On Saturday, July 10, on the stage Between the Churches, starting at 9 PM, the XXXV festival “Theatre City” will be opened. After the opening ceremony, the audience will once again have the opportunity to see the play “Blood Wedding” by Federico García Lorca, directed by Igor Vuk Torbica. The play is a co-production of the Public Institution “Theatre City” Budva and the Novi Sad Serbian National Theatre.
“Blood Wedding” was premiered at the XXXII festival “Theatre City”, and then it continued its theatrical life on the stages of the region. The premiere performance took place in 2018 on the stage of the co-producer, and the play was also on the co-producer’s regular repertoire during the 2018-2019 season. It was also shown at the 23rd Yugoslav Theatre Festival “Without Translation” in Užice, where Milica Grujičic won the “Ardalion” award for the best female role in “Blood Wedding”. The play was also performed in Herceg Novi, organized by the Public Institution of Culture (JUK) Herceg Fest, on the occasion of the 50th Mimosa Festival. At the MIT festival at the Royal Theatre “Zetski dom” in Cetinje, the audience chose “Blood Wedding” for the best play. The play was also performed in front of the Slovenian audience, at the 26th “Primorska Summer Festival” in Koper, as well as at the “Bar’s Chronicle Festival” and “Tivat Cultural Summer – Purgatorije” in Tivat. It was shown at the XXXIII “Theatre City” as well as at the Montenegrin Theatre Biennale in Podgorica, where Igor Vuk Torbica won the best director award, Varja Đukić won the best best female role, and Vladimir Pejković won the best music award. Igor Vuk Torbica was also awarded the 2017-2018 “Theatre City” Award for his contribution to theatrical creation.
On the occasion of the “Blood Wedding” premiere, Torbica commented on the reasons for choosing this text: “I wanted to immediately find a text that would make many people ask me first – a question very well known to us directors – What are you going to do with it today?”. I already had a ready answer, that I am not interested in that today, that if we have to do everything we do with the current grounding and foundation in the immediate now and here, then to hell with the whole art. I wanted to invite people to stop thinking for a moment from their own hell of subjectivity. To let go of knowledge and to feel. To let another centre, other than the cerebral one, receive a work of art. To calm down the noise of their thoughts and to listen and feel in the first place. Lorca was my first choice, not only because of his undisputed place in the entire European and world poetic tradition, but also because he is one of the few authors who managed to transfer his poetic language to theatrical frameworks, refusing, at the same time, to obey the laws of traditional drama, assembly, conflict, fable development, and meaning. Besides this, on the territories of our former common country, Lorca has long been neglected on theatrical stages. In these geographical areas which we call ours, what is called new Spanish poetry has, in fact, remained undiscovered forever, or at least not completely revealed. Paradoxically, we might notice that there is so much in common in the motifs of these two poetic and linguistic legacies. It is not just a coincidence that surrealism – after growing out of the voices of mostly Spanish authors – found its current acceptance so quickly among the authors of the Yugoslav people. In that respect, Lorca was for me an author with whom, even in front of the audience that doesn’t have this kind of background, we could achieve subconscious associations and dialogues through the play. After all, in his poetics, he managed to reconcile all those things that, as it seems, on these territories will never be reconciled. Like no other author before him, Lorca united, in equal quantity and power, three poetic, authorial, and, I would say, ideological plans: artistic traditions, national and personal.”
Besides Igor Vuk Torbica, the director of the play, the author team consists of Branko Hojnik, set designer, Jelisaveta Tatić Čuturilo, costume designer and Vladimir Pejković, composer. The play cast: Varja Đukić, Milica Grujičić, Ivana Mrvaljević, Pavle Popović, Branka Otašević, Vukašin Randjelović, Miroslav Fabri, Draginja Voganjac, Maja Stojanović, Dušan Vukašinović, Filip Đuretić and Nenad Pećinar.
The play is in the repertoire on July 11, on the stage Between the Churches, starting at 9 PM.
“Theatre City” Press Service