Thursday, 30th April at 8pm ::: Maja Pelević & Stefan Kaegi
In the digital edition of Philosophical Theatre, on Thursday, 30th April at 8pm, on Bitef Theatre YouTube channel, the fourth in the series of discussions will be held between Maja Pelević and Stefan Kaegi.
Maja Pelević and Stefan Kaegi are going to talk about what is happening with culture at the moment, and how we could imagine new (post)epidemic theatre forms in the time of social distancing. They will also touch upon the subject of movement of people in the future, the topic of migrations and whether they will persist, or if the possibility of closing borders will become the new normality. Moreover, when it comes to the privileged middle class, how will travelling and tourism look like under the ever-present threat of contagion? Will the decreased human movement lead to a cleaner world and to the expansion of other life forms? Finally, they will try to imagine a world without or after people, and whether it is the right time to accept the possibility of giving the world over to the nature and (or) to artificial intelligence and robots.
STEFAN KAEGI produces documentary theatre plays, radio shows and works in the urban environment in a diverse variety of collaborative partnerships. Using research, public auditions and conceptual processes, he gives voice to ‘experts’ who are not trained actors but have something to tell. This is how he directed Mnemopark, a model railway world in the Basel Theatre - a live film (set in 1:87 scale) that has been shown in over thirty cities between Tokyo and Montreal. Kaegi has toured across Europe and Asia for over three years with two Bulgarian lorry drivers and a lorry converted into a mobile audience room (Cargo Sofia). In 2008, he developed Radio Muezzin in Cairo - a project about the call to prayer in our age of technical reproduction, and in 2011, Bodenprobe Kasachstan about migration and oil in central Asia. At the moment, he is touring with Remote X, a modular site-specific audio-tour for hordes of 50 listeners. In 2010, Kaegi was awarded the European Prize for Cultural Diversity. In 2011, Kaegi curated the “Idiom”- section of the Malta Festival Póznan. Kaegi co-produces works with Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel, under the label “Rimini Protokoll”. Rimini Protokoll’s purpose is to pry apart the sense of reality and present all its facets from unusual perspectives. Rimini Protokoll was awarded the Faust Theatre Prize in 2007, the European Prize for New Theatre Forms in 2008 and in 2011 the silver lion of the Biennale for Performing Arts in Venice. The multi-player video-installation Situation Rooms about the weapons-industry got the Excellence award at the 17th Japan Media Festival. In 2015, Stefan Kaegi has received the Swiss Grand Award for Theatre / Hans Reinhart Ring.
At 52nd Bitef 2018, performance Nachlass, pièces sans personnes, based on the concept by Stefan Kaegi, and produced by Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, won Grand Prix “Mira Trailović” and Politika Award.
MAJA PELEVIĆ, born in 1981. Graduated from the Faculty of Drama Arts in Belgrade, department of Dramaturgy and received a PhD degree in Theory of Arts and Media at the University of Arts in Belgrade. Her plays have been translated into English, French, German, Norwegian, Slovakian, Ukrainian, Russian, Hungarian, Slovenian, Bulgarian and Polish and have been produced all around Serbia and Europe and published in many foreign anthologies. Since 2012, she has been directing and producing her own projects. She won many major awards including: Borislav Mihajlovic Mihiz Award for the achievement in playwriting in 2006, and The Sterija Award for best contemporary play at the Sterijino Pozorje festival for the play Orange Peel in 2010. Together with Srećko Horvat, she has launched Philosophical theatre in Belgrade.
Digital edition of Philosophical Theatre
Let’s Think the World Over
During the state of emergency caused by the outbreak of COVID-19, Bitef Theatre has launched a digital edition of the Philosophical Theatre. Every Thursday in April, at 8pm, Bitef Theatre YouTube channel will broadcast live discussions with eminent Bitef Theatre artists.
After the successful discussions with the theatre director Oliver Frljić (Zagreb), and the theatre director and former Bitef curator Anja Suša (Stockholm), next are the meetings with the famous names of the contemporary theatre, whose performances we had an opportunity to see at the last-year’s Bitef - Milo Rau (Brussels) and Stefan Kaegi (Berlin). The discussions will be, like in the “good old times”, moderated by Srećko Horvat and Maja Pelević, while the viewers will have an opportunity to ask them questions.
Philosophical Theatre is a project initiated with an idea to re-establish a close relationship between philosophy and theatre. Launched at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb in 2014, the program has been a part of the Bitef Theatre repertory since the season 2019/20. It tackles the most relevant questions of the present moment and the problem of the societies we live in.
As the initiator Srećko Horvat states, “the link between philosophy and theatre has always been much stronger than the link between philosophy and any other medium or art”. Theatre has always been a place for active deliberation of society and social processes, and Philosophical Theatre creates a space for public discussion, which is nowadays more than necessary.
In that respect, Horvat remarks: “In times of a global pandemic, when all of us are trapped at our homes and made vigilant about keeping distance, we need social interconnectedness and critical thinking more than ever. For the time being, Philosophical Theatre persists through different channels, until we - hopefully soon - get back to theatre! The return to the ‘good all days’ will never happen anyway, because the old days were never good in the first place. We are facing a difficult but necessary task of radically rethinking and reinventing the world over.”
