20-5-11
Hotel Royal, Belgrade
After breakfast today, we gathered to discuss the latest chapter from “With Their Backs to the World,” Mayor for Democracy before heading to the University to meet Dennis’ friend, Zorica. For anyone who hasn’t read “With Their Backs to the World,” which I assume is most everyone, I would highly recommend it. The author is a journalist who visits Serbia three times over a number of years and interviews a diverse group of people. Through her interviews, we see a development over three distinct periods of recent Serbian history: Milošević is still in power, leading up to the election in which Milošević lost power, and the post- Milošević democratic government and the struggles they faced.
After our morning discussion, we headed off to meet with Zorica. She teaches as part of the Faculty of Philology at the university. Her focus is on comparative literature, primarily dealing with Shakespeare. She gave us a tour of the school and talked briefly about the advantages and limitations of teaching in Serbia. I remember her mentioning two very unique anecdotes about her experiences here.
First one: they don’t have the technology overload that we have in the States and as such have to get creative with how they utilize and implement it in the classroom. She detailed a story about how she wanted to show clips of Shakespeare to her class, but didn’t have a way to project it and for the class to view it easily. However, there was a student who worked at the local cinema theatre who managed to arrange for the class to go there to watch the clips.
Second anecdote: recently, Zorica was on sabbatical. During this time, she travelled to England and spent time lecturing on Shakespeare – specifically Shakespeare in the Balkans. While on her sabbatical, she was introduced to the renowned Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt. She mentioned to him that she was very familiar with his work but, embarrassingly, had never actually seen a cover of any of his work. She has a collection of his work, all photocopied. He responded that he didn’t care she had never purchased one of his books, all that mattered was that the knowledge was being shared.
Books in Serbia are very expensive – even by American standards. Like the issues faced here with technology, professors have to get creative to stay up-to-date with current scholarly endeavors. Zorica mentioned that if she were required to purchase books (copywrite law is…fairly lax, to put it lightly), anything she could afford would be twenty years out of date.
On our tour we got to see the department library – the university library is in another building almost entirely across the city from the Philology faculty. The university doesn’t actually have a campus per-se. It is actually comprised of various academic buildings spread throughout the city. But back to the library. Librarians here serve a slightly different purpose. They are actually the only ones allowed to browse through the stacks. You have go to them with a good idea of what books you want and they will retrieve it for you…it’s a little different than what I’m used to and Zorica mentioned that she doesn’t like the system…there is something to be said for browsing the stacks and allowing the opportunity for the right book to “jump out at you.” The library was the last stop on our tour and we went to a near-by café to have some refreshments with Zorica.
That afternoon, we visited the Nikola Tesla museum in Belgrade. It was pretty cool. They had worked replicas of some of his experiments and a lot of information about him. Like the 21 October museum, the Tesla museum was small and concise. I am really enjoying the small museums here…I dislike the fact that in America visiting a museum is an all-day experience. Even then you don’t feel like you’ve experienced all it has to offer. It’s a welcome change for us inquisitive ones.
On our way back to the Hotel form the museum, we passed the Yugoslavia Dramatic Theatre. Dennis decided we should check to see if we could get a tour of the theatre, as he had done on previous trips. We ended up meeting the Technical Director of the theatre, who gave us a brief tour of the facility. Additionally, as we were about to leave, he offered us all free tickets to Biljana Srbljanović’s play Locusts that evening. We readily accepted and hurried back to the hotel to change before the show.
Back at the hotel, I looked up a brief summary of the play. Here is what I found:
“LOCUSTS is a dark farce that takes on the tensions between two generations – young adults who are afraid of getting old, and their parents who fail to reconcile their past. The play’s individual episodes weave tightly into each other, creating the illusion of a continuous plot wherein the “locusts” represent the losers of all generations: children who grew old before their time, thirtysomethings resigned to their fate, and childish (or simply senile) pensioners. They cling to exterior structures, craving and grabbing at anything they can: the savings of an aged father-in-law, admission among the "immortals" of the academy, improvement via plastic surgery, an undeserved bit of human affection. When these ultimately evade them, they amuse themselves by grabbing at each other’s throats, unscrupulously, with deliberate intention and unconcealed pleasure. The result is essentially a “natural”—and savage—state, the war of all against all. LOCUSTS is a play about people who change nothing in the world, who leave nothing behind, who will not be remembered for their deeds, and yet they live. They are here. They are us.”
The play was very interesting. And CUNY put on the English language premier last October, so I plan to email them about acquiring a copy of the script. As for the show itself, it is composed of some quantity of vignettes that occur between some number of characters. This composition presents a large challenge when it comes handling the numerous scene changes. The designers answer was quite effective. They chose a minimalistic approach which centered on using a combination of a large turntable and flown flats to mask when scene changes occurred, allowing for very smooth transitions through the action.
To me, the turntable was the larger actor in the show. Ever present, it represented the passage of time throughout the performance. The turntable only ever rotated counter clockwise – the direction Earth rotates around the sun. The staging of the actors throughout the piece also effectively utilized the turntable to demonstrate how a person can either struggle against the world and the inevitability of time, complacently be dragged through time, or actively make the most of what time we’re given in this life. The play ended in a very powerful image of a man attempting to run contrary to direction of the turntable. The faster he ran and the harder he struggled against time, the less and less effective he was in his efforts until he was entirely swept away.
After the show was over, we met up with Yugi again at a small little Jazz bar near Theatre DAH known as Rif. Rif is small, intimate little club. The walls are covered in eclectic decorations ranging from a bust of Bob Marley smoking a huge joint to Mona Lisa smiling devilishly to Charley Chaplin dancing around. The room was smoky and a man who looked to be about twenty was playing on a baby grand in the corner while a woman of a similar age sang in a husky tone to songs of days gone by.
Eventually the musician took a break. The pianist came over and began to talk with us (we had been engaging him throughout the evening…we were the only other people in the bar). I wasn’t able to talk to him really, but from what I understand he was quite cynical and negative…so it doesn’t really bother me much at all.
People left in twos and threes throughout the night until it was only Stacia, Dennis, Yugi, Yugi’s friend Dan, and me. Around three or so, we decided to head outside and walk around the nearby park for awhile before Stacia, Dennis, and I took a taxi back to the hotel and went to bed.
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