Bitef
2002/03. The Dracula Project, Theater des Augenblicks, Kaiserliches Hofmobiliendepoc, Wien / Les subsistances, Lyon; 2002. Sena Đorović, Siniša Ilić, Bojan Đorđev, Frida Kahlo una pierna y très corazones, Muzej savremene umetnosti, Beograd; 2001. Teorija koja Hoda, DreamOpera, New Moment Ideas Campus, Teatro Tartini, Piran; 2001. Slobodan Snajder, Zmijin svlak, Centar za kulcurnu dekontaminaciju, Beograd. SNOW WHITE; POST FESTUM OF THE FAIRY-TALE AS POST-DRAMATIC THEATRE It is indeed great pleasure to tackle a play/text that has such a well-known narrative as its literary pattern. This, of course, does not happen rarely in traditional theatre - the same plots have been exploited over and over again in dramatic literature for centuries - but, theatre audiences know the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs better even chan the story of Hamlet. This offers a director and actors endless possibilities. It enables a pervert, complete delight in the very performing, with no need to declare, convey a message. Therefore, the communication of the narrative is unnecessary - we all know what has happened and to whom. Biographies of the characters are unnecessary. The plot is already known. Probably Robert Walser had this in mind while writing this play, or »dramolette« as he called his plays. Because, there are no characters in
the text, no action, no plot. (Perhaps a denouement of the plot, but certainly no plot.) Dramatis personae refer to the fairytale, but not as our fairytale, but as that fairytale - between them and the fairytale there is a distance, and they play the game of its interpretation, and so does the director, and indeed so do the spectators. (Playing, however, is neither innocent, nor harmless. Playing is a ‘form of life’).. The actors do not have any more information than the audience. The audience does dot have any more information than the actors (because that would make it just a suspense thriller). The fairytale is not reconstructed on stage. We are not interested to know who Snow White really was. (For me it is hard to imagine her in any other but Disney’s model!) Only speech remains. Snow White’s? The Queen’s? The Hunter’s? The Prince’s? ...It does not seem to be important in the drama either, ah speech roles are non-ontological... The same refers to the performance. Ah that remains is speech as a social machine in full swing, whose inertia runs over everything that is individual, singular, excessive, painful, terrible, humane... that we would expect to slow it down, disrupt it, stop it... even for an instant. The intervention of the director/dramaturgy (/scenographer/costume designer) in this theatre performance progresses in wo, apparently opposite directions. Plastically performing the ‘death of the author’, into our reading chat we offer you to read, we ruthlessly introduce dramatic, non-dramatic, popular, queer, trash and trar/t-polidcal and pop-political and even volkpolitical references/quotations. And then again - and that is the other direction - all aimed at focusing to a maximum of implicit assumptions in Walser’s drama. Primarily, there is the