METAMORPHOSES

After Ovid
Aleksandar Popovski
Jelena Mijović

Director ALEKSANDAR POPOVSKI

Dramaturg Jelena Mijović
Set Design NUMEN
Costume Design Jelena and Svetlana Proković
Music Silence
Choreographer Dalija Aćin
Speech Ljiljana Mrkić-Popović
Production Manager Ana Ćurčin

Premiere on Ljuba Tadić Stage, on Wednesday, June 9 2010 at 8PM.

MARIJA

DARKO

ABOUT THE PLAY

Ovid himself says ‘My heart burns with desire to sing about transformations into other bodies’. Metamorphoses are a lexicon of all myths about creation of the world. When you read it you realise how little mankind has changed. How little it changed in its character. Technologically, it develops, but in essence – we are where we are. No news. In Metamorphoses you can find what we see as a great problem, what we here fear terribly, and in Ovid you see it’s normal – it’s metamorphoses. Metamorphoses are normal conditions. Metamorphoses are changes from one body into another, and another. We strive to make everything fixed, to make things stable, set and given for evermore, because that’s the only way we are sure of them. Marriage, work, success, failure. Just tell me whether it’s success or failure, don’t mess around! And Ovid speaks of something different: everything is metamorphosis. Nothing is given to stay as it is forever. Tomorrow, you can turn into a river, and a tree can become a rock. That’s within us. Metamorphoses are our natural condition and when we become aware of it we will have a much easier time. That’s why we convulse when we face things we don’t accept and feel we have to fight, and yet they’re given and it’s how it has to be. One thing has to transform into another. This is how this playtext came to be. I only took love stories, like a music album. Every one of those has their dominant emotion and I knew which ones I wanted and what I wanted to tell, but I didn’t want to enclose them within a finished dramatic form. I told the crew, ‘this is a story’, and it’s up to us how we’re going to tell it. The story goes, for instance, Pyram and Thisbe loved each other, there was a wall, there was a raven, father wouldn’t allow, they turned into a tree. This approach produces and exudes some other kind of adrenaline, some other chemistry that leads the actors, myself, designers, to start to use some other elements and skills we wouldn’t use otherwise.

Aleksandar Popovski

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

ALEKSANDAR POPOVSKI
Born in Skopje (Macedonia) 1969. He graduated from Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. His professors were Slobodan Unkovski and Stole Popov. His directorial debut was in 1992, with the play The Giant and the Seven Dwarves by Dejan Dukovski, City Theatre – Skopje.
Plays directed: Love of Perlimplin and Belisa by F.G. Lorka (Independent production, Skopje), Just Like That, Under the Clouds (Theatre ‘Small Station’, Skopje and Aarhus Theatre, Copenhagen, Denmark), Circus Printimpram by Danil Harms (Little Station Theatre, Skopje), Damn Whoever Started it by Dejan Dukovski (MNT, Skopje), Closed City  by Marius Ivaskevicius (Teatro Stabile Sloveno, Trieste), Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare (City Theatre Gavella, Zagreb), Metamorphoses, adaptation and dramatisation of Ovid’s work (KUG Graz), Events in the Village of Goga by Slavko Grum (SNG, Celje), New Friends by Ellen Pegg (National Theatre of Northern Greece, Thessaloniki), Antirides by Ana Lasic (SNG Ljubljana), Don Juan by Moliere (Dramatic Theatre Skopje and Ohrid Summer Festival), Alice in Wonderland by Biljana Srbljanovic (Atelje 212, Belgrade), Three Sisters by A.P. Chekov (National Theatre Bitola), The Tempest by Shakespeare (Turkish Stage of Minorities Theatre Skopje), Pillowman by M. Mcdonagh (SNG Celje), Cherry Orchard by A.P. Chekhov (National Theatre Belgrade); Danton’s Death by Georg Buchner (Teatro Stabile di innovazione del FVG – Udine); Dracula, after Bram Stocker, adaptation and dramatisation  Aleksandar Popovski and Dejan Dukovski (SNG Maribor); Don Quixote, based on the novel by Cervantes, adaptation and dramatisation T.Kosi/J.Vencelj/A. Popovski (SNG Maribor), The Balkans are not Dead by Dejan Dukovski (Dramatic Theatre Skopje); The Powder Keg by Dejan Dukovski (Satire Theatre Kerempuh); Roberto Zucco A.M. Koltes (Atelje 212), Wild Flesh by Goran Stefanovski (Dramatic Theatre Skopje), Candide or Optimism by Voltaire (JDP), A Boat for Dolls by Milena Markovic (SNG Ljubljana), Hamlet by Shakespeare (Universitat fur Musik und darstellende Kunst, Graz, Austria), Miss Julie by August Strindberg (Turkish Stage, Skopje), Per Gynt by H. Ibsen (Gavella Theatre, Zagreb)….

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FROM REWIEVS

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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