27-5-11
Hotel Royal, Belgrade
This morning was an early one for us – we had the Theatre DAH workshops starting this morning. Our first day was spent working with Maja. We did a lot of drum work and ended the session with props work – creating scenes derived from and involving our assigned prop.
In the afternoon, we watched a documentary at DAH about their Cultural Bus Project. They travelled around Serbia and performed on bus routes. For the performances, they choose routes that travelled along and through historical areas in each city and expounded upon the rich local history found throughout the Balkans.
We left DAH around four or so and went to the hotel to take a nap before heading out to the Mikser Festival that evening. Mikser started out as a small art and design exposition but has since grown into a five-day art, design, and music exposition. It was awesome. The art work there was absolutely beautiful. The site for the festival was especially interesting – it’s located in an old factory area. Within the huge silos were the various exhibitions of artwork so that at almost all times you are forced to juxtapose the harsh, gritty insides of silos with the beautiful works of art people have created. Some artists used the grittiness to their advantage, while others sought to remove it entirely from the picture. It was most interesting when you would forget what kind of building actually housed these exhibits and just lose yourself in the surroundings…it was great.
I don’t want to go into too much detail, but I will comment on some of my favorite works. The first one was an exhibition of 10 red chairs that had bare light bulbs hung above them at various heights. On each chair was the word for Truth, I believe, in the various Balkan languages and dialects. The second piece was a desk, assumed to be one Tito used at some point, with a pad of paper and a pen lain across it and a desk lamp as the sole point of illumination. Upon the pad was scribbled a letter from Tito to a friend wherein he discussed his fascination that a person could put all their hopes, dreams, and aspirations upon the shoulders of a man they had never met (Tito). It’s an interesting observation to be sure.
Around 9p we left the exhibits to go watch a band that Katie’s friend performs in. We went, we listened…we left. They were alright…90s punk basically. The musicianship was great….the vocals were not so hot. We went back through the exhibits and out the other side where we ended up walking into a documentary about Dancehall dancing in Jamaica. It was interesting. The film showed the recent progression of Dancehall from showing who can enjoy the music the most toward who can look like they’re having the most outrageous sex… It was hard to decipher exactly where the personal and cultural opinions on the matter differed. You would see a group of people dancing, and the women would seem to be enjoying it but then a guy would do something she didn’t seem thrilled about and she would get upset or angry, but the guy would just keep going… I didn’t know what to make of it. I’d like to talk to people who are from the culture and get their opinions…anyways, after the documentary we caught back up with those still there and headed back to the Hotel.
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