Download SOMEONE ELSE`S HEART or THEATER TREATISE ON BORDERS

BILJANA SRBLJANOVIĆ
SOMEONE ELSE'S HEART
or THEATER TREATISE ON BORDERS
Art Hub Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Director: DINO MUSTAFIĆ
Costume designer: LEJLA HODŽIĆ
Music: DAMIR IMAMOVIĆ
Video: SRĐAN PEŠIĆ
Choreographer: ĐERĐ PERVAZI
Cast
JUSUF BRKIĆ
JELENA KORDIĆ KURET
ADRIANA MATOŠI
ARMEND SMAJLI
ALBAN UKAJ
Author
(...)
Biljana Srbljanović
Biljana Srbljanović graduated dramaturgy at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade
(1995), where she has been engaged as a lecturer since 1997. Her works arise from a
strong personal experience of the environment in which she is located. At the time of
Slobodan Milosevic's regime, her criticism was aimed at the Serbian society (Belgrade
Trilogy, Family Stories, The Fall). When she left Serbia and began to get to know
European society as well after visiting the United States, Srbljanović became engaged in
analyzing the social organization of the so-called "First world" and their way of life, in
particular, in analyzing the reverse face of united Europe (Supermarket) and "the
American Dream" (America, part two). In addition to the political and social criticism,
her plays speak of the most intimate personal problems of modern man, such as family
and intergenerational relations and conflicts (Locusts). In recent dramas she speaks of
metaphysical subjects such as loneliness, aging and especially death (Barbelo, Death is
not a bicycle).
Plays by Biljana Srbljanović have been staged in more than 150 theaters around the world
and have been translated into over eighty languages.
Dramas and Sterija Awards: Belgrade Trilogy (1997), Family Stories (1998, Sterija
Award for text); The Fall (2000); Supermarket (2001, Sterija Award for text 2003); Alisa
(2002); The Animal Kingdom (2003); America, Part Two (2003, Sterija Award for text
2004); Locusts (2005, Sterija Award for text 2006); Barbelo, of Dogs and Children
(2007, Sterija Award for text 2008), Death is Not a Bicycle (2011), This Grave is Too
Small For Me (2013, Sterija Award for text 2014); short plays Manifesto (2001) and
Travel (2008).
Srbljanović has won the following awards: 'Slobodan Selenić' award, 'Ernst Toller' (for
engagement 'between politics and art'), 'Joakim Vujić' for the overall contribution to
theater... Further, she has received the Award of the City of Belgrade, 'The conquest of
freedom' for civic engagement as well as the most important theater award 'Premio
Europa' - New theatrical reality. Twice she was proclaimed the "best foreign writer' by
magazine Theatre Hoyt.
Lives and works in Belgrade and Paris.
Director
(...)
Dino Mustafić
Born in 1969 in Sarajevo, film and theater director.
Graduated in film directing at the Academy of Performing Arts and Comparative
Literature and Library Science at the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo. He spent the war
in Sarajevo, and directed Sartre's Wall, which, despite the war activities, they used to play
every day. He is director of the International Theatre Festival MESS Sarajevo.
Directed documentaries, music programs and theatre plays. His first feature film Remake
(screenplay by Zlatko Topčić) had its world premiere in 2003 at the International Film
Festival in Rotterdam, where he was voted among the five best films of the festival, and
thereafter presented at many international festivals.
Plays by Dino Mustafić have been performed in many theater centers of ex-Yugoslav
space, and at festivals in Germany, Egypt and Italy. He has directed plays based on texts
by Sartre (Wall, Dirty Hands), Ionesco (Rhino, The King Dies) Mrozek (On Foot, Cops),
Moliere (Tartuffe), Koltes (Roberto Poochie), Shakespeare (Macbeth), Schwab (The First
Ladies), Boytchev (The Bird Colonel, Underground Hanibal), Gardner (I'm not
Rappaport), Villqist (Helver’s night), Dee Loer (Adam Geist), Nick Wood (The Warrior
Square), Glowacki (The Fourth sister), McDonagh (Billy the Cripple), and others.
Awards: Film Remake was awarded for best first film and best actor in San Francisco and
the "One Future Award" in Munich.
Plays The Bird Colonel, The Fourth Sister and Helver’s Night won the award "The key to
Tmač" awarded by the magazine for drama, theater and education TmačArt. The play
Helver’s Night was awarded at festivals in Cairo, Rijeka and Pristina, and thus entered
the history of the Chamber Theatre 55 as the most awarded show.
Mustafic was a member of the jury of 2005 Sterija Pozorje Festival. He participated at the
Sterija Pozorje Festival in 2007 with the play Before Retirement by Thomas Bernhard
(JDP Belgrade) and in 2011 with the play Born in YU.
From the media
Humiliation at the border
You become disgusted with your own name and your birthplace, with the date of your
birth and the reason why you were born - says one of the heroes of the show, describing
encounters with customs officials and employees of the consulate.
It is thunderous applause and laughter, sense of both bitterness and excitement... that
accompanied the premiere of Someone else’s heart, or Theater treatise on Borders by
Biljana Srbljanović, directed by Dino Mustafić, played January 6 at the Sarajevo War
Theatre (SARTR).
Woven of crude factography of local life shaped through artistic manuscripts of the
author team, the play indeed mesmerized the audience from the very first moment.
From scene to scene, from theater boards our own life was staring at us, kicking us in the
chest and in the plexus... From the non-recognition of identity documents from Bosnia
and Herzegovina - Kosovo, through the boy from Mostar, who has three names (for Serbs
he is Marko, for Croats Sasha, for Muslims he is Salih), from the Ustasha forces – male
and female, male and female Chetniks, love of refugees from Syria, from the Hungarian
border made of barbed wire, from the fact that people cannot cross from Western to
eastern Mostar and the other way around even though there is no border and there are no
guards, from the delirium tremens in the embassies of Western countries and on the
borders of these states... on and on.
(...) The play is, in an impressive way, characterized by music, humor, and the fact that it
is played in three languages (Serbo-Croatian, Albanian and English) and everyone speaks
everything, but there is still parallel subtitling; the eyes of the audience are glued to that
subtitle in order not to accidentally miss anything. It is all the same to them whether they
will read or hear, but the extremely dynamic tempo actually means that we actually do
not know how we absorb the text.
Director Dino Mustafić says that they have turned a bureaucratic topic, which includes
visas, regulations, forms, stamps ... into a juicy theatrical act.
- This is an important issue for the Balkans, and we see that it is becoming increasingly
important for Europe too, because we witness new barb wires and borders. Humiliation in
many ways ruins life in every sense, and the most terrifying border is the one that we
cannot see – the border in people's heads - says Mustafić.
(…)