With The Powder Keg  by Dejan Dukovski directed by Dimiter Gotscheff, which concluded the International Theatre Workshop, attention was focused on an area of the Mediterranean as sensitive as the Balkans. The Powder Keg, episode one – for the part regarding the theatre– of a European co-production project (ENPARTS) which in addition to the Venice Biennale involved the Bitef festival in Belgrade and the Berliner Festspiele, is now followed by Winter Gardens,in which this critical zone is viewed once again under a magnifying glass, to tell the story of Serbia between past and future.

The play is directed by Nikita Milivojevic, born in 1961, currently the director of the Bitef, the most famous international theatre festival in the Balkans, where all the major avant-garde theatre companies in the world have performed, and since 2005 director of the Bitef Theatre which, in the wake of the festival’s success, was created twenty years later (1989).

 

Winter Gardens,in the words of director Nikita Milivojevic, is dedicated to the lost generation of the Nineties. When he spoke of it for the first time in a Belgrade café with Maja Pelevic, the leading figure in new Serbian playwriting and co-author of the play, Milivojevic presented his idea of putting two generations face to face: his generation, which was born in Yugoslavia and viewed its country as a place where it “wanted” to live; the other, Maja’s generation, which viewed Serbia as a place to escape from. Those were the war years, when over 700,000 young people fled the country and Serbia became the land of Karadzic and Mladic in the world’s imagination.

 

The play is based on the exchanges of e-mails and letters written to Milivojevic by his friends who had left the country. “My thoughts were prompted by the stories told in these letters, says the director. I imagined the lives they led in new cities, with new friends, new neighbours, their loves, hopes and fears. Their confessions of what concerned them – from their everyday life to political considerations to simple descriptions of landscapes – and their considerations about those of us who stayed in Belgrade, appeared to me to contain more truth about our existence than I could find in all the texts I could read at the time. They were not looking for a new homeland, but for a place that could offer them a decent life. In one of these letters they asked me: ‘How is it possible that a country wastes everything it built in only 15 years?” There, Winter Gardens  is dedicated to this lost generation.”