After six editions in Prishtina, the annual Kosovo Theatre Showcase relocated to Tirana this year. Borisav Matić reports on the first ever Kosovo/Albania Theatre Showcase and a programme of work that illuminated both the past and the present.
Since 2018, the Kosovo Theatre Showcase, organized by the independent cultural organization Qendra Multimedia, has been a yearly pilgrimage for many theatre makers, critics and journalists from around Europe – and sometimes way beyond – who flocked to Prishtina and other cities in Kosovo in order to witness the latest developments of the local and regional theatrical scene.
When I first visited the event in 2021, following the pandemic’s isolation and a period of reduced theatre-going, I remember a serendipitous feeling of discovering a showcase that not only aimed to build bridges between Kosovo, its neighbours and the wider international community, but also sparkle difficult conversations about the region’s recent history and complex political situation. The grey and gloomy weather of autumn in Prishtina was a fitting backdrop to performances and panel discussions which often dealt with the topics of the Kosovo war, the corruption of the allegedly democratic societies in the Balkans and the West’s hypocritical and neo-colonial relationship toward the region.
This year, the showcase moved a few hundred kilometres south to Tirana, Albania, and was presented in a slightly different concept, as the Kosovo/Albania Theatre Showcase which Qendra Multimedia organized from the 29th October to the 2nd November, together with its Albanian partners, the National Experimental Theatre “Kujtim Spahivogli” and the National Theatre of Albania. This way, the international guests had a chance to familiarize themselves with the Albanian theatre on a larger scale, while the local audience got to see works from Kosovo and other countries in the region.
From a Dictatorship to a Neoliberal Reality
Despite moving closer to the seaside to a much warmer and sunnier climate (the temperature in Tirana at the beginning of November often reached 23 or 24 degrees), the program of the showcase did not become more laid back in terms of the seriousness of topics it explored. On the contrary, the event’s program was as socially engaged as ever and it covered a larger geographical swath of the Balkans, thus wrestling with more diverse political and social issues. In many aspects, the 2024 edition of the Kosovo/Albania Theatre Showcase can be seen as an attempt to confront society’s traumas, be it Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship over Albania, the chaos of the Kosovo war and its aftermath or personal traumas related to sexual harassment.
It was only during my stay at the showcase in Tirana that I realized how deeply Albania’s theatre scene is still affected by Hoxha’s rigid regime which kept the country isolated through much of the second half of the 20th century. More than 30 years after liberalization reforms, the population is still trying to process its violent and repressive past while simultaneously navigating the brutal neoliberal reality that came after the end of the Cold War, a reality that steadily keeps Albania – just as any other Balkan country – on the periphery of Europe and capitalism.
Such social conditions are ever-present and visible to an outsider’s eye in the local theatre scene. During one of the panel discussions organized at the showcase, “Theatre Landscape in Post-Communist Albania”, the actress Ema Andrea, the director of the National Experimental Theatre Gjergj Prevazi and the director of the National Theatre of Albania Altin Basha all spoke that artists are still exploring suitable aesthetic formats through which they can talk about the crimes citizens endured during Hoxha’s rule. At the same time, they are facing austerity in culture and arts that’s so drastic that Albania has one of the most underfunded theatre sectors in Europe and individual performances must often veer into commercialization in order for theatre institutions to survive.
Flowe Sajzar, National Experimental Theater “Kujtim Spahivogli”
Among the shows that thematized the country’s 20th-century dictatorship was the performance that opened the showcase, Flower Sajza from the National Experimental Theatre “Kujtim Spahivogli”. Directed by Endri Cela, this documentary piece is based on the testimonies of survivors of the Tepelena camp where convicts and political prisoners were held from 1949 to 1954. Entire families of convicts and dissidents were held in the camp in inhumane conditions and many of them died from starvation or disease. The show dramatizes this dark chapter of Albanian history through conventional documentary-style techniques – the actresses Rajmonda Bulku and Adriana Tolka tell the survivors’ testimonies from a first-person perspective, while videos of the camp and interviews with survivors are broadcast between the performing segments of the show. While it’s safe to say that many of these documentary elements are too conventional and uncreative, with the testimonies often being delivered flatly and without a sense of the performative and dramatic, there is a more poetic part of the show. The dancer Valentina Myteveli rises from the pile of soil at the beginning of the performance and we soon learn that she represents and child who died in the camp and then fictitiously transformed into a flower.
The highlight of the show and the strong humanist message directed at the audience occurs when Simon Markaj, a former political prisoner and survivor of one of the internment camps, gives a passionate speech stressing the importance of confronting the crimes of the past in order to move forward. He emphasizes that he does not aim to create divisions but to take part in reconciliation. This would have been a beautiful and important message if it were not relativized by a later segment where the show not only makes a direct comparison between Albania’s camps and Auschwitz but states that Hoxha’s camps were in certain terms even a greater tragedy than the Nazi death camp. While it should be obvious that it is irresponsible to compare Albania’s internment camps to the largest extermination camp in history where around 1.1 million people were killed (roughly the same population Albania had in 1945), there’s also a lingering feeling that the collective pain surrounding Tepelena and similar camps was too long repressed in the national consciousness, so exaggerations such as these in Flower Sajza surface sometimes.
Dealing with the past is a present thread in the repertoire policy of the National Experimental Theatre, it’s evident thanks to another production of this institution, Concert which was also co-produced by the Italian Institute of Culture Tirana. The performance – based on the text of Stefan Capaliku, an Albanian writer and dramaturg, and adapted and directed by the Italian director Giacomo Pedini – is set in the 1950s city of Shkodra when the institutional culture was being formed by the new communist regime. The show focuses on the relationship between art and a dictatorship, told through a story of three main characters – the free-spirited composer Pol Gjakova who presumably died by suicide, the state inspector who views art as dangerous and subversive and the poet who oscillates between being an artist and a spy. Though the show is imagined with a serious tone, I would argue that it lies somewhere in between a satire and an unintentional cartoonish performance because of its stereotypical characters that are brought to life by an equally one-dimensional acting.
But not all Albanian shows at the Showcase wrestled with the country’s past. Some were based on the classics, without explicit references to modern- or present-day political turmoil. Such was the show Faust which was produced by the National Theatre of Albania and Sardegna Teatro from Italy, in association with the Italian Institute of Culture Tirana (the two Albanian-Italian co-productions are representative of strong cultural ties between the countries). This is a show that’s once again directed by an Italian director, this time Davide Iodice, and based on a collage of Goethe’s, Spies’ and Marlowe’s versions of the Doctor Faust story, assembled and adapted by the writer Fabio Pisano. Faust is in many ways a populist performance, not just because it is clearly popular among the local audience which filled the entire auditorium and awarded the creative team with huge applause, but because it is more interested in external attractions with its pompous style than in the interpretation of texts it is based on. While there were some pleasurable moments, like Ema Andrea’s witty, bohemian performance of Mephistopheles, it is hard not to think about this show as one of those commercial performances thanks to which Albanian theatres attract larger audiences and acquire funds.
Existential Dilemmas of Europe’s Youngest Country
While the Albanian performances offered a new inside look into the country’s 20th century history and the state of theatre today, the staging of two plays by the Kosovan playwright and director of Qendra Multimedia Jeton Neziraj took us back to a familiar ground, the satirical, absurdist, socially-engaged world of the artist whose work was quite present at the previous editions of the Showcase.
One of Neziraj’s older plays, The Internationals, was produced by Between the Seas: Mediterranean Performance Lab from Athens and directed by Aktina Stathaki. It is a fragmentary, highly sarcastic, dazzling play about the Kosovo war that shoots its critical arrows toward all sides that were involved in the conflict. Milošević and other perpetrators of the Serbian military aggression towards Kosovo, Kosovan nationalism, the USA, NATO and the International Criminal Court in Hague – all are targets of darkly farcical vignettes, which leads us to the play’s core idea that all political sides involved in the Kosovo war participated in a stunning moral failure of humanity where thousands of innocents were left to die (though it’s worth noting that not all sides were equally responsible for this failure). Stathaki’s direction is non-pretentious production-wise and it mostly relies on the comical skills and transformational abilities of three great actresses, Anastasia Katsinavaki, Vivi Petsi and Adrianna Chatzigalanou, who alternate between playing ten or so characters.
Six Against Turkey, Qendra Multimedia. Photo: Armend Nimani
Unlike The Internationals, the recently premiered Six Against Turkey – produced by Qendra Multimedia – is a staging of Neziraj’s most recent play that centres around a 2018 incident when six Turkish school teachers with legal residency permits in Kosovo were extradited to Turkey for being an alleged threat to the country’s national security. Neziraj uses his signature satirical style to retell the events surrounding the failed coup attempt in Turkey in 2016 and Erdogan’s subsequent crackdown on democracy and political opponents, inter-referencing this storyline with Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes. Blerta Neziraj’s direction sharpens the piece’s satire by Orientalizing the stage with elements of Ottoman or Turkish culture, such as the puppet shadow performances and cotton-candy stands, and by exaggerated, grotesque visuals like inflatable suits. But perhaps the biggest shortcoming of the show is that it doesn’t represent such a richly imagined, absurd world typical for Neziraj’s other plays. Under the layer of sarcasm and stylization, Six Against Turkey is a pretty faithful and linear translation of real-life events surrounding the 2016 coup attempt, while the story of the six that are “against Turkey” is basically a footnote within the performance.
The Showcase audience had a chance to see one more production from Qendra Multimedia, White People which is based on the play of the American playwright Steven Leigh Morris and directed by the Kosovan director Besim Ugzmajli. It is quite a curious production because it’s not firmly rooted in the political realities of the region – on the contrary, it is a story about a theatre director and two actors trying to make a production of King Lear at a semi-professional theatre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, while the demons of the American culture wars and Tulsa’s dark history of racial violence infringe on their creative work. It is a demanding play to stage in Kosovo because the issues of the American liberal-conservative divide are so distant from Kosovo’s reality and the show, thus, more represents a curious picture of a political situation far, far away than it communicates with the local context. Though the actors at one point snap out of the realistic illusionism and point out the systemic discrimination of Roma artists within Kosovo’s theatre sector (I would like to see a whole show about that!). As a result of this context discrepancy, it seems that even the creative team got bewildered during the process as the acting is uneven and can often lead to conclusions opposite to those of the textual material. Verona Koxha’s exaggerated style of acting can, for example, lead us to the impression that the show is mocking the non-binary character she plays.
This year’s edition of the Kosovo/Albania Theatre Showcase also featured two performances from two institutional theatres from Kosovo, The Traitor’s Niche from the National Theatre of Kosovo and Tartuffe from the City Theatre of Gjilan. Although the two shows differ in many aspects – the former is based on a 1978 historical novel by the famous Albanian writer Ismail Kadare and the latter on Moliere’s play – both share a contemporary, deconstructivist approach to directing classical or well-held texts. The Traitor’s Niche is a story – dramatized by the Kosovan playwright Doruntina Basha – about the failed uprising of the Albanian people against the Ottoman Empire during its cruellest days, told through interweaving storylines of several characters. Tough sticking faithfully to the historical narrative, the director Kushtrim Koliqi applies to the staging many contemporary visual elements, such as a disco dance floor, the use of roller skates and references to video games, not to link the story with the current moment but to present the Ottoman leadership’s liquidation of Albanian insurgents as a form of a ruthless power game. On the other hand, the director Qendrim Rijani interprets Tartuffe not as a comedy but as a family story with tragic elements, without Moliere’s naïve happy ending. The contemporary style of the set design and costumes are used to present the story in universalist manner, while the decadent behavior of characters (sexual intrigues and cocaine snorting, to name a few) is used as a comment on the bourgeois class and the corruptive power of money.
How I Learned to Drive, Heartefact
Overcoming Personal Traumas
While the majority of the Showcase program focused on complex societal and political issues from the region’s past and present, the only Serbian production presented at the event, How I Learned to Drive from the multidisciplinary independent organization Heartefact, gave us the most intimist experience of the 6-day theatre marathon, albeit one with considerable social implications. The performance is based on a 1997 Pulitzer-winning play by Paula Vogel which is often described as Lolita from a female perspective because it tackles issues of sexual harassment, grooming of a teenage girl and incest. It is a story about a teenage girl who was groomed by her uncle from the age of 11, told in a non-linear fragmentary manner that reflects her memory and the process of coming to terms with her traumatic past.
Although Mina Milošević has already written for SEEstage about How I Learned to Drive, I would point out that this production represents an incredibly nuanced and thought-out approach to issues of sexual violence and molestation of minors. Under the directorial leadership of Tara Manić and with the virtuous, full-fleshed acting of Marta Bogosavljević and Svetozar Cvetković, the performance paints empathetic portraits of a teenage girl and her uncle. While Bogosavljević’s character takes the charge in presenting the story to the audience – she often narrates parts of the story looking spectators directly in the eyes – Cvetković builds his character with sympathy and tenderness, although his manipulative behaviour is clear throughout the performance. The show’s point of vividly presenting the emotional attachment between the two characters together with its positive moments is important as it presents the full complexity of a manipulative, violent and incestuous relationship.
The play takes its title from the fact the protagonist was taught by her uncle to drive a car and during one of their lessons he sexually harassed her. Yet driving is also seen as a motif of liberation in the play and Manić’s production. At the end of the show, Bogosavljević sits among the intimately and claustrophobically packed audience members and pretends that she’s driving. The protagonist whom she plays drives into the unknown future but with a sense of hope – she manages to escape the abusive relationship and come to terms with her trauma.
This optimistic ending of How I Learned to Drive got me thinking about the importance of hope and belief that we can overcome our traumas, no matter how violent they are. While almost all of the performances at the Kosovo/Albania Theatre Showcase presented, analysed and wrestled with different societal traumas, this intimist show is the only one that showed us a way out of the violent setting. Perhaps that message of hope is not only relevant to this Heartefact production but to the entire program of the Showcase and the political reality in the region. No matter how traumatic and conflict-ridden our past is, there is hope that we can build a better future with mutual cooperation and understanding.
Main image: Six Against Turkey. Photo: Armend Nimani
For more information, visit: qendra.org
Further reading: Six Against Turkey: A parable about the degradation of democracy
Borisav Matić is a critic and dramaturg from Serbia. He is the Regional Managing Editor at The Theatre Times. He regularly writes about theatre for a range of publications and media.
He’s a member of the feminist collective Rebel Readers with whom he co-edits Bookvica, their platform for literary criticism, and produces literary shows and podcasts. He occasionally works as a dramaturg or a scriptwriter for theatre, TV, radio and other media. He's the administrator of IDEA - the International Drama/Theatre and Education Association.
