“The terrace is not a location on the map of the Mediterranean, but an area of struggle: between nature and man, the Dionysian pulse and the Apollonian spirit. It is an area of a search for meaning in which death asks life questions about love, friendship, hope, longing, ideals, the essence of life.

The westerner’s position towards the subject of death is twofold. Death is amongst us, as violence of man towards man, or as the negation of itself through the immeasurable production of youth (mummifying the body by means of aesthetic surgery, cults of desirability glorifying solely the young body leading to paedophile canonizations in the world of mass culture). Death has been capitalized though the productions of the illusion of the eternal life of the body, untouched by years, treated cosmetically like the holy skin…

Death that comes from the depth of nature, like a blind force, sickness, catastrophe, strong wind or earthquake that in a split second destroys the meaning of every individual existence, reminds us at least for a moment that man is not only part of the civilization he is building, but also of nature: unpredictable, threatening, implacable in its caprices, mightier than intellect trying to classify, name and arrange things in the world. The trauma of our finality and mortality is severe.”

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Jovan Hristic (26 August 1933, Belgrade – 20 June 2002, Sremska Kamenica), the son of a Belgrade engineer Pavle and Bisenija Hristic, finished the Second Boy’s Grammar School, together with Slobodan Selenic. Studied architecture and philosophy. Graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in 1958.

Poet Dusan Matic encouraged him to publish his first poems (in Knjizevnost magazine). The collection of poems entitled The Diary of Ulysses appeared in 1954. Other collections: Alexandrian School, Old and New Poems, The New and Newest Poems, Collected Poems and, posthumously, Collected Poems (publisher: Rad), In a Dark Hour (prepared by Leon Kojen). For years he edited Knjizevnost magazine, then worked as the editor at the publishing house Nolit, was a member of the Association of Writers of Serbia and the president of the PEN club for Yugoslavia.  

Jovan-Vava Hristic was also an essayist and published a number of works in domestic and foreign periodicals.

Published collections of essays: Poetry and Criticism of Poetry, Poetry and Philosophy, Theatre, Theatre I and II, Theatrical Papers I and II, as well as the important studies: Chekhov the Dramatist, The Forms o Modern Literature, On Tragedy, In the Search of Theatre (posthumously). Editing and preparing books for publication, Jovan Hristic presented to our reading public some significant writers and philosophers: G. Conrad, A. Wilson, B. Russell, T.S. Eliot.

He published five dramas; all of them have been performed and often awarded: Clean Hands, Orestes (a radio play), Savonarola and his Friends, The Seven: the Way We Would Perform Them Today, The Terrace.

He was a professor at the Faculty of Theatrical Art, and taught dramaturgy to all generations from 1967.

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Tanja Mandic Rigonat has a diploma in theatre and radio directing, which she studied at the Faculty of Dramatic Art in Belgrade, in the class taught by Dejan Mijac.

She has directed Lovely Rita by T. Brash at the SKC, Miss Julie by A. Strindberg at Atelje 212 Theatre,  Lolita by V. Nabokov at Bitef Theatre, George Washinton’s Loves by M. Gavran at Atelje 212, Autumn Sonata by I. Bergman at the National Theatre in Belgrade, Verica Among Plum Trees by M. Bobic-Mojsilovic (the director’s first collaboration with Svetlana Bojkovic, the performance got the Audience’s Award at the  Festival of Monodrama at Zemun), Tatula by J. Strein at BELEF, The Man of Coincidences by J Reza at the National Theatre in Belgrade (Predrag Banicevic received “Rasa Plaovic” Award for Best Actor in the 2000/1 season), Collected Stories by D. Margulis at Atelje 212, The Ear, the Throat, the Knife by Ruden at Atelje 212,  Dead Ears by O. Bogayev at the National Theatre in Sombor.

She has dramatized the novel Lolita (together with Biljana Maksic), The Devil Was Hot, a collection of stories by Charles Bukowski, the novel Dead Souls by N.V. Gogol (directed by Dejan Mijac).

Tanja Mandic Rigonat has also directed radio dramas, written or dramatized by herself.

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PRESS REVIEWS:

This drama about death, the unavoidable story in almost every outstanding literary work, is staged by director Tanja Mandic Rigonat on a suitable, reduced but very suggestive set designed by Aleksandar Denic. On the sun-lit veranda of a Mediterranean house, beneath which the sea ceaselessly murmurs, she shows an unsuccessful, gloomy holiday of four young people, two men and two women. One of the women dies. Their relationship is that of husbands and wives, friends, perhaps even secret lovers. In fact, on such a stage, the director creates a sharp contrast between the physical and the immaterial, between the naked bodies, casual clothes, requisites of seaside fun and eternal matter – stone, sand and water, the irreplaceable azure firmament. And, through this, as Jovan Hristic also demands, man’s measurability and fragility is indirectly demonstrated to the audience.

Good Intentions, Vladimir Stamenkovic, NIN, 13 May 2004

… Hristic observes four people on a summer holiday: they are together, but so alone and mutually unnecessary. The Terrace is a frame for everything they might have been, but are not. These are two friends who do not really need female partners. The boys are not willing to soil their hands with embraces. Their supreme passions are career, bowling and fishing. Even illness does not change that – the tragic condition by which frail Nada Sargin (in the part of Olga) shades and elaborates the invisible streams of consciousness. Nenad Jezdic and Igor Filipovic, by the high-pitched tone and irritation, force gentlemanly Hristic into the present, the time of firebrands and humiliating instability. Because with us it is always a beginning, nothing lasts…

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