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PRESS RELEASE / Highlight of the Season: The first work by Oliver Frljić to be performed in the Czech Republic

21.02. 2017

The three-day-long Bazaar theatre and dance festival (17–19 March) opens on Friday 17 March at Studio Hrdinů, with the radical performance Damned Be the Traitor of His Homeland! This production marks the first time that a performance by Oliver Frljić, one of the the former Yugoslavia’s most acclaimed directors, will be presented in Prague. Audiences will be treated to Frljić’s explicit interpretation of Yugoslav civil wars cruelty, artfully performed by members of the Mladinsko theatre ensemble. Tickets and festival passes are available online via GoOut and at the box office of the Alfred ve dvoře theatre, whose production group Motus is the Bazaar festival’s main organizer.

Croatian director Oliver Frljić has garnered attention with a series of original works and radical reinterpretations of classic plays. His provocative performances have met with success from Ljubljana to Belgrade, and from Düsseldorf to Krakow and Vienna. With his works, Frljić has managed to open up debate on the censorship of theater in Croatia; in Slovenia he touched on the painful topic of the “Izbrisani” – residents without citizenship; and in Poland he stirred discussion regarding Polish complicity in the Holocaust. In 2014–2016, he was director of the Ivan Zajc Croatian National Theatre in Rijeka, where he focused on exploring the social reality in which the theater existed. Now he has joined with the Mladinsko Theatre to tackle the subject of the Yugoslav civil wars in Damned Be the Traitor of His Homeland! In the play, which is both an indictment and a humanist manifesto, personal dramas become intertwined with historical ones.

“This performance attempts, through the inflation of death, through the incessant repetition of the unrepeatable, to emphasize a theatre mechanism that always remains a representation of a certain outside reality. With its compulsive attempts to stage collective death, this performance challenges the theatrical representation of death, as well as the idea of theatre representation itself. The repetitions of death that appear on stage in almost regular intervals and after which the protagonists ‘come back to life’ expose the standstill of theatre mechanisms of representation. It is these very mechanisms for the production of fiction – that most often remain concealed – that push out any thematic-content frame and thus remain the only visible thing,” says director Oliver Frljić.

Slovenia’s Mladinsko theater ensemble is composed of Balkan actors for whom the subject of the performance is a personal matter and also a question of artistic responsibility. The play tells personal stories from the disintegration of Yugoslavia; in fact, the title comes from the final verse of the Yugoslav national anthem.

Besides Damned Be the Traitor of His Homeland! the Bazaar Festival presents other unique performance works, mostly from Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. The motto of this year’s festival is “More Than Nation.” The centrepiece of the festival is the Saturday Bazaar, a survey of excerpts of future dance and theatre works by indie artists from the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Israel, Serbia, Slovenia, Slovakia and elsewhere.

Ticket presales at GoOut.cz

More information at www.alfredvedvore.cz/en/bazaar

Festival passes: CZK 700 / 400 (students, seniors, disabled) until 28 Feb. 2017. Price in March: CZK 800 / 500. Admission to individual performances: CZK 200 / 100, except for the performance by Oliver Frljić, where admission is CZK 300 / 200.

Program of the 2017 Bazaar Festival:

FRIDAY 17.3.
1–5pm / Alfred ve dvoře/ THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE INDEPENDENT CURATOR I: Workshop with Goran Injac, artistic director of Mladinsko Theatre
4pm / Studio ALTA / DISASTROUS – Presentation of works by SILK Fluegge, including excerpts (AT)
6pm / Alfred ve dvoře / MOTHERS OF STEEL / Agata Siniarska (PL) & Mădălina Dan (RO)
8pm / Studio Hrdinů / DAMNED BE THE TRAITOR OF HIS HOMELAND! / Oliver Frljić & Mladinsko Theatre (SLO)

SATURDAY 18. 3.
10am–1pm / Alfred ve dvoře / THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE INDEPENDENT CURATOR II: Workshop with Goran Injac, artistic director of Mladinsko Theatre
2–10pm / Studio ALTA / SATURDAY BAZAAR
Block 1 / 2–6pm
HAZARD ZONE / Zdenka Brungot Svíteková (SK/NO/CZ), Marta Bichisao (IT) & Sylvain Sicaud (FR)
KEEP CALM / Ufftenživot (CZ)
STEREOPRESENCE / Cristina Maldonado (MEX)
+ RespondArt discussion with Alica Koubová
Block 2 / 6:30–10pm
IN THE NAME OF KAR / Markéta Jandová & Jitka Tůmová (CZ)
THE ZIONIST-SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF UGANDA: THE STATE OF THINGS TO COME (PRAGUE EMBASSY) / friendly fire (DE)
A DANCE IS A DANCE IS A DANCE / Agata Siniarska (PL) & Xenia Taniko Dwertmann (DE)
+ RespondArt discussion with Alica Koubová
+ DJ Johana

SUNDAY 19. 3.
6pm / Studio ALTA / DIOR IN MOSCOW / Ingrida Gerbutavičiūtė & Agnija Šeiko (LIT)
8pm / Alfred ve dvoře / TRANSFORMABILITY / Willy Prager (BLG)