"Try, fall, hit yourself, stick a band-aid and move on", is the life motto of actress Ljiljana Đurić, who graduated from the Academy in Sarajevo in the class of Professor Aleksandar Džuverović, and today lives and works in Belgrade.
The actress born in Konjic was "falling", but she always found a "band-aid" to cover the wound and move on. She was a student of her generation, as a high school student she published two collections of stories and at the age of 17 received a city award.
She hesitated whether to enroll in medicine or acting. Her parents cheered for the white coat, but she was still drawn to the planks that mean life. Since then, she has been constantly asking herself whether acting is the right job for her. She got the answer when she wasn't even looking for it.
"I was lucky enough to get a work permit in my second year of study. My happiness turned into a crisis and I left the Academy for two weeks because I was convinced that I could not do that job, that it was not for me. The second crisis was after two years of service and lasted a year. Then there were much more serious crises in life, when you lose your country, city, job, when you find yourself literally in a meadow with your own and someone else's two children and you don't know where you're going. Then you realize that all those previous crises were insignificant. Then, out of compulsion, you start doing your job, in order to earn something, then pedagogic work, and you realize that you can do other jobs very successfully, but you don't want to. I took a break for a few years, convinced that I was done with acting. One morning I woke up and thought I was going to die if I didn't go on stage one more time," Đurićeva tells "Vijesti".
Since the directors thought she was done with acting, no one offered her the role, so she had to take matters into her own hands. She did the monodrama "Life to Remember", a play that was talked about and written about a lot, and realized that she couldn't do without acting.
“Film, television, it's a nice joke, but it never meant anything to me. I love live speech and a live audience in front of me. The older I get, the more I realize that I have found the right path. If I hadn't had such a life situation to try other jobs, I might never have been involved in pedagogy and I wouldn't have discovered that acting heals. And it really heals. It gives you security and allows you to emotionally live and have a real experience", says the actress who was an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, also had an acting school for children and helped the little ones to find themselves through acting, for which many are grateful to her today.
There are dear and less dear roles. The ones you never get enough of, but also the ones you wouldn't play again. But there are also roles that mark your career to some extent. One of the roles that helped her realize that acting is what she wants to tackle is the character of Julia in the play "The Brewer" by Božidar Zečević.
"It was a dress rehearsal. I did everything right, and yet everything was desperate. No one knows how to tell me what's wrong, and yet that's not it. Professor Brane Đorđević, whom I loved very much, came and asked me what the problem was. I tell him I don't know, but I know I don't like anything. He watches the rehearsal and tells me: Either you like what you do, or you hate it. And I realize that it solved my problem - I had an aversion to it, but I couldn't define it. At the second dress rehearsal, I played with that attitude and did an outstanding role. Thanks to that role, I also experienced a true catharsis and everything I did in my life was worth that one moment. The play was going on and at one point I stopped acting, sat down, cried and said: Guys, my name is not Sibina Zlatić, but Ljiljana Đurić. He was a complete stranger in the hall, on stage, and I was just in tears. I felt like a newborn who knew he was a newborn, so pure and empty. The audience felt it too, because after a short break there was a huge applause", she recalls with a smile the moment when she experienced an emotional cleansing of her soul.
As he points out, theater is a collective art. It happens that there are plays in the repertoire that do not suit you because you are young. When the performances come that you might have wanted to play then because of age "you are no longer in the repertoire".
"Due to some combination of circumstances, some roles simply slip away from you. I love Brecht, although I haven't played him much. But, I would do something from him again because thanks to him you 'dig' for yourself every time. I like that distance and at the same time maximum participation. That amazement that you transmit not to the audience, but amazement to yourself. There are a thousand and one roles I would play, but just as many I wouldn't," says Đurić, who is convinced that acting will always be there - stronger than all crises.
It's been that way for centuries.
"Acting is now in transition, not only because of the economic crisis, but also because of the technological crisis. The actor has always been a roving artist and that's how it will be - he'll travel, "put up tents" and look for an audience. Forms, technologies have changed, they will continue to change, but the essence has remained the same. The art of the scene, movement and words must survive," says the actress, who tells young people to try their hand at what they love, what they want to do.
After all, how would they know if this is what "lies" with them and what is healing them.
"Man is like a bird - he forgets everything and loves to live"
She presented herself to the Nikšić audience with the monodrama "Petri's Wreath" based on the novel of the same name by Dragoslav Mihailović. The director is Duško Anđić, and she did the dramatization of the text.
The character of Petrija was somehow destined for her. She dealt with him three times and each time in a different way, because she always found something new in the character of a woman who had lost everything, but not the will to live.
"The first time I started doing a play, I was looking for a story with which I would make good money. And for the year, I made really nice money. Then it was no longer interesting to me and I stopped playing it. Years passed and I don't know if I started to think about Petria in a different way, but I realized that this is not what I did the first time. I felt the need to do it again because I saw a different woman. I wanted to find an answer to the question of how it is possible to live after so many tragedies", says the actress, for whom the aforementioned play brought many awards.
At the 11th Festival of Small Scenes of the Republika Srpska, it was declared the best play, while in 2007 it was awarded the "Silver Knight" at the International Theater Festival in Moscow. Then there was a pause again, and when she started "digging" herself again, she also scratched Petrija's figure.
"That Petrija is following me somewhere. It is a traditional text, traditional acting, and yet everything is new. Now I admire her strength to survive, I admire life. That fascinates me and I emphasize it, which Mihailović also likes".
The essence of the character, even if it seems so to her, is contained in the part when Petrija says: "Man is such a bird - he forgets everything." I don't know what kind of pain he has, in the end he will always get rid of it and forget it. And he continued to live even if nothing terrible happened to him. Panti remembers a little more than that, it's not that he forgot everything, but somehow as if through a fog, as if it happened to someone else, not him. It's such a carrion. He likes to live, fowl."
"I'm constantly discovering new Ljiljana, everything can be found in it"
She would present herself as an endlessly curious person who is searching for herself and for a lot of information all her life.
"Anything can be found in that search. Very often I find a different Ljiljana and I am happy when I find some aspect that I did not know before. When I was young, it affected me, surprised me, so I used to feel the need to justify myself, explain, prove. Now I realize that I am very rich that I have so many Lilies and that even at this age I have the strength to discover a new one every time," says the actress, who as a child dreamed of being a cosmonaut and instead imagined some new worlds to "fly" around, when the universe is already unattainable to her.
He likes to travel and admits that he spends everything he earns on trips because there is always some "corner" where he finds people similar to him.
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