Chronicle by Elena Jebelean
Sadness is universal, you feel it just as well in literature, in dance, in fine arts, in music. This dance-theatre show brought them all together. As both director, choreographer and composer here, Filip Petkovski started from five poems by Macedonian poets. Their musicality has different echoes, which for an hour, will lead you through this world of real shadows, like the chords of an Orpheus descending to the Underworld. Dakha Brakha, Duke Bojadziev, Boris Harfman, Hrvoje Crnić Boxer, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Ludwig van Beethoven, Filip Petkovski are the composers who accompanied the grace, precision, force of suggestion of the dancers-actors in this katabasis, dressed not only in the costumes of Antonija Guginska Jordanoska and Maja Gjureska, but also in the whirlwind, in the warlike storm, in drops of water falling with multiplied echo in the fountain, reminding of the music of the icicles dripping from the eaves on the spring mornings. But how much world tenderness can you enjoy in a severed life?
In the beginning of the show, beyond a large semi-transparent white curtain, the dancing actors are gathered around a table. One of them, at a typewriter, makes the well-known gestures of writing, pushing the carriage to the left at each end of the row. Maybe the poems are composed recently, maybe the poets are contemporaries. But on stage everything is timeless, the same confrontations and pains as old as the world. Rhythmic swaying movements, bending in front of fate, in wailing. If you read the texts received at the entrance to the room, you understand that it will be about leaving, war, death, love, waiting and longing. But you understand it anyway, even if you do not read the poems at the beginning. It's enough to discover them at home, to check to what extent you find in them what you felt at the show, what you thought and what changed your mind.
The four silhouettes around the table are difficult to recognize as real beings beyond the screen. Almost at stage level, a projector amplifies their shadows on the canvas of the screen, which is, symbolically, the white page, just then written on the machine, filled with fictional transfigurations. So, as shadows, through the gestures that already engage each fibre, they conquer the stage both horizontally and vertically. The light-time augments their contours, as it densifies and materializes the experiences you keep in your memory. Individual memory, history, cultural memory. Not personalities, but generic people, dressed in black, with similar clothes, with their heads covered in a black veil, fixed to the neck, which opacifies their faces. They come out one after another in front of us, reveal themselves and cover themselves again. They dance repetitively, enough to build suggestion, but also unexpectedly varied, enough to build individualization.
They work together, but especially alone. They alternate dancing with talking, they build different worlds on stage through their gestures. Each one assumes a breath, a poem. The man, interpreted by Vasil Zafirchev – especially under the sign of struggle and death. The women, played by Natalija Teodosieva, Simona Dimkovska, Sara Cvetkovska – especially under the sign of love and loneliness of the one who laments the departure of the lover and faces the aggression of the enemy. The black veils are taken off in turn. One reveals the dancer's rich black hair, which, at the top of a staircase, initially scatters delicately, petal by petal, then brutally, with anger, the wedding bouquet of white roses. She will be hanged, paradoxically, by an ascending rope. Another veil brings to light the blonde, braided tails of a girl who still plays hopscotch, beyond the trauma of successive rapes. A third one makes room for the wreath of flowers and the bridal veil, which eventually end up in the suitcase for the departure to a safer place, in the wide world. The man that returned from the front is alive, but he barely can walk with the cane. From most of those who left, only the letters come back home, falling on the scene like a snow of pages with bloodied edges through the effect of light of such a strange ephemerality, which flashes red. In the final scene, they form a snow with which the children fight with joy, in which they roll without any worries. It seems as if the thread of life would be reversed, from death, through trauma and the need for normality, settlement, to the playfulness of non-consciousness.
North Macedonia, an entire world, with a heart tattooed on the bare chest in front of the bullets. A world in black, red and white. A world where blood becomes groundwater, so that it is impossible to deny one's identity. The red blood of love is intertwined with the black blood of death. A world whose vitality frightens, whose love poems also conquer through fragments of breath:
“If I die/ Do not close my eyes/ Keep up the love” – Radovan Pavlovski, A message
“We weave around each other/ A virtue out of weeds/ In a storm of white, red and black handkerchiefs” – Radovan Pavlovski, Kiss in the grass
“Come closer than a flower rooted in heaven/ and by the colour of your mouth I will guess/ in which fruit the summer will end.” – Petre M. Andreevski, Denicija
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“Theatre Chronicle @ Eurothalia” is a programme conceived by Daniela Șilindean together with the team of the German State Theatre Timișoara, within the Eurothalia 2023 European Theatre Festival, held between 20-30 September 2023, financed by the National Cultural Program Timișoara - European Capital of Culture in 2023.
