Zagreb 2020

As part of the project Sanjam(o) predstavu (We/I Dream of a Play), which we have been developing for quite some time now and whose film parts we have published on our social networks, emerges our ‘performative event’ with the working title Zagreb 2020. Subtitled ‘a theatrical concert’, it seeks to unite, eclectic as it may be, the dramaturgy of a (post)impressionist fragmentary poetics with the binding melody of musical sections and vocal sequences, all in order to speak of the ongoing long year and the specific sorry case of our city, from the point of view of its citizens, us. Some twenty actors and actresses of the ensemble of the City Drama Theatre Gavella – closed at the moment due to earthquake damage – enforced by a band of musicians, set off on a combined effort to collage together the given or the improvised monological structures they all have been handed, out of which some have remained as they were, whilst others have developed into dialogic scenes with two or more performers, depending on the inspiration of the moment, development of thought, and the environment. The confessional and the documentary intermingle with the theatricalising and the alienating, personal humour collides with our collective melancholy, and nightmarish thoughts with wakeful ones into a yet stranger reality, the reality of Zagreb in 2020…

First performances: 27th and 28th of November, 2020, at the Home for People and Art – Lauba (Kuća za ljude i umjetnost – Lauba)

By genre at once tragicomic, farcical, burlesque and grotesque, in the form of a vaudeville play, of both verbal and dance theatre, mime and pantomime, twenty one members of the Gavella theatre incarnate Zagreb’s recent (hi)story, their own and that of others, referential and self-referential. This theatrical performance and concert mimics the structure of a club party, from late-night events to Beckett-like or Ionesco-like absurd situations which make clear everyday culture, visible in the Zagreb homes which, all the while, continue to slowly fall apart, and whose parts are torn down in order to be used to build once more. (Mira Muhoberac, Vijenac)

There is many an emotion which we all feel in this play, many a humourous and many a tragic situation, but the unified image that is summoned in front of the spectator is really that of a Zagreb we’ve been living in in this unhappy year. And it’s not even just the coronavirus pandemic or the earthquake: the story is much wider, many more parts are in focus – people are still unhappily in love with each other, and Zagreb women are courageous, even when at nerves’ end, the young are lost in the hell of narcotic drugs… Perhaps that is why Zagreb 2020 has a cathartic effect on the spectator. (Bojana Radović, Večernji list)

Gavella’s actors really perform as the pillars of theatrical art, in spite of the ‘floods’ their theatre has been through. (...) The play Zagreb 2020 proves beautifully that the first and most essential layer of human communication in any theatre ought to be set up precisely at the level of the actors’ personal chemistry. (Nataša Govedić, Novi list)

This witty and tender play is also a therapeutic seance. (...) The play is as much unified as it is directed, and it it knitted into and out of an impressive cultural event, a vanity fair of solitudes out of which rises a particular tension between lyrical and epic pessimism, all in the play and in the selection of songs of these 21 actors and actresses and four musicians… (Tomislav Čadež, Jutarnji list)