Critic by: Arma Tanović Branković

Last night at SARTR, I watched the play Sarajevo Feeling based on the text of Almir Bašović and directed/choreographed by Thomas Steyaert, choreographer, dancer and painter, a former member of the world's (one of the five largest) dance company Ultima Vez. I left the ticket for the premiere to my daughter, who is delighted because she can watch a performance in Sarajevo by one of the former troupe members whose handwriting is a role model for her as a young ballerina and dancer when it comes to the sublimation of theatrical, performative, and dancing script.

Made in the mentioned symbiosis, the play tells about three gang groups of urban teenagers in Sarajevo at the dawn of war, siege and the awakening of the dormant beasts of nationalism.

With the formative means of post-dramatic theater, every scene evokes terrible, clear, and very personal images in the viewer, especially if you had the opportunity to witness this era. In the very introductory part of his study Post dramatic Theatre, Hans Thies Lehmann warns of the fact that the dramatic text and the theater (Ivana Chubbuck emphasizes the necessity of personal reading of the text even in terms of personalizing the main task at the level of the plot) are different and separate dimensions. When determining their relationship, it is possible to determine the primacy of the latter, since the stage act, springing from the ritual, taking the form of dance mimesis, was already shaped into a certain manner of behavior and ritual practice before literacy, from which the theater emerges, combining dance, music, movement with a role. The post-drama theater does not eliminate the text, but approaches it as an element, a part of stage design in an abstracted form that counts on the emotional and subconscious engagement of the viewer.

This theatrical approach can be very coherent and incomprehensible or, as is the case in Sarajevo Feeling, have an onto genic effect that contemporary theater must possess. The theater today must have a transcendental healing power that modern man (an individual who has lost his meaning) searches for in shamanic rituals, drawing on ayahuasca in search of his own, often lost depth.

After the play, I didn't leave any smarter because I knew that the war had destroyed entire generations from 70 to 84 years old who, like ghosts, spent their lives between the trenches into which they were pushed too early and the cancer that also came too early because of the trenches, but I left shaken. By traveling to my own past to clear images of growing up before the collapse of the world and the state, which were the only reality for me. Everything else is an illusion and someone else's world.

The wild dance known as shtuka, which we ritually defied in Sloza at concerts of demo groups in the very horizon of the war with which the play begins, testifies to the intuitive recognition of the true barbarism to come.

Precise, not at all pathetic hugs that reminded me of departures and partings. To friends and family who left and left havoc in their lives. Because when you are 13 years old and your crush and all your friends from class and from the street are gone, then it seems that there is nothing left to wake up for.

A poignant scene of undressing and dressing, which in its repetitiveness reminded me of the frantic winding of days and years in which the war does not stop and becomes less and less interesting to the outside world, just like this one in Ukraine, until at the end the actors put on parts of their clothes where they do not it belongs to and so they look like the disabled, the wounded and all of us in the war in a combination of stripped clothes, those from humanitarian aid and those inherited from our parents. This is what was the fashion of the nineties in Sarajevo, and what the kids are raving about today as a unique trend.

And then those clothes are left without a man. And it is an earthquake upon earthquakes. The way Edin Numankadić's Table installation from the famous exhibition Witnesses of Existence is poignant because of the absence of man. Because war eliminates man. Those clothes reminded me of the collection of objects of the murdered children of besieged Sarajevo and the exhibition that was also staged in SARTR in 2012 and which, to the shame of all of us, has been waiting for its home for ten years. And people dance like ghosts the way that generation of crippled childhood danced that dance of the search for freedom and identity in the absence of freedom and identity.

For me, the most poignant scene is where the whole group looks at a stray bullet being fired wondering if they should respond with firecrackers the way we responded to snipers with peace walks until we became a party for snipers, adrenaline killing at leisure, as evidenced by only one action larger than me of the text, the one in which the actors spit out their (already received bullet). A murdered life and a future before death itself.

Today, 30 years later, I sometimes look at the children in the AG club, one of the last Noah's Arks of urban Sarajevo sunk into the mire of post-war crime and primitivism, where the children of our children from Sloga are kicking themselves and sometimes I have the feeling that they are being watched from the darkness by eyes that scare more rather wolves, those that the actors in the play glue to the darkness of the stage and walls and that stare at you the way the beasts of nationalism stare at our children and wait.

Those paper eyes glued to the stage last night stared at the students of the Third Gymnasium. It is extremely important that young people come to the theater and watch plays that require their emotional, intellectual, and personal engagement, but this practice should start earlier, in the upper grades of elementary school. Believe me, such experiences are more important to them than all kinds of arthropods and the old mountains of Asia. We must teach children to think but also to feel. Art is an indisputable tool here.

And as for the acting ensemble, it's touching and great that the actors in Sarajevo can really play anything. We do not have a specialized theater for contemporary dance or musicals for example. We don't have a dance conservatory. We do not have dance as a subject in primary and secondary school. We teach children to forget the body because in conservative societies the body is a sin. But we have great and trained actors. We rarely say well done to each other! Unfortunately. And they should. Well done people. A great, clever, subversive show. Which I took home and thought about all day.

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