At a moment when, as he says, there was cultural prosperity in Yugoslavia, he decided to swim from safe waters into the unknown and become a freelance artist. It was in 1983 and he never regretted it. After all - "an actor is an actor".
His performances last for decades, he is welcomed and sent off by audiences around the world with applause and ovations, he acts, directs, writes, teaches, UNDP is a goodwill ambassador for tolerance and against violence, retired and, as he says, a normal inhabitant of planet Earth.
He played and directed in about 170 theater plays, shot dozens of films and TV series, received more than 100 awards, including seven for lifetime achievement. He says of himself that he does not engage in theater to act, but to say something, "he is rich in nostalgia for time and space" and happy to be "an actor who defends the illusion of the theater", because that is "the meaning of art".
At the recently concluded 20th International Actor's Festival in Nikšić, he was the president of the jury that decided on the awards. In the break between two performances, two realities or offered illusions, this "duo drama" was created because, as he said, everything is theater, including the interview - we both "prepared to make the best possible impression", I ask questions, he it fits, even the stage is there (terrace of the bar), and instead of artificial light (reflectors) we have the Sun.
His name is Zijah A. Sokolović.
"An actor..is an actor...is an actor" - what is an actor?
As a young man, I had the good fortune to be involved in theater - I was the first generation of educated actors in Sarajevo and Bosnia and Herzegovina. So I got the opportunity to answer or think about if I'm an actor, what am I? To answer the question of why I do it, and secondly, what am I in fact to do it, so that later I was overtaken by the question of what it is to be an actor, who invented that communication in general and what it meant that has survived to this day. So, it is something much deeper in the nature of man.
From time to time, as I grew older, my relations with it became more and more complex and required much longer and more serious answers than those who first forced me to make the play "An actor... is an actor... is an actor ”, then I understood that the salvation of humanity is in the theater, that only a living man can to some extent explain all the beauty and all the tragedy of the world. All other forms are not so effective, as you would say, because theater is terribly serious, serious in that human panic situation to explain the world in which man lives and to explain man's nature. And somehow I managed to put answers that still bother me in my plays and in my relationship to the theater.
Are you satisfied with the answers you reached?
What is fantastic, the answer to what I am, or what the posers are, or an actor, I searched for in the play "An actor...is an actor...is an actor" 46 years ago, and I am still answering that question by playing that play. It means that this question is so complex, that it is interesting even for the time that passes, and it is being played. What bothered me a bit was that when I would find some sense of the answer, it was lost over time. I lost myself too, because I became different in some things, but it didn't confuse me much.
I tried to stay in that and all the plays I did, from "Glumac", then "Cabares, Cabarei", "Međujire 0-24", and then "Medvjed", and "Democracy", which came out later, and "Left-Right Actor" where I went the farthest in that way of using the theater in explaining the theater itself, even "Goja", which I did last year, is a difficult consideration of the actor today, as an actor.
Some of your plays, such as "An actor...is an actor...is an actor", "Cabares, Cabarei", "Rođenje - Kobajagi brought me a stork", "The Bear", "Interlude"... have lasted for decades. When you created them, did you believe that you would play them for so many years and in so many countries?
I am also burdened by that type of analysis and I would not like to return to those thoughts in any, except for a serious element. But, I think when I chose the topics, they came from a situation that in my world was not explored in that way, or the questions were not asked in those plays in the way that I asked them and sought an answer. Which means that the duration of the plays depends on that first impulse of time in that time when they were created.
Some times, both in the actor and in the man, have not changed. The questions remained constant and this ignorance remained. Maybe only with the play "Lejvo - drzesno glucum" was I aware that it is a topic that is absolute. And then I was amazed, how I couldn't find it earlier, and I kept spinning. I went to coffee with that theme, I went to sleep, I traveled with it, and it took me 55 years to say - that's it: the themes that were chosen and that persistence not to give up ideas, because if you give up the theater , then all this that I was thinking about, what I wanted, goes to transience.
How does your understanding and approach to theater, acting, and acting differ when you are an actor from when you are a director?
I played in many beautiful plays in assemblies, so I returned from some solitude to society, to become part of the whole, not to forget myself and not to become alienated. It was interesting to search for the way I think about plays. And then, living in Austria, a wonderful actress, Fide Iral, with whom I played a wonderful show for two hours in German, said to me: "Why don't you direct?" Although at the beginning I said that people were fed up with my acting, I still decided to do a couple of plays, to see how I understand it when it's a demanding topic. And then I started to change as a man.
Perhaps the play "Left-right actor" came from that. That ease of agreeing to all given circumstances. This means that even in life, a person should easily agree to live only if he understands the given circumstances. If he doesn't understand that he's in a midlife crisis, then really neither the doctor will help him, nor the hemorrhoids, nor the prostate. And then I got that ease to try to understand myself, or myself through some piece that now needs me to change the way I play. And it was really unusual. It took me time to accept that one form, to, if I may say so, neutralize everyday life, usual habits, relationships, until directing. I started changing really cheekily. And I started looking at the world absolutely differently.
Did you like the change you saw in yourself and in society?
I liked it because I discovered in myself absolutely unknown natural abilities as a human being that existed and were not discovered because I was not in those given circumstances. Theater is omnipotent in many forms and we must use it as such, at least in research or viewing. Not to watch a play and go home, not to look at our life and get angry or go drinking, or to seek treatment at a psychiatrist, but to try to understand ourselves. That's the beauty of theater.
When I started playing plays at the Academy, I was both imaginative and likable, I had the wit of the mentality of that country and that city. It was all cute, but it wasn't what interested me. I asked myself if I could do something else and I saw that I could. I wanted to think and say something, and that's how "An actor...is an actor" was born. The meaning of my role is to tell people something, and for people to believe it. We are in a situation now where we believe more in a witch doctor in Africa, when he drums, than in a president who is on television every day. And so is a witch doctor. He also has a role, he has the same means, it's the same theater.
The point is that I, in my commitment as an actor, use the opportunity to say something to people that they can only hear in this form. I gave up being an actor in any form. I wanted to stay where I wanted to say something.
You often mention Austria in conversation. How much has she changed you, both as a person and as an artist?
I left my job in 1983, at a time of cultural richness, and became an independent artist. I no longer had a salary, no health insurance. I decided on a kind of solitude - to do what I think I should do and to live by it. So, I was already in some kind of distant capitalism. Everyone was shocked. And that might be a secret of Austria, that I had to play every show with the belief that people will come to see me again, because that's what I live for. And I don't want to devalue that, to now make some comedies that I will sell, when there wasn't even any in that sense.
So, I have to play the show as if this is the beginning of the next one, so that people will come to see me. When I came to that Austria, then I saw that they think more or less the same as me, existentially, and that they have to work 100% for their existence. That all theaters play the same, with full commitment, that they do not change the text, that they do not cancel performances, even when they are sick and when they are not sick, that they all come to rehearsals at the same time, that they have absolute artistic engagement in that domain that they can give. I entered a completely different world.
When you say discipline here, people get goosebumps, because according to them, discipline implies lack of creativity. I don't belong to that. I belong to some individual imagination deeply rooted in man that needs to come out in that form. Having met the actors there, he realized that I don't have to change, but that I just have to enrich myself with some other things. I had the feeling that I was not in Austria, because we know what Austria is like. That, we know everything. We are people who know everything. Just say country, we know everything. Name it, we know it all. And we can talk about it. Just tell me the subject. It changed me in that sense because I added to my life, added in a form that people live there in that way and make a show.
You said that plays can't last forever, but books can. Is that why you decided to write?
Everyone is persuading me to write a personal book, not only about the experiences, but about the meeting of the plays with the time in which they passed. It was different to play "An actor.. is an actor..." in 1978, and it is different today. Both in sentences and in words. Playing on Brioni with Ivica Vidović, Pero Kvrgić, Rado Šerbedžija, she was also there Marina Vujcic, her husband is the founder of the festival with Šerbedžija, who told me: "Why don't you publish the text of your play as a book, because this is all wonderful? To leave something". I asked her how and she said that we should compose that text, so that people who have seen the play say that it is a text and not some improvisation. I know exactly what I wanted, which theatrical elements I used to save myself as an actor. Saved in the idea, in the game. And then I put it into text.
That was the second edition of the text. The first was in 1978 when Fabijan Šovagović, a great actor, after watching my play wrote an essay about it. I was shocked what he saw in that play - he put everything I had learned, what I knew, what I saw and what I wanted. He told me that I had to publish a book of that text. When the book came out, he told me it was a document. And then when Marina suggested it, I took it much more seriously. I said that the text must be some proof that people saw the play. Then we invited people who saw the play to write about it and they wrote. And when they started writing it was very touching. How much people love that profession, how much people appreciate that I was engaged in that profession, and how much respect people had for me talking about this profession for so many years. That was fascinating to me.
We had seven editions of books. And of course, money is always a problem and we stopped. I also published a book for "Cabares, cabarei". And it went like a charm and even today people still want to read about it. And now I have come to the third book, the publisher is from Podgorica, "Nova knjiga". He was in Brioni and came after the show to congratulate me, to say that it was fantastic. He told me that we have to publish a book. You know, when people are blown away by a show, they promise everything. He promised a book, I said good, and the book is really here. Most of the people from the first book "An actor...is an actor" have died. And that is something fascinating. Pero Kvrgić, Ćirilov, Šova, Stefanovski, Pero Kvesić, the journalist who first interviewed me and said that my show is for 101 people. He then said - it is fantastic in the play that only one person understands, and everyone is watching. Now people from this time wrote.
In your biography it says: you live in Vienna, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Podgorica, Skopje... What does that mean - that you are everywhere, Or that you are still looking for yourself?
Even before, in the former Yugoslavia, I was not a member of the League of Communists. I was a member of maybe the theater council. So, dealing with myself and acting, I didn't want to belong to a whole, because I would start thinking like a whole. That's what I was afraid of. And that going to freelance actors was the freedom to look for a theater that interests me.
If I were to declare myself in any sense, I would limit myself both territorially and mentally, both with people and with myself, to a certain space. I would have to belong to him in terms of acting and, ultimately, engagement. Not belonging to anyone in that sense, and being born as such, I chose the theater, and the theater exists in all the cities of the world.
That's how I thought - that I belong to all the theaters in the whole world. As people want otherwise, that is now their private matter. Listing the cities is actually an irony and a desire not to belong to anyone in particular. Whoever wants to accept me both as a person and as an actor can accept me even as a pensioner in that sense, that's fine. But I don't want to be classified under any restrictions, because then my theater will also be classified in the time in which we live.
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