Bitef

not by accident that the lines in this play sound like a bad translation of an American movie. And "The Great White Conspiracy" does not want to be only a formal "translation", but also a true one: by forging the official data, Vojnov tells a story about the person committing suicide, who is actually being killed! Behind the paranoid movie thriller one can see a theatrically bizarre sublevel of melodrama; one is killed by the person who loves him the most. Inspired exactly by this melodrama, I treat the script and the documentary material from the perspective of those who survived and who live from Cobain's death, because it is clear that this performance also plans to live from this death. All apologies. Miloš Lolić MILOŠ LOLIĆ Born in 1979 in Belgrade. Graduated from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, Department for theatre directing, in the class of professors Slavenko Saletović and Ljubomir Mud Draškić'The Great White Conspiracy" is the final performance for his B.A. degree. In Bitef Theatre in 2002 he directed Adam and Eve, based on the play by Miroslav Krleža. He acted in the movies Kisses by Saša Radojević (2004) and South-Southeast by Milutin Petrović (2005). His actors almost do not communicate among themselves: their play has been reduced to the expressive elementariness and directed directly towards the audience, but it carries very much of g, the internal energy and subdued violence which are at times expressed in effective scenic images. H The young actor Milos Vialukin played the part of Kurt Cobain with great subtlety and strength, Ь Щ with the great and significant help of Miodrag Krstovic (whose irritating Pete represents the music |И ; industry as the lair of hypocrisy and vultures), and Milutin Milosevic in the role of Louis, the fan, a ¡ 7 Щdemon with the face of an angel. Almost always present on the stage, more as a symbol than as an active character, was an actress born in Split, Aleksandra Jankovic, in the iconographical prominent role of Courtney Love. Equally significant absence from the play is noticed in the case of Cobain's music; namely, it is nowhere to be found or heard in the performance of "Great White Conspiracy", j~ H and yet you have the impression that you have listened to every Nirvana's album, from "Bleach" to : Êm% l%> I И Unplugged in those hour and a half of the play - that is, perhaps, the greatest compliment to the performance and its authors. Hrvoje Ivanković, Jutarnji list, Zagreb In theatre Atelje 212 he directed the play by Dimtrije Vojnov, The Great White Conspiracy, about the fate of the legendary front man of the grunge band Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, who shot himself exactly ten years ago. The play about Cobain does not follow a cliché pattern of biography plays, which encompass the entire personal and career journey of a famous person. This narrowing of the plot and focusing (only the last days of Kurt's life are shown) carried out by Vojnov, mean an additional level of originality; the whole drama revolves around an illusory event, so that it turns into a kind of meta-biography. The contrived event is very radical: based on this story, Kurt did not commit suicide, but was killed by the representatives of the label industry. It is clear that this event is contrived because of the possibilities it opens up on the level of meaning; the whole story about the relationship between art and industry is built on it, about desperate struggle against the system, about the alternative art that dangerously mutates into the establishment, about the (im)possibility of subversion in an Orwelllike coded world. In that way, one can follow the story about The Great White Conspiracy in Atelje 212 without problems: about Kurt who is willing to finally sell himself to the music industry because of his beloved Courtney, but whose sense of subversion and freedom is saved by a bizarrely loyal fan who allowed Kurt to be killed. On the level of theatrical means of expression, a modern, restrained and largely neutral theatrical space stood out. Placed in this kind of space, Lolic's theatrical concept was based on a confining metaphorical device: the performers acted frontally, on the apron, without any physical contact among them (without looking or touching each other). Ivan Medenica, "Vreme", December 16th, 2004