26. 10. 2009.

Press Conference and Critical Round Table – "Puss in Boots" and "No Shadow"

The press conference held on 22 October 2009 was host to the cast and crews of two performances, Puss in Boots (director Drago Buka, and actors Adnan Goro and Merima Lepić), and No Shadow, a performance by Austrian directing and performing duo, Shamal Amin and Nigar Hasib.

 After hearing that the votes of the audience have propelled them to a solid first place, with an average score of 9.49, director Drago Buka said that he was naturally flattered by these positive reviews, but that this may not mean anything for the future of theatre, Though, as Buka ironically remarked, there has been no financial support for theatre from institutional pockets, theatre, and cultural institutions in general, are working on significant projects and are continuously promoting cultural values even in such impossible conditions. Though Puss in Boots had its premiere seven days prior to the MESS, the production process began a long time ago. Buka pointed out that he had made significant changes to the original story by Charles Perrault, resulting in many of “his own dialogues”, “songs and some characters”. This was, as he pointed out during the conference, his intervention as the author of the screenplay. He also mentioned that the cast had made suggestions for changes, such as the acting duo of Adnan Goro and Merima Lepić.

 After Puss in Boots, we were also introduced to the acting and directing couple of Shamal Amin and Nigar Hasib, émigrés from Kurdistan who have worked as artists in Austria for many years. They have worked together since 1989, and ten years ago, developed the idea of establishing a laboratory that would be primarily focused on exploring human voice as an “intensely powerful instrument”.

As the laboratory’s chief researcher, Shamal pointed out that the process of staging a narrative also involves staging the body, the voice, the physical setting up of the stage,  as well as staging human life, and that these are the starting points for the discovery of one’s own and entirely new contexts. After a lot of exploration, both artists decided they wanted to work with the human voice in its artistic, cultural, anthropological and aesthetical contexts, making them their starting point.

The cast of this research project were also the guests of the critical round table held in the same venue at 12.00, where discussants posited the same questions about the idea and concept behind the work of the Lalish Theater Labor research centre. Apart from the assumptions that were clarified earlier at the press conference, the round table moderator Bojan Munjin concluded that this was “a research theatre of speech and movement, in a form that is defined by theatre theory as ritual theatre”. The researchers then also spoke about a philosophical and cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century, which brought back into focus the idea of exploring the body and all it can do, “which led to neglecting the voice”. Shamal also mentioned that “voice today is used as a transport mechanism to send a message”. For them, voice is not just a form of “transport” - it above all represents life, because “human sounds have their own history, their own memory”. For that reason, their theatre tries to “spiritualise” this voice on stage.

 Shamal and Hasib also pointed out the need for the audience to feel the message and their vocal performance, and to spend less time on interpreting it.

In response to the question of the audience about what the actors feel on stage when they explore what they call tone, Nigar repeated her idea of the research project as not being finished, because with every new performance in a new surrounding, with its open social and cultural contexts, the actors can hear and feel new tones that become a part of their performance. As one participant of the round table remarked, and to which Nigar Hasib agreed, voice does have a therapeutic power. (J.K.)