The Silent Picnic

Friday was spent drinking wine and frolicking in the Sava with my fabulous Dah classmates and teachers; yesterday was spent drinking wine in Brick Lane with my fabulous host and high school friend Deb. There’s a theme to this trip already.

I’ve been thinking about how to summarise my Belgrade experience, and of course I can only offer a gush of adjectives. Beautiful, fascinating, enlightening. It’s very boring to read the kinds of praises I’d like to lavish on Dah and on Belgrade, so instead, here’s a sort of romantic and reverential look at some of the most memorable moments from the last 3 weeks...

On my 10^th day in Serbia we have our day trip to Novi Sad to see the Dah production In/Visible City. It’s a fiercely hot day. The train breaks down on the way back to Belgrade. My housemate Jeff quips, ‘You can take the train out of communism, but you can’t take the communism out of the train.’ As we wait for a new train, we see a solitary turtle poking around in the grass.

On my 12^th day in Serbia we go to the Sava Centre for a screening of the documentary of In/Visible City. My fellow international students and I understand so little of the Serbian language that we never quite know the specifics, but it’s interesting nonetheless. We are exposed to a lot of Dah’s work over the 3 weeks, in the form of a lecture by director Dijana, demonstrations and performances by actresses Maja and Sanja, and videos and stories. We are really immersed in the company's rich history, on top of all the things we learn during 'school' time.

After the screening, we go off down to the Sava and dance at one of the clubs that float along its banks. We pass two adjacent restaurants called ‘Argument’ and ‘Dialogue’. Argument is closed!

On my 15^th day in Serbia I go on a bus tour with Kym, Izumi and Oana. We ride to Vinča, about half an hour from Belgrade, to visit the archaeological site there. We meet our curator (he’s like a movie character curator – bearded and tanned, utterly enthusiastic and eloquent and charming) who tells us that the site we’re standing on has offered up nine thousand years of history. He leads the group through a garden of apricot trees to the makeshift museum (the structures are all temporary; they’ll be removed to allow further excavation). Most of the materials they have excavated over the last hundred years are in the museum and university in Belgrade, but there is an interesting array of objects on display here. Fishhooks, sewing needles, pots, razors.

Our curator explains that many small figurines were found at the site which show that nine thousand years ago the people here wore woven clothes with v-shaped necks. The prevalence of these female figurines shows a society celebrating fertility. He observes that this was not a matriarchal society, but one where neither sex dominated the other. Matriachy, he states, was a myth invented later on by those who wished to naturalise patriarchy. (We are all quite taken with him by this point.) This society sounds quite lovely actually; Vinča was a trade centre (illustrated by the scattering of ceramics over a large area which seem to be made by the same hand) and its inhabitants behaved peacefully towards each other, as potential customers, rather than as enemies. Our curator said something very simple which, in this context, I somehow found very profound: he described the creative habits of Neolithic man - how the men of Vinča could drill a perfectly circular hold through a stone by passing sand through a reed, and how this kind of creativity saw men going back to their houses at the end of the day feeling satisfied - useful. And so they were peaceful. Many artists and poets and thinkers have expressed this simple truth, but I really found it pertinent when demonstrated by the Neolithic peoples of Europe! How disappointing and inevitable that this peaceful population was assimilated into shrewd, copper-crafting neighbouring communities, and hurried on into the Bronze Age.

(After our curator’s talk we wander back outside and eat a few apricots off the trees.)

Also on my 15^th day in Serbia I go with Kym and Izumi to see the Belgrade Philharmonic playing at the Sava Centre, with violinist Stefan Milenkovič and cellist Ani Aznavoorian. They play the Brahms concerto that I listened to over and over in high school when I became a bit obsessed with the cello. There are white roses placed on the arms of each seat.

My 21^st day in Serbia is the day before we leave. Our last school exercise is to walk through Kalemegdan, silently. For two hours we wander through the fortress, stopping to admire views of the city, to look at monuments and displays and churches. Midway, we stop and have a picnic under the trees. It's a lovely meditative way to spend our last morning. And in the afternoon, we all go off and get riproaringly drunk on Dijana’s houseboat/raft/bach (‘splav’) on the Sava.

Now it's my 3rd day in London! I've been hollered at in the flower markets and fed an intense curry in Brick Lane. I congratulate myself on having mastered the tube (next station, hubris), and I've seen tiny Henry Moore bronzes and eaten pavlova at the Tate Modern. It's a far cry from Belgrade but I keep having to stop myself saying 'hvala' (thank you).

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.