Битеф
The performance is the first part of the trilogy Process_City inspired by Franz Kafka's novel The Trial and its philosophical and political implications. Vacation from History is a meta(physical) comment on Kafka's work: a travel on the edge of collective and individual consciousness, through the realms of dream and death as the only safe refuges from history.
CONFESSIONS MARE; (...) I go to bed still babbling, curious of what would come next. My eyes are wide open and it seems I would never fall asleep. Mom or dad tell me stories I love and that exalts me. Slowly, my breathing becomes deeper and calmer and I don't speak anymore. I still listen to the story but not as excitedly as in the beginning. My gaze changes, as if I would be entering another world. Their voices become more distant. Perfectly calm, I sink deeper and deeper... BOKI: My memory gives me no answer whatsoever when it comes to remembering the way I was lulled to sleep in my childhood. 1 know I have been sleeping deeply and firmly, waking up early. But the time before the sleep... I therefore call my mother and ask her to peek into her memories: Mom: I used to sing you a song... "Sleep, sleep, Bojan, on your mother's lap, mama will kiss you, and the angels will guard you..." You were always tired and would fall asleep real 500 n... You were out on the move the whole day and you went early to bed, as soon as the cartoons would be over after 8,.. Then I would be holding you by the window and telling you how I loved you to the sky and the Sun and you would be asking me, "And to the stars? And to the Moon?"and I would be answering you... We were talking a 10t... JELENA: Mom tells me that I used to cry a lot the first year and a half and that she didn't sleep for nights, strolling up and down with me in her arms. What is comforting is that she says that it was even worse with my elderly sister. As my mom is a poetic soul, she used to read me and recite all sorts of things. Me not older than two or three years, listening, "Mother walked for four hours, and made fifty thousand steps... and brought the news that the goat was dead..." When i think of it now, my mom used to cry so softly... The doctors said there was no particular reason why I would be crying; grandma was saying it was surely my mom's fault; dad would somehow always doze off so that, when my sister would fall asleep, there would be left just the two of us: me crying and her vigilant - or should I call it devoted? But that is self-understood, isn't it... DAMIR: I try to remember anything related to being lulled to sleep but in vain. I don't remember anything. I remember the children's bed, I remember playing spaceship in the bed (1 cover myself with the quilt and there I am in the spaceship), but i don't remember the lulling... I don't lull my daughter to sleep anymore... Now she reads by herself before sleeping. When she was little she couldn't imagine going to bed without stories, riddles, playing games, her teddy-bears... I'd lie next to her, tuck her and then tell her stories... Sometimes i would read some stories and fairy-tales but I mostly invented different stories that were sometimes quite composed and with a point. She would often determine the course of the plot or some tour de force and so on (interactive story-telling)... REFLECTION If we concede (if for no other reason then out of an ironic predilection for Fukuyama's thesis, at present obviously naïve and inadequate) to the idea that history has already reached its end, and
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VACATION FROM HISTORY