A work that ceases to be questioned becomes an artifact, not living art.

Composer and director Irena Popović She conceives contemporary opera as an open art form, in which time itself is constantly questioned through music, voice and stage. Her chamber opera “The Island”, based on the libretto Jelena Novak according to legend about Jacinta Kunic, starts from the cultural heritage of the Boka Bay, but translates it into contemporary artistic language, opening up questions of memory, identity, duration and relationship to time.

The work was premiered last year in a concert version, as a commission by KotorArt realized in partnership with the Me&Us Foundation, and at this year's KotorArt it will experience its first full stage realization. The stage premiere will be on July 19th at the Church of the Holy Spirit in Kotor, and on July 21st the play will be a guest at the Budva Grad Theatre, at the Mogren Fortress, as part of the cooperation between the two festivals. Ostrvo is a co-production of the Podgorica City Theatre, the Music Center of Montenegro and KotorArt, and the performance will feature: Dubravka Drakic, Olivera Ticevic, Sofija Ivanovic, Boka Chamber Ensemble and the author herself.

After last year's concert premiere, the opera Ostrvo is getting its full stage production this year. What does this transition from concert to stage form mean to you, and how did working on the performance influence your further thinking about the work?

I do not think that the stage realization is the final stage of a work. On the contrary, it is a new reading of the same idea. A work that ceases to be questioned becomes a cultural artifact, not a living art. What interests me is not how to preserve opera, but how to restore its ability to produce thought. In this sense, I feel a closeness to Peter Brook, who freed the theater from excess representation, with Heinrich Goebbels, who showed that musical theater can be an independent thought form, but also with Hans-Tis Leman, whose theory of postdramatic theatre opens up the possibility that a performance is not based on illustration, but on experience. Paradoxically, the stage work on Ostrvo did not lead to addition, but to subtraction. Through the rehearsal process, we discarded everything that was superfluous, everything that explained, described or closed off meaning. The performance became more stripped down, more precise and, I believe, more radical. Today, I am much more interested in reduction than accumulation. Art does not become stronger when it says more, but when it has the courage to say only what is necessary. I believe that contemporary opera should not offer answers or illustrate a story. Its responsibility is to open a space in which the audience becomes an active participant in the creation of meaning, which is close to reflections Jacques Rancière about the emancipated viewer. For me, that was precisely the point of the stage realization of 'The Island' - not to make the work bigger, but more truthful.

The legend of Jacinta Kunić has been preserved in the collective memory of Boka Kotorska through generations. What in this continuity of memory interested you as an author and how did you build your opera from it?

I was not attracted to the legend of Jacinta, but rather the fact that it has survived in collective memory. This means that through it, the community preserves something much deeper than an event. It preserves an experience that could not be forgotten. The legend has never interested me as historical material, but as a space in which the community preserves questions to which it has no final answers. Myths survive precisely because they do not offer facts, but patterns of human experience that are reread in every time.

How important was the space of women's memory, preserved outside of official history, in shaping your Jacinta?

I am particularly interested in the fact that women's stories have survived for centuries outside of official history: through legends, lullabies, embroidery, rituals and family memories. Men's history has mostly recorded wars, borders, conquests and victories. Women's memory preserved relationships, absences, everyday life, worries and what seemed unimportant, but actually constitutes the essence of a society. I think that it is precisely in this invisible space that the deepest layer of our identity is preserved. That is why I did not experience Jacinta as a heroine of fidelity or waiting. For me, she is not a woman who waits. She is a woman who endures. That is the essential difference. The Island is not an opera about waiting, but about perseverance, about inner freedom and the ability to remain true to one's own truth in a world that constantly asks us to be someone else. In this sense, the legend was not a starting point for reconstructing the past, but for reflecting on the present. I am not interested in what really happened to Jacinta. I am interested in why her story still refuses to be forgotten today.

How was your understanding of Jacinta as a figure of presence and duration shaped in the music and stage language of the opera?

The biggest challenge was to avoid psychologization. I was not interested in Jacinta becoming a character whose emotions we would follow, but a space through which we contemplate time, absence, memory and permanence. These are questions that cannot be explained. They can only be experienced. This is precisely why I believe that music has a unique philosophical position among the arts. It does not describe the world, but changes our relationship to time. And time, in my opinion, is the main protagonist of 'The Island'. Not the chronological time of events, but the inner time of a person, the time that remembers, lasts and does not agree to linearity. That is why, throughout the work on the play, we increasingly rejected. Stripped it down. Radicalized it. The stage and musical language became increasingly reduced, almost ascetic. Electronic sound spaces were not built to impress, but to open up a space of perception, a space in which time can almost be heard. In contrast to this reduction stand the gentle, almost ritual melodies of our grandmothers. I do not perceive them as a folklore quote, but as a form of female memory transmitted by voice. This clash of stripped-down electronic landscapes and archaic female singing is not an aesthetic contrast for me, but a meeting of two times - the future and deep memory. For me, Ostrvo is not a play about Jacinta. It is an attempt to create a space on stage in which presence becomes more important than event, and duration more important than plot. I think that this is exactly the kind of experience we miss the most today.

The three female voices in the opera do not represent three different characters, but different temporal planes of the same consciousness. How did you develop the relationship between the three female voices in the opera and what did this polyphonic structure enable you to do in a dramatic and musical sense?

I think that three voices is not a dramaturgical procedure. They are a way of thinking. Western dramaturgy has long rested on the idea of ​​one center, one hero and one voice. I am interested in polyphony as an ethical model of the world. Not because it is more complex, but because it is truer. In every human being, memory, experience and possibility exist at the same time. That's why even Jacinta couldn't have one vote. That idea was transferred to the choice of three different vocal poetics. For me, a classically formed operatic voice carries discipline, tradition and centuries of musical memory. The voice of a girl or a young girl brings fragility and insecurity, openness and the possibility that the world is yet to be spoken. The actor's voice brings in what opera sometimes suppresses: breath, fracture, immediacy and human imperfection. But it is important to me that it is not a conflict between different aesthetics, nor an attempt to replace one poetics with another. On the contrary. I'm interested in the moment when virtuosity becomes a support for fragility. In which technical perfection does not demonstrate power, but creates space for the imperfect voice to be heard. For me, it is a deeply ethical and not just an aesthetic decision.

As a composer, my greatest challenge was to write music in which none of these poetics would be compromised. I did not want the actor's voice to imitate the operatic voice, nor did I want the operatic voice to give up its nature. I was interested in how each voice could preserve its own identity, while at the same time becoming part of a common musical architecture. As a director, the challenge was even more complex. It was necessary to build a performance in which these different vocal natures would not only be heard, but would learn to exist together. To listen to each other, support each other, and open up space for each other. This is not a direction of conflict, but a direction of trust.

Perhaps that is why the metaphor of a tapestry is closest to what I wanted to achieve. Each thread has its own color, texture, and trajectory. None is more important than the other. It is only when they intersect that a picture emerges. Thus, 'The Island' is not an opera about a single voice, but about the possibility that different voices together shape a truth that is greater than any individual experience.

Your authorial poetics often blurs the boundaries between musical, dramatic and performative expression. How is your interdisciplinary approach shaped specifically in the opera 'The Island'?

Contemporary art interests me the moment it stops organizing the world through hierarchies. I think that is one of its most important questions. In 'The Island' I was not looking for a single language, but for the possibility for different languages ​​to exist together. For the operatic voice to support the acting, for electronics to open up space for ritual singing, for the body to think together with the music. Not through conflict, but through mutual trust. Such a network of relationships represents for me the feminine principle of creation. Not as a question of identity, but as a question of structure. The world does not have to be organized around a single center to be whole. That is why I believe that the future of opera is not in defending tradition, but in creating new relationships. Not between disciplines, but between people, voices and different experiences of the world. For me, this is an aesthetic, ethical and political position at the same time.

In recent years, you have increasingly been both a composer and director of your musical and theatrical works. What does this dual authorial perspective bring to your work on opera?

My creativity in recent years has naturally led me to the need to think about the work as a whole. I do not start from the form, nor from pre-set theatrical rules. I start from the idea. Each work seeks its own logic, its own architecture and its own language. If we approach it through ready-made models, it very quickly becomes an illustration of the already known. That is why I am interested in contemporary musical theatre as a space in which it is possible to rethink the relationship between sound, body, space and time. Not as a sum of different elements, but as a single system of thought.

In this sense, Heiner Goebbels is important to me. His work encouraged me not to accept opera as a closed historical model, but as an open form that constantly questions its own language. I think that this is the responsibility of every author today - not to repeat existing patterns, but to create new ones. I do not believe that art exists to confirm what we already know. Its role is to change the way we think, perceive and build relationships with the world. That is why for me every new work is an attempt to find a new language, not a new story.

The Boka Chamber Ensemble in this work is not just a performing apparatus, but becomes a kind of extended voice of Jacinta, through whispers, speech and sound. How did you develop the relationship between the performer, voice and electronics in the opera?

I think one of the key questions of contemporary opera is how to overcome the hierarchy between those who supposedly carry meaning and those who support it. I am not interested in such a division. In 'The Island' the ensemble is not a performing apparatus, nor is the electronics an addition to the acoustic world. Everything belongs to the same system of thought. Voice, instrument, speech, whisper and electronics are not different layers of the performance, but different modalities of one and the same presence. I am not interested in the boundaries between vocal and instrumental, between acoustic and electronic. I am interested in the places where they intertwine. It is in these interspaces that meaning is created.

I think the future of opera will depend on our ability to abandon the hierarchical models inherited from the past. I am not interested in a work organized around a single center. I am interested in a network of relationships. More of a weave than a construction. More of an organism than a system. In that sense, the Boka Chamber Ensemble is not an orchestra with an opera. It is the opera.

In your author's text on opera, you treat silence as an equal dramaturgical element. How difficult is it today to direct the audience towards an experience of contemplation and duration?

We live in a time that produces an excess of sound, images, and meaning. However, I am interested in what emerges when that excess is withdrawn. That is why I do not experience silence as an absence, but as one of the last spaces of artistic freedom. After John Cage It was no longer possible to think of silence as emptiness. It became a real artistic material. But I am also interested in its other face, the one that belongs to women's cultural memory. The silence of lullabies. The silence of rituals. The silence of relationships, in which the same movement is repeated for hours, with almost nothing said. It is not a silent silence. It is a silence that carries experience, memory and time.

In 'The Island', silence is an equal compositional and dramaturgical material. Just as a tapestry is not created in one stroke, but with thousands of almost invisible stitches, so meaning does not appear all at once. It is slowly imprinted in time. Silence is the space in which the work continues to exist even when the sound stops. Perhaps that is why I think the future of art is not in producing even more content, but in defending the space of attention.

Sometimes I think my next artistic task is to write the quietest opera in the world. Not an opera without sound, but an opera in which silence will be its most responsible performer. I believe there are things that only silence can perform.

Last year, KotorArt commissioned and supported the creation of the opera, and this year's realization is being realized in co-production with the Podgorica City Theater and the Music Center of Montenegro. How important are such co-productions for the creation of new opera works in the region?

I think that contemporary opera can no longer be created within closed institutions. By its very nature, it requires dialogue, risk and trust. That is why co-productions are not just a production model for me, but a model of artistic thinking. I find it especially valuable when different institutions gather around a new work and are ready to share responsibility for its creation. In a time when culture is often reduced to managing the existing repertoire, supporting a new work is an act of courage. It is much easier to preserve tradition than to create the future.

I believe that the time of large closed cultural narratives is behind us. I see the future in a network of cooperation, in the meeting of different poetics, experiences and institutions that do not give up their own identity, but enrich it with dialogue. Art has always been created in places of encounter, not isolation. In this sense, the cooperation between KotorArt, the City Theater Podgorica and the Music Center of Montenegro has symbolic value for me. It shows that contemporary opera can be a joint cultural project, and not the property of one institution or one city.

Maybe that's where I see the future of the region. Not in building bigger cultural centers, but in building stronger cultural ties. I think that 21st century art will survive through cooperation, not competition. It's not just a production model. It's an aesthetic, ethical, and political position.

Many thanks to you, sir. Ratimir Martinović, to the lady Sandra Vujovic and to the gentleman Vučić Ćetković that they joined forces and decided to give birth to 'The Island' together.

In just a few days, the opera will go from an open rehearsal in Podgorica to the premiere in Kotor and a guest appearance at the Budva Grad Theatre. How do you experience the play's festival journey and meeting different audiences?

The festival life of a play is not a question of dynamics for me, but of context. I do not believe that a work remains the same when it changes space. Every architecture, every community and every audience produces a new reading. In that sense, a play is never finished. It continues to emerge through encounters.

It is especially important to me that 'The Island' begins its journey precisely in Montenegro. This is not just a geographical framework, but a cultural and emotional space from which the work grew. At the same time, I am not interested in locality as a boundary, but as a starting point. I believe that every truly local story, if it is artistically honest, becomes universal.

Festivals are today rare places where art can still establish a dialogue between different poetics, cultures and audiences. In an era of closed cultural systems, they become spaces of exchange, not just representation. That is why I do not experience this journey from Podgorica to Kotor and Budva as a series of performances, but as a process in which the work changes its resonance. Its essence does not change, but the way it opens up to the space and the people who temporarily make it their own.

The premiere of your ballet Night of the Gathering of the Century on June 30th opened the 40th Budva City Theatre. What does that kind of symbolism and responsibility mean to you in a creative sense?

I do not see the opening of the festival as a recognition of a work, but as a trust in an artistic idea. In a time when culture often chooses safety, opening the jubilee festival with a new original work means believing that art still has the right to take risks. This ballet is given special weight by the dialogue with I don't care. Great works do not survive because they belong to the past, but because each time recognizes new questions in them. That is why I was not interested in illustrating his text, but in establishing a contemporary artistic conversation with it. Perhaps this is precisely the meaning of great festivals - not to confirm the canon, but to constantly reread it. I believe that culture is not created by preserving heritage, but by the courage to rethink it every time.

Although the opera is based on a local legend from Boka Bay, “The Island” addresses universal themes of love, loyalty, memory and waiting. How important is the question of how the audience experiences and “takes with them” a work of art after a performance to you?

I dare not think about what emotion the audience leaves with... That question, in my opinion, is less important than the question of the ontology of the work of art: what the work is and how it continues to exist. I believe that art is not the transmission of meaning, but the creation of a new experience of reality. Love, memory, fidelity or duration are not topics for me. These are different forms of existence that art does not illustrate, but produces as an experience. I believe that opera should not be a closed system or a finished world that is exhausted in its own performance. It should remain an open structure, able to continue in the one who listens to it, to accept new readings and new contexts. Paradoxically, this is precisely why the Island is not a closed space for me. It is open. Open to different meanings, to different experiences and to different times. Perhaps this is exactly the ontology of the work of art that I strive for - that the opera is not an object that ends with the lowering of the curtain, but a living form that continues to exist in thought, memory and time. A work of art, in my opinion, is not what ends in front of the audience, but what begins only then.