PERHAPS TO DREAM
What happens when a character from the play “Dreams and Obstacles” spins and in that turn finds themselves in a new play, “Perhaps to Dream”? This “spin-off” leads to new scenes that raise questions about the meaning of leaving one’s own country, about life in art, about the possibility or impossibility of choice, about the value of one’s own dream. [2016]
Every day, on her way to her theater, a young woman meets a man on the street who is surrounded by an unpacked backpack and instruments, wrapped in a blanket with an exotic pattern, playing music. They do not share a native language, but they share different languages that extend beyond speech. She tells him, or just imagines telling him, the story of her life. He answers her with music.
They try to find meaning in their life choices in a world where people are forced to leave their homes to save themselves, in which it is sometimes most important to follow the thread of Shakespearean dreaming.
The totalitarian mind wants our life and our dreams to be nothing, and not only from the point of view of some constructed totality, but also for ourselves, for each of us individually. And DAH Theater’s play “Perhaps to Dream!” (2016, directed by Dijana Milošević) opens windows for us and frames (literally – scenically) precisely those small lives and small dreams of ours, for which we must not allow anyone to convince us that they are either the same as everyone else’s or irrelevant from the point of view of the whole. And who determines what that whole is and must be – they somehow always fail to tell us.
In her mature and well-developed stage presence, Ivana Milenović Popović plays out her life and her dreams, and the interaction with the musician (Uglješa Majdevac) allows that presence to be defined precisely as such – scenic, overcoming the dichotomy between reality and fiction, life and art, dream and wakefulness, dreams and being awake. And of course, it is a play about art and the artist: because what happens when, after a long and arduous acquisition of artistic skills, “working on oneself”, we once again – but this time precisely as artists – face a hard wall of reality, when we realize that for us, and for us as artists, there is again no escape, no way out, no coquetry, and that the burden we have taken upon ourselves is not at all easy. That anything other than saying our word would be cowardice and a crime, and that finally we, as artists, must do something. That that word is sometimes not only for us, but also for someone else, for some others, who look at us with anticipation and hope, with a feeling that they – after all and fundamentally – owe us something. That as artists we must be able to put ourselves in the place of another, of others, sometimes in the place of so many others that their number is not even known, because others should never be a number. And there, where no one is a number anymore – there art must be born.
– Vladimir Kolarić, writer, film and art theorist [UNTIL THE LAST BREATH]
Direction and dramaturgy: Dijana Milošević
Actress: Ivana Milenović Popović
The following texts were used in the play:
Ivana Milenović Popović, an excerpt from V. Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, a text by Iren Majer from the book
“The Female Side of War”, a text by Jugoslav Hadžić from the play “Dreams and Obstacles.”
Musician: Uglješa Majdevac
Music: P. I. Tchaikovsky, C. Nielsen, D. Brubeck, Slovak folk motif, Buldožer,
W. Lutoslawski, I. Stravinski, U. Majdevac
Set design: Neša Paripović
Costume: Ivana Stanković
Lighting design: Milomir Dimitrijević
Photography: Una Škandro
PR and organization: Nataša Novaković
DAH Theater thanks Jadranka Anđelić, Zoran Lazović, Maja Mitić and Šira Vulf.
DAH Theater especially thanks Irina Kruzhilina for the conceptual design of the costumes.
Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia
