Biljana Srbljanović
DEATH IS NOT A BICYCLE
(to be stolen from you)

Premiere on “Ljuba Tadić” Stage on June 17th 2011
Duration: 2h 5’

Composer

Digital Collage*

Director’s Collaborator

Assistant Costume Designer

Nadežda

Dad

Ensign Jokić

Aleksandra

Fat girl

Ropac

Lady

Aleksa

Musicians:

Iva Milošević

Nikola Dragović

Željko Ivović

Mihajlo Rajković, Uroš Antić

Lazar Čolović, Danilo Tirnanić

ABOUT THE PLAY

After the plays Belgrade Trilogy, the Supermarket, The Locusts and Barbelo, On Dogs and Children, the Yugoslav Drama Theatre now presents Biljana Srbljanović’s new play Death Is Not a Bicycle (that they can steal form you).
Also here, there are once again those characters we already know coming from Biljana’s world: perverted and too well fed children, immature middle-aged weaklings, their peers caught into vicious circles of unfulfilled marriages, old men seizing for themselves a future they will not get a chance to greet, and of course - their children, trapped in relationships from the past which they cannot overcome, along with self-absorbed, ambitious politicians, mothers and fathers who are willing to walk across corpses even in their own house.

And, as it usually happens in her pieces, the fate of these people living in their small, family hells in which they have imprisoned themselves are only seemingly unrelated and separated from each other. They intersect and overlap one another during the story, thus creating a cynically sloped, ruthlessly focused and just therefore a very disturbing, painfully true picture of the society in which we live.

Biljana Srbljanović: The questions are always the same - what is that which confronts us forever in the generations of parents and children, how painful is the process of growing up, lasting sometimes even till a late old age, and how does death bring, besides the logical sadness, a strange kind of serenity as well? This play speaks of my father’s generation, the “Walter Defends Sarajevo”- generation, along with this generation of mine, the ‘lost’ generation. It speaks also about all those following us, who will continue the cycle of family conflicts, obsessions, great love and rage. This play is, also for me, first of all, a funny play. But also I think that these exceptional actors have found the right tone, somewhere between grief and melancholy, between the comedy of life and death.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

BILJANA SRBLJANOVIC

She was born in 1970, graduated in dramaturgy from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. She teaches dramaturge at graduate course at FDA. Plays: Belgrade Trilogy, Family Stories, The Fall, Supermarket, America part II, Locusts, Barbelo, Of Dogs And Children.
Awards: Premio Europa – New Theatrical Realities, five Steria’s prizes, Ernst Toller Prize, Slobodan Selenić’s Prize...
She lives in Belgrade, Paris and Baku.

Slobodan Unkovski: I would like to make a certain sort of lament over Serbia (...) I would like to see what could have been here if it was what should have been. For example, what are the missed chances, why is the state of collective mind (or soul) just the way it is. (...) Of course, art holds no answers. I do not know what is all that I am supposed to know to be able to answer why something is as it is, but I can see HOW it is. And, that 'how' is a thing I would like to show, to make it seen, and to draw the attention.

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ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

SLOBODAN UNKOVSKI

Has directed productions across the former Yugoslavia, in Italy, Russia, USA, Belgium, Sweden, Greece... His first direction in Yugoslav Drama Theatre was in 1982 with the play Hrvatski Faust (The Croatian Faust) by Slo­bodan Šnajder. Following year this production toured to Theatre of Nations Festival in Nancy. His directing for YDT include: Pozorišne iluzije (The Theatre of Illusions) by Pierre Corneille in 1991, Bure baruta (Powder Keg) by Dejan Dukovski in 1995 (YDT has participated with this produc­tion at eight festivals in Europe and in the world), Šine (Tracks) by Milena Marković in 2002, The Seagull by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov in 2003, Brod za lutke (Boat for Dolls) and As You Like It by Shakespeare. He taught acting and directing at post-graduate couses at several universities in USA. Currently, he is a professor of Theatre Directing at the Faculty of Drama Arts in Skopje.

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REVIEWS

Universal metamorphoses
In the play Metamorphoses set on the Main Stage "Ljuba Tadic" of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, nothing is fixed, not even that which is unchanging in the most open structures of theatre set design. The director and the regular associate of our theatre, Sven Jonke (from the art group Numen) did not create a classical set design, but a kind of authentic installation that may be transformed. In every performance the actors transform and create it themselves. They wrap huge amounts of self-adhesive tape around several tall columns, which are the only fixed parts of the decor, creating thus an abstract, airy and glossy installation (...)
Although the spoken text may seem fixed in its final release, it is, so to speak, also a product of the working process, being a free adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. (In the play’s program it is signed by Popovski and the playwright Jelena Mijović).
This epic is composed of fifteen singing, each of which includes one or more ancient myths with a particular love theme. Their common feature is that love within them requires payment or for some other reasons leads to a literal transformation, usually from a human to an animal, plant or stone. Such a dramaturgy involves constant metamorphosis within the acting processes, pending between imitation and narration, building of a world of fiction and its breakdown, the processes of experiencing and commenting. Such a style of acting was most articulated by the excellent Tamara Vučković, who knew how to drag us into the inner drama of Echo or Juno, and then, within seconds, to kick us out agin creating a clear ironic distance. A similar principle of this game in rougher shape however, with more pronounced differences, was built by Nebojša Glogovac, playng Tiresias, Terejos and Kinaris. This does not mean that the other actors like Nikola Đuričko, Jelena Đokić, Goran Šušljik, Nada Šargin, Radovan Vujović i Marija Vicković didn’t not achieve good artistic results, but it only means that their play had other qualities (such as a temperamental playfulness by Jelena Đokić, for example). It simply didn’t include the special articulation in the transitions of this genre and style.
The director further developed the general principle of metamorphosis through a bipolar system, where the other part was choreography (authored by Dalija Aćin). The most symbolic expression of this was in the excellent scene in which the retelling of the enormous number of murders, seen almost as overthrowing of sheaves, was "illustrated" by the constant falling and raising of the blowing break-dance dancers Darko Bursać and Luka Lukić...
Without that initial irony in the function of an alibi, it can be assumed that the processes of constant transformations happening during this performance, at a certain point it will reach a more defined distinction between the narration and the imitation in this generally artistically and intellectually valuable project.
Ivan Medenica, NIN 

Joys and Sufferings of the Ephemeral
The play Metamorphoses, directed by Aleksandar Popovski is a coherent play performed consistently in its idea, style and acting, on the field of a highly stylized expression.(...)
The music, both instrumental and vocal, which ranges from ethereal, minimal electronics to an easy, hypnotic pop (the band Silence), also has an important role in underlining the emotional meanings, but also in determining the rhythm of the play.
A series of songs performed live by actors also make an essential contribution in the deepening of the emotional effect, but they also have a Brechtian function of cutting the illusion or the creation of an analytical, auto-reflexive attitude towards the game and the very act of presentation. Similarly, serving the function of alienation are also the microphones, through which the actors in certain scenes deliver the text, building thus a distance to the presented topics. General issues get a new, theatricalized context avoiding the pathetic. (It should be noted here that the issues which are addressed here, being the issues of love and suffering, are quite risky to deal with in terms of easy falling into clichés and pathetic). In turn, this leads to the very framing of this story, emphasizing the theatricality, that make the play Metamorphoses, on the one hand, a specific honouring to the trend of telling a story within a story. On the other hand, the play by Popovski is a penetrating, lush mosaic painted by dense and bold colors about the temptations of love, that arise as a metaphor of life itself. The vulnerability and the elusiveness of the feelings of love, the inspiration that never fade nor dry out, that does not die but retains its vitality even in our time of the horrible, destructive materialism.
Ana Tasić, Politika

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