LEICA FORMAT

RIJEKA DIPTYCH

Two novels about the impressions of our city’s history on its – Rijeka’s – present. At the very beginning of the new season, we will connect two plays from two previous theatre seasons (2018/2019 and 2019/2020) in RIJEKA DIPTYCH, and in the upcoming seasons we will connect them with the staging of Berkim Sejranović’s novel Nigdje, niotkuda (“Nowhere, out of Nowhere”). Don’t miss the first two performances of the theatre’s future RIJEKA TRILOGY or the TRILOGY OF RIJEKA.

Writing about Rijeka “from without” and “from within,” Daša Drndić constantly reexamines the connection between the person and the city: do the citizens of this city speak the same language and use the same words when describing the world around them? Do we recognize the “real” citizens of a city by their language, or does recognition depend on other factors that in some cases give the impression that the person across from us simply doesn’t belong anywhere? What if that person is a foreigner, a woman who comes to Rijeka immediately after the war and uses the Serbian word for “green beans?” After all, how does this city live with people who haven’t been introduced to the tapestry of pure language, a pure city, a pure nation? The play Leica Format encourages us to recognize the sadness and comedy, as well as banality and violence that lurk with us as we walk through “our” city. It leads us to confront the everyday chauvinism which we try to justify and call by other names.

The new staging of Practicing Life is neither a renewal nor a reconstruction of the former play, although the idea was once considered. Instead, it was created as though its predecessor did not exist. The new Practicing Life enters into a periodical dramaturgical dialogue, both sentimental and critical, with the play by Fabrio, Gašparović and Paro, and also proposes an approach to the novel and its first famous staging from the early 1990s from the responsibility and perspective of today. Practicing Life – Second Time is therefore a play that reads Fabrio’s novel for the second time, but also in a different way. It is both an homage to and a dramaturgical-directing-acting reexamination of the former Practicing Life, as well as of the history of our Theatre and the City.

The Rijeka diptych is performed in memory of Mira Furlan and Daša Drndić.

The performance lasts two hours and five minutes, and is performed without an intermission.