Also to be discussed – presentations of Sanja Mitrovic and Gabriele Reuter

Once upon a time there was a happy country called Yugoslavia. Really, it was happy, not because even the trees joyfully spelled the name of the leader Tito but because people were happy, even those pictured on the 100 dinars bill. Then the country stopped being happy – until its citizens (fewer now, since the country had become smaller) gathered again on the bridges of the capital, to save it from bombing. In Will you ever be happy again?, the Serbian-born artist Sanja Mitrovic and the German Jochen Stechmann star a performance about how the international perception of national identity marks the personal construction of the self, putting in a mirror their own experiences. The result is ironic without being bluntly critical and touching without being sentimental – equilibrium very difficult to reach when talking about the innocent bystanders of recent past.

In Tourist – A De-centered play, England based dance artist Gabriele Reuter continues her research of space as performative material, playing with invisible objects and geographies. In Istanbul, a local guest, a student-dancer, joined Reuter and her two companions on stage. Together, they invent a language, a landscape, an adventurous story in imaginary and real – but not so real – spaces. Reuter goes back to the immense potential of the empty stage in order to question the forever-tempting theme of the tourist, the stranger in a dangerous – because unknown – foreign land. Tourist – A De-centered play climbs invisible mountains and travel through colorful territories of the mind, drawing a dynamic choreography of possible landscapes.