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Produced by the Swedish theater Riksteatern and the Royal Drama Theater Dramaten, this play will be performed on October 9th at the Terazije Theater, starting at 8 p.m. It is a modern version of the fairy tale of Joan of Arc, which deals with resistance to social and systemic injustice.
Through the story of a young girl, a rebel, who decides to cross the lake that separates two worlds, two classes, the authors dissect the problems of social inequality and class differences, as well as issues of ecological disaster and climate change. Rebelling against social injustice, young Jean is violently stopped in her attempt to overcome the differences between two worlds, on two sides of a lake, making that same lake the site of both the girl's symbolic and actual death.
"The climatic drama #Jeanne is like a melancholic echo of some idealistic age. But at the same time - in the completely unique direction of Anja Suša - it represents an adventurous, drastic, and absurd dystopia", said the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet in its review.
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Anja Suša is a multi-awarded theater director, active in Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Poland, Sweden, and Denmark. She also performed the role of Bitef curator from 2006 to 2016, and in the period from 2002 to 2011, she was the director and artistic director of the "Duško Radović" Little Theater in Belgrade. Since 2019, she has been working as a professor of theater direction at the University of the Arts in Stockholm, and in Sweden she has directed more than ten plays with great success.
The play #Jeanne is based on the play The Black Box for the End of the World by Ivana Sajko, a Croatian writer, playwright, and theater director who has been living and working in Berlin for a long time. He creates in the fields of literature, performing, theory, and music. Her dramatic texts have been published in many languages and performed all over the world, while some of them, such as the Woman Bomb, have achieved international success.
The drama The Black Box for the End of the World was among the six works awarded at the competition of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia "Marin Držić" for the year 2021. The jury statement reads that the play mercilessly identifies and dissects the social inequalities and class differences between two worlds that emerged from different sides of the pond.
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Strength, Don't Let Yourself Be Anyone's
This year's edition of Bitef will be held from October 3rd to 10th. Under the slogan "Strength, Don't Let Yourself Be Anyone's", the festival audience will have the opportunity to watch nine plays in the main programme that come from Germany, Lithuania, Hungary, Sweden, Greece, Burkina Faso, Belgium and Serbia.
The festival has traditionally been supported by the Secretariat for Culture of the City of Belgrade and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia, as well as the Delegation of the European Union to Serbia, the Goethe Institute, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Embassy of Greece. New Moment New Ideas Company, the festival's creative agency, is a partner and friend of Bitef. Festival partners this year are Generali osiguranje Srbija, Erste Bank a.d. Novi Sad, as well as friends of the festival Coca-Cola Hellenic Serbia, 1664 Blanc and Somersby, Rajićeva Shopping Center, Alma Quattro, Info media group and Halo Creative team.
