Битеф
the morning the field is still soaked from the rain. The weather clears up in the afternoon, and the large audience can enjoy our spectacle under a clear and starry sky. As we are building up our set and rehearsing in the afternoon, we hear the sounds of a party coming from a few hundred metres away in the middle of the wild landscape. Frafgments of clarinet and accordion music. Frank, our technician, goes to have a look. He returns with stories of wrestling bouts. Later on Yugoslavians who have seen the performance that night tell us what was going on. Rural hands who work in Belgrade and miss the village community meet here every Sunday afternoon. A lot of them had climbed over the fence of the festival area, attracted by the fire and the music of our spectacle. Their reactions could be heard, like. »What a pity my sister and my cousin aren't here, how can I tell them what I've seen?« True to Bitef custom, we have a meeting with the public and the press the next morning. The chairperson - Dasha, a television presenter introduces us in a lyrical, Mediterranean way: »The performance was what circus and variety must once have been... the revelry of the theatre, evoking emotions of anxiety and fascination... a direct visual language which entails a démocratisation and demystification of the notion of art...« In the ensuing discussion people hazard guesses about our background: are we influenced by the Bread and Puppet Theatre, Indonesian art, children's books? We explain that we know what models are available, but that we generally choose our own course. Our professionalism and businesslike attitude are repeatedly favourably compared with the Yugoslavian company Kugla, which performed at the festival a couple of days earlier. We shift the discussion from a qualitative comparison to a structural level. We know Kugla well. Dogroep and Kugla staged a co-production for the Dubrovnik festival in 1 980. We know how difficult things are for them, based in Zagreb, cut off from every source of information, entangled in bureaucratic socialism. Our primary work during the festival period is't the regular perfomance. After all, we've played it fifty times or so this summer. On the last day we're going to play Imagomania, a one-off production designed and constructed here in Yugoslavia. We call these productions »specials«. The emphasis in a regular production is on the play, inventiveness and quality of the script: for a special we can make
large-scale constructions (Dogroep's work is visual above all else), guided by the architecture and character of the site. Intuition and improvisation play a larger part. We collect material in two trucks -scrap metal, old stage props, demolition wood. During the days spent on construction we are nervous and full of enthusiasm, inwardly cursing because it keeps on raining and progress is slow. We work on the script until the early hours. The result is a concentrated performance which matches the expansiveness and calm of the surroundings. One hour long we construct a landscape of different kinds of fires, one by one. There are three strictly demarcated groups of players involved; four musicians, three technical staff (mechanics/technicians) and three players in a constant process of metamorphosis. It is a ritual that slowly unfolds, in which we fasten a series of cages to one another and stack them up to form a twelve-metre tower, houses with burning roofs in which an orchestra is playing ride into the night and disappear. We give a late-night television interview. The presenter Dasha describes the difference between the two performances: the first wild and effervescent, the second restrained and serene. Next day, just before we leave, someone gives us a Yugoslavian theatre magazine. The reviews haven't appeared yet, but the cover illustration is a fantastic colour photograph of our first performance. We spend out last dinars on bottles of slivovitz and head for Amsterdam. ■ Dogtroep.
GROWTH AND CHANCE How does a company which breaks every rule of the theatre get started? How does the company grow? Once it has got off the ground, how do you learn to perform for a larger audience? What oscillations between excitement and dissatisfaction force a company to keep changing? If you look at our development over the years, it is pointless to confine your attention to the artistic work, or to the company as an organisational unit. The dynamic lies In the tension between these two poles. This chapter deals with the growth of the artistic work as a reaction to the developments in the structure of our