, the theater in our country did not have this obligation, I think that it came with the second half of the XNUMXth century, and that this requirement that is placed before the theater is of a more recent date. Because not even the entire ancient tragedy and drama referred to contemporary events. The Trojan War was ten centuries before the ancient writers wrote about it, and I think that this obligation was imposed by modern society, but that the theater itself puts it before itself. Sometimes it comes to me, I even feel it as a kind of protest against the fact that the theater must do this, it must do that, to take and do some absolutely benign comedy that does not refer to contemporary events. Because I think that the theater doesn't have to do anything, and that it has to do everything.

Theater penetrates into the depths of life and souls, and does not exist without drama

How does the theater deal with all the banal, simple, vulgar, with this terrible tabloidized social and political reality, and the horrors of neoliberalism that the world and our societies place on us?

I don't know if it is worn at all, and if it should be worn. Because the theater has its own story, its own logic, it is much older and more significant than all that we see, but I think that the theater in Budva was not expelled from the Citadel, so that some things in this city would be different. I don't know if the theater opposes reality, if it creates that rebellion in a person to rebel at least within himself. Theater is woven from something else - every theater tells a story, and each theater is woven from something else. Theater interprets life and the world as it is, by its very nature it opposes any injustice, because it is always on the side of truth, not power. The very fact that texts are made that talk about shocking events and the destinies of some people, and that some existential problem is put into focus by talking about living people who are not starlets, who are not reduced to being "rich, successful and powerful" , on the contrary, they are humiliated and powerless, the theater is rebellious and opposes. It penetrates into the depths of life and human souls, and does not exist without drama, without problems. In "Miracle in Šargan", Simović describes the two soldiers who are looking for the man who freed them from their wounds, to kill him. Because by taking their wounds, he took their identity.