Dah - Da!

Apparently today is the 26th of June, which means I've been in Belgrade for about 12 days. I'm sitting in what has become my regular internet cafe, dizzied by cigarette smoke and the eclectic Serbian radio. Outside is Slavija Square (actually a circle) which whirls day and night with trams and trolleybuses and cars going in all directions.

I'm a bit in love with Belgrade. It's shabby and bombed out, but also very old and beautiful, often all at once in the same street. A few times I've slunk (the only way to move in this heat) down to the main pedestrian-only street in the city, where ice cream sellers from one persistent company are placed every few metres, and over to Kalemegdan, an enormous, lush park encased in - or overflowing from - a seventeenth-century fortress. Early on, Maja and Sanja (from Dah) took us there one night to see The Boban Marković Orchestra playing in the basketball court in the centre of all this grass and stone. There is a view from the top of the fortress over the confluence of the rivers Danube and Sava. All along the rivers there are floating bars and resturants (we went to one the other night called the 'Old Penguin'), but not many swimmers.

For swimming, you go to the lake, Ada. On Sunday the lake was soupy with plastic, cigarette butts and the oil and dirt from the ludicrously bronzed bodies of hundreds of Serbs. There are fruit stands where you can buy a punnet of raspberries for a dollar. One of the things I expected from Europe was that it would be equal parts really gross and really lovely; so far Belgrade lives up to this expectation.

The course I'm taking is at the Dah Theatre Research Centre. It's the International School (their 7th), and my classmates are mainly young female actors, with one male actor and three older practitioners studying directing. It's intensely physical; for the first few days my calves ached from doing Qigong and running round to drumbeats each morning. Everyone sweats and puffs and sighs all day. Normally I hate this kind of exertion, but I really love this course. The women teaching us are so experienced in their fields and so thorough and so articulate about what it is we're learning with each activity. (I'm a little bit in love with Dah too.)

The Dah productions (of which we've seen a couple, in Serbian...) are physical and political. Last Monday we went to Novi Sad (a couple of hours from Belgrade by train) to see them perform their show In/Visible City on a public bus. They've done, and continue to do this performance in different local towns and cities, altering it for each of the places they visit. It deals with local history and the ethnic minorities of different municipalities. The impromptu audiences love it, and I have these wild romantic ideas about doing the same sort of thing in Australia or NZ, but something tells me audiences wouldn't be so generous.

That's Serbia for now. More words and photos soon.