I am interested in the local characters and mythomaniacs

Writer and director Vida Ognjenović will once again bring this historical hero of the Pastrovsk region back to the Citadel. In an interview with "Vijesta", Ognjenović reveals what inspired her to return to Kanjos.

After more than two decades, you decided to do Kanjoš Macedonović with the same partner - the Grad Teatar festival. Where did you find the inspiration to revisit this piece of yours?

"It seemed to me that even in today's context, we should reflect on the subject of conditional relations between states, which largely determine the life and behavior of an individual. Today, it is to a certain extent more intriguing than at the time of the play's premiere. The fact that a man goes to kill a terrorist without knowing about him nothing, just to fulfill the clause of the patronage contract, sounds to me like important material for a stage discussion."

You have continuously worked on the popularization of Montenegrin and especially Budva cultural heritage. Where did the artistic energy that caused you to deal with Budva and Montenegro come from?

"The geographical location itself would not mean much to me if it were not for the vortex of inexhaustible variations of true, mythologized and fictional events, personalities, plots, plots and stories that circulate in this climate. I am fascinated by this heritage that has resisted harsh time, the fragility of memory and the torture of stuttering oral retellings , because, of course, not every storyteller had the gift of a nameless original narrative master.

I am interested in those individuals, "slanted women", as the folk poet calls them, braggarts, braggarts, mythomaniacs, stalkers and cavaliers, and all those ingenious women, patient waitstaff, skilled in reading life's riddles. I'm interested in their world held on the composition of sea and stone, where the mind is really at the sea, and death is very close to the neck."

When we already mention dealing with Montenegro, the logical question arises as to why you have not yet achieved cooperation with our national theater - the Montenegrin National Theater?

"I don't know which comedian made this happen. I don't believe that there was any special effort to prevent it from happening, although, apparently, nothing was done in the opposite direction either."

It is often said that it is not best for a theater performance for the writer to be the director of his play. You have been refuting that thesis for years, especially at the Budva festival.

"Yes, those remarks mostly refer to playwrights who direct their plays, even though they are not professional directors. They, on the other hand, explain that they do it in self-defense, because they have had a bad experience with professionals who make so much noise and beat up the text that the writer writes it at the premiere barely recognized.

And to see miracles, both are right. The director, with deliberate and researched actions, gives a certain text a multitude of completely new directions and dimensions, which the writer cannot even foresee. The playwright feels threatened by this and vehemently protests. Let him write the drama himself, then let him work on it to his heart's content and recut it according to his own discretion and to his own measure.

Well, that's exactly what I'm doing, taking advantage of the fact that I'm a director by profession. Although I have a very good experience with the directors who directed my texts and I care to do at least the premieres myself. Therefore, I perceive all those alterations, shortenings and correspondences, adding or reducing the number of characters, which I do during rehearsals, as great opportunities for the director's workshop, and not as a competition with the writer."

Are you afraid that today's weather and the conditions in which the festival works are not favorable to you and that it will be very difficult to achieve the success of that famous first performance?

- I'm not doing a performance in comparison to the previous one, because I think comparisons between settings in different times make no sense. Neither the former performance can be moved into this social context, nor, on the other hand, can the future one be displaced from this contemporary coloplet of ideas and knowledge with which it should communicate.

By the way, no weather has been kind to me, I don't expect it from this either, because I know it would be an illusion. Of course, I do not deny a certain tension, and why should I. Let's take fear as part of poetics. Apprehension and inhibition are important nuances of the energy of this work. After all, I believe that a work of art is and should be in a kind of polemical relationship with each time, and that is why it is always threatened by the danger of misreading, violent loading and resistance from the outside.

This time of ours is perhaps a little too neurotic and edgy. There is a lot of malicious outrage, simulated and incited rebellions, undermined by sharpened prejudices that try to look like convictions, but in reality they are mostly self-parody. Of course, it's not easy to break through all that and conquer a wider field for direct communication, which the play strives for.

Acting, as we know, is an art of vulnerable breath, somewhat mouth to mouth, soul to soul, feeling to feeling, it needs a cultivated communication space. But there would be trepidation in tamer times, I tell you, it can also be effective.

In the first cast of the play, Žarko Laušević, Petar Božović, Irfan Mensur, Predrag Tasovac, Rade Marković, Petar Kralj etc. played. Do you feel that you have actors of similar quality available today?

"I remember the ensemble of that play from two decades ago with a nice feeling of deep kinship. It was a truly select team of masters that my colleagues envied and with great reason. I salute them on this occasion as well. Now a completely new division will perform, a group of excellent actors who today dominate the stages of our theaters.Among whom, I believe, no one has seen an earlier play.

So it will not be a playful evocation, but they will compete with acting stars whose performance in these roles they know only from the stories of the viewers, which is even more difficult. In fact, it will be a clash with sentimental memories of a period, and of the play that evokes them. But there is some devilishly special appeal in that, I would say. I believe they are already sharpening their claws..."

We are witnessing the lack of space when it comes to the realization of the drama program of the Grad Teatar festival. What are your plans when it comes to the scenes for playing Kanjoš, especially since it is a multi-act drama?

"We hope to return to the Citadel for the first two acts and descend among the churches for the third. Failing that, I don't know how we'll manage to find any shelter from those aggressive summer vibes achieved by maddening decibels and virtual hysteria."

How do you balance your ambassadorial duties with your directing and writing duties in a very tight calendar of your commitments?

"Difficult. I am quoting the writer Borislav Pekić, who once answered a journalist's question about how he manages to write a novel of a thousand pages with all his other obligations. Since it was a TV interview, there was a pause, because the journalist was waiting for the continuation of the answer, and Pekić remained silent , absent-mindedly looking into the distance outside the frame. Here, too, I will continue to defend myself from this question of yours by remaining silent."

And in the end - how would you rate the cooperation with the team that runs Grad Teatar Budva? This year is celebrating a really big jubilee - 25 years since the foundation - what would you, as a person with exceptional experience, recommend them to change and what to insist on in the future?

"I give a high rating to our cooperation. These are people who really spare no energy in working to ensure that Grad Theater survives. I appreciate that they are not mystifiers, that they never act as omniscient managers and wooden experts like those from the joke that they don't distinguish a dog from a sheep.

On the contrary, they are people with a fierce work rhythm, who neither agree to shortcuts, nor give up for a trifle, and yet they try to understand and follow our artistic whims and unpredictability. I would recommend them to make every effort to get the City Theater a permanent performance space, that would bring many good changes to the further life of the festival."

We will give grades at the end

Do you think that the idea of ​​this year being a self-representation is a good one, or does such a concept lead to a kind of closure?

"I understood it as a kind of jubilee summary of the Grad Theater. A festival like this deserves it and in fact it is asked to self-examine twenty-five years of its existence in this way, some of which were a fierce struggle for survival.

I understood this concept of an active review of the past seasons, with a theatrical pressing of five premieres and performances every evening, as the idea of ​​compressing a quarter of a century of existence into thirty-five theatrically intriguing and provocative evenings, and in this way Grad Theater seriously verifies its results in the cultural public to which it belongs. We will give grades at the end, not in advance."

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