Existing political institutions and practices have impoverished our possibilities to think beyond known political concepts.

It seems impossible to step out from prescripted social roles. In this situation, art has to reinvent ways to repoliticise public space it represents. In other words, art has to avoid to be just another representation of current relationship of power.

Oliver Frljjic will be leading a workshop in which he will introduce methodology and strategies he puts in place in order to reintroduce politics in Theatre from the perspective of content and representation.

A starting point will be the problems between Flemish and Walloons' communities; how to explain the roots of this problems to somebody who is from a completely different cultural context?

Public presentation at the end of the workshop on Monday 25th of November at 7pm at La Balsamine.

Free entrance.
 

In collaboration with La Balsamine

"Opinionated, taboo-breaking and internationally lauded, theatre director Oliver Frljić appeared in the Croatian press more often than any other cultural figure during the course of 2012.

Born in the Bosnian town of Travnik in 1976, Frljić has made a habit of touching society’s raw nerves. His 2008 version of Euripides’s Bacchae contained uncomfortable parallels with crimes committed during the Homeland War of 1991-95, and was notoriously removed from the repertoire by the Croatian National Theatre in Split. No less provocative was 2009 Turbo-Folk, a cocktail of sex, violence and Serbian folk-pop (co-written with Borut Šeparović of Montažstroj) that went down a storm with young liberal audiences and offended the cultural mainstream at the same time.

Since then Frljić has barely stopped to catch breath: his plays have rarely been off the repertoire of Zagreb’s main theatres, and success in Slovenia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia has turned Frljić into the most talked-about director in the ex-Yugoslav region. One of his most-travelled productions is the autobiographical I Hate the Truth! (originally produced for Zagreb’s &TD Theatre), in which different members of the Frljić family (played by actors) discover that they have profoundly different memories about precisely what happened in their collective lives. Pushing unpleasant memories under the carpet has become a way of life in the societies of the ex-Yugoslav region, and it is the spread of this voluntary amnesia that has become Frljić’s main theme.

His abrasive, socially critical play Zoran Đinđić (dealing with the assassination of Serbian prime-minister Đinđić in 2003), performed in Belgrade in 2012, provoked mass walk-outs and standing ovations in equal measure. As an arch provocateur in a region whose collective conscience is still in need of a good pricking, Frljić is likely to remain in the news for some time to come."

Time Out Croatia