Bitef

j BITEF Theatre and GRAND Theatre}

1984

George Orwell 1984

Nikola Zavišić

Concept/Director/Scriptwriter:

Concept/Drrector/Digïîal fights:

Andre Pronk

Cast:

Slobodan Bestie, Reut Gez, Vladislava Đorđević, Lazarela Lovović

Set/Costume design:

Vuk Tatalović

Anlmatlon/Digitai set design:

Sound:

Jänner Noorman

Media server programming:

Jasper Buurman

Camera:

Marko Gligorijević, Alicia Ziff, Derk Jan Kroon

Editor;

Calista Jippes, Martin Lambeck

Production:

Violeta Slepčević, Marghriet Van Der Wal

Set buHder;

Erik Van Dosten

Why Orweil's 19841 I was very young when a cover of a book in my father's library frightened me. Against a black background, there was an image of a finger, apparently roasted, and stabbed on a fork. That was one of the earliest images from my childhood, and I still remember it clearly. Many years later, fifteen I think, 1 peeked for the first time under the cover of that book, curiously entitled Nineteen Eighty Four. It was only when I began to anticipate the meaning of its content, that 1 understood my childhood fear. The story deeply disturbed me. I had to do something with it. Another twelve years later, a chance suddenly appeared to meet again with the dark and eerie world of the Orwell’s novel, and I began to let go of the childhood fear by trying to present it, to myself and to the audience, on the stage of Grand Theatre in Groningen, and soon afterwards in a barn, on a desolated farm on the island of Terschelling, in the unpleasant brownish North Sea, at the Oreol Festival. And I've made it. The fear is gone, many people in The Netherlands have already seen the performance, the critics most often praised it, and new invitations arrived for guest performances in Europe, even in China! However, I will not stop at this. The hopelessness of an individual human destiny (against the powerful machinery of single-mindedness, terror, fear and torture) in the character of Winston Smith, for me is not over yet. To present the work I did in The Netherlands to the audience in Belgrade, at Bitef Festival, is a lot of work, but fortunately not the reason for new fears, not yet. How was the performance structured? Without artistic pretenses, and through painful experimenting with the form, the performance 1984 found its own way to step out before the audience. The current form of the performance is unusual, at the very least. There is only one actor-performer in this production (Slobodan Bestie), with a very difficult task to adjust his performance precisely to the light beams of two video projectors. Like a hero of an interactive movie, he is forced to count his steps and adapt his performing rhythm with the technically demanding blocking of the moving projections. He is in a very strenuous situation, for he must be prepared that at any moment he may find himself in a situation in which he cannot continue with his performance, because of a technical error. It is not easy to live on stage with that awareness. But this situation carries its own excitement, and a final satisfaction when, at the end, all goes well. It has been going well so far. What did the preparations look like? We rehearsed the performance in four sessions, on the small stage of Grand Theatre in Groningen. The first three sessions were dedi-