29. 10. 2010.

PORTRAIT- Selma Spahić

Selma Spahić was born in 1986 in Foča. Her parents are both doctors in Zenica. She grew up there, except during the war time, which experienced as an immigrant, abroad. After finishing high school in Zenica, she went to Sarajevo so as to learn the speciality that would become hers: directing.

 Theatre is for her a late discovery. She started directing studies in Sarajevo’s Academy of performing arts at the age of 16. She decided to learn direction after having seen so many films. Cinema was her first passion. “I wanted to be a filmmaker, but then I fell in love with theatre during the studying” she says.

 And the Mess Festival seems to have a lot to do with this new passion. During her first study year in Sarajevo, she discovered the festival and saw the complete program. And she continued the year after, and her love for theatre has never stopped to this day.

 She says that what had a great effect on her was the specific process of theatre, especially the work with actors, the process that consists of exploring all kinds of subjects with actors, topics that are important to our society, problems that people do not dare to look at. What she finally discovered in theatre is an intimacy which makes out of this discipline “the most magical place in the world”.

 What is magical to her is the idea of creating something out of scratch, beginning sometimes from a text, but not always. Her theatre is built from an intimate experience and a cooperation with actors.

 Despite her fascination for actors, she never felt like being an actress. “I am too rational for that,” she says. “And I have serious stage fright!” What she likes above all in actors is their emotional capacity of letting themselves go. But she chooses brilliant people to work with, who have references, and who are able to ponder a topic in the same way she does, who have the same idea of the performance as she does. She likes diversity and works with many actors from around Bosnia, regardless of the fact that she has a close relationship with the ones she grew up with at Sarajevo’s Academy.

 As far as the form is concerned, she is not typecasted. Even if Bob Wilson or Marina Abramovic have an important influence on her, because of their imaginative and breaking-the-rules performances, for Spahić, the topic is still the most important. She believes that the topic gives her the form.

 In her last performance, “How I Learned to Drive”, which talks about paedophilia, she chose a very simple set design, with no light changes at all, “because the subject is more important than anything else”.

 As the program selector of Future Mess (a MESS Festival program dedicated to young directors), the point of view was the aspect that interested her. “I didn’t want any limits, I just wanted to see the topic behind the performance”.

 Selma mostly likes working on micro-worlds that say a lot about the society we are living in: “What is really a sad situation, but offers a wealth of opportunities for artists, is that you have millions of topics in society. There are many important things that people don’t want to talk about, that are taboo”. Paedophilia is one of them, but she also dealt in her previous performances with violence, loneliness, conformism, etc.

The micro-world of theatre and its intimacy gives her a great opportunity to discover mechanisms of all these social facts. “We all live in the same society, in the same country, we recognize the same things... Performance is not just art, we deal with social issues, even at a smaller scale”.

 And when you ask her about the financial conditions for theatre, she responds: “It is not easy for us. I know we should have more money. But still, you can’t use it as an excuse. The important thing is to never give up when you face these obstacles. And, somehow, performances happen!”

Glas Marjorie