Dritëro Kasapi: “Theatre can create common cultural experiences”

Dritëro Kasapi, artistic director of Sweden’s Riksteatern, talks to Duška Radosavljević about growing up as an Albanian in Macedonia, being labelled a ‘migrant director’ and his belief that theatre can build bridges.

‘Have you ever been to Skopje?’ Dritëro Kasapi asks shortly after we settle into this conversation about his career journey from the edges of former Yugoslavia to the top of the theatre hierarchy in Sweden. ‘Once on a school trip’, I say, ‘I have a vague memory of walking across the bridge.’ That happens to be the most important and definitive detail my interlocutor wants to impress upon me: ‘It’s a divided city’.

It’s not only the river that runs across the city, or the fact that it is a site of long-term co-existence of the Muslim and Christian communities – ‘it is in the psyche of the people’, he explains. And it did not help that in the aftermath of the 1963 earthquake, the local politicians intervened in the UN-appointed plan led by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange in such a way that maintained the deep-seated ethnic divisions.

In such a fractured landscape, where silence was often the safest language, Dritëro Kasapi however discovered something powerful: art could be a tool for understanding and connection.

Born in Skopje to a racially mixed family of teachers – his ethnically Turkish mother was a teacher of French and his Albanian father a head of an Albanian school in the predominantly Muslim district of Gazi Baba – Kasapi remembers a childhood marked by systemic segregation and anxiety. Back in the 1980s, his father had to rehearse at home what he would say to his colleagues at work the day after, for fear of putting a foot wrong in front of the party officials. Growing up Albanian in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia meant navigating a complex social terrain where languages, classrooms, and opportunities were carefully partitioned. Kasapi’s high school was quite literally divided – Albanian students in one set of classrooms, Macedonian students in another, separated but sharing the same building.

“We were housed in a Macedonian high school but only part of the day,” he recalls. “Some time in the 1980s it had been decided it would be too dangerous to have an Albanian-only school, because this could breed separatist ideas. But in the 1990s we could talk about it in a different way to our Macedonian colleagues who felt like hostages there.  They understood this problem and they said: ‘Yes, this is part of the bigger politics’.”

But where others might have seen insurmountable barriers, Kasapi saw possibilities. At 16, he started a multilingual school newspaper called Interfon, deliberately creating a space where Albanian and Macedonian students could communicate across ethnic lines. Articles were published in both languages, translated to ensure mutual understanding – a subtle act of rebellion against the prevailing segregation.

Theatre became his next frontier of exploration. His first significant production, The Dream of Misery in Projection, was based on poems by Migjeni, a socialist-era Albanian writer. Performed when communism had just fallen and uncertainty hung in the air, the piece was a raw, intuitive exploration of social injustice that resonated deeply with audiences.

“As we stood on stage with the whole of the audience in front of us, I saw that they were really relating to it. They were really forgiving of all the bad acting, writing and directing, and what they understood was the story. I didn’t expect that kind of response where people were really touched: ‘Oh this is what the youth is thinking!’. And then I realized that theatre can actually be an important medium of art having something to say,” Kasapi explains. It was a revelation that would shape his entire artistic career.

When he entered the Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1994, Kasapi was a groundbreaking figure – the first Albanian student of directing in the school’s history. At 18, he was also the youngest in his class of four students as the directing course ran only once in every four year cycle and most people who got in had tried previously too or had been studying something else in anticipation for the new year of intake. He was admitted into the class of the distinguished Yugoslav and Macedonian director, Slobodan Unkovski. Instead of feeling marginalized, Kasapi chose to confront the inherent tensions head-on. In his second year, he created a provocative performance about the Bosnian War, deliberately casting actors who had previously used racist language towards Albanians.

“I had two options: to ignore or to tackle it,” he says. “Ignoring it wouldn’t do anything. I’d just be an outsider – and I didn’t want to be an outsider.”

This approach – of radical engagement rather than withdrawal – became his signature. In this production, he cast a young Albanian student as God, symbolically inverting the power dynamics. The result was transformative. One of his actors admitted that working together made it impossible to continue casually denigrating Albanians.

Kasapi was part of a broader civil society movement emerging in Macedonia during the mid-1990s. This “third power” – comprising artists, human rights activists, and cultural organizations – sought to redefine national identity beyond ethnic categorization. They argued for citizenship rights that transcended ethnic boundaries, a radical stance in a region deeply entrenched in identity politics.

“Your rights are not because you belong to a certain ethnicity,” he emphasizes. “They are because you are a human being and a citizen.”

His work reflects this philosophy – using art not as a weapon, but as a bridge. Each performance becomes an opportunity for dialogue, for challenging preconceived narratives, for humanizing the ‘other’. A lasting legacy of this work in his native North Macedonia has been the Children’s Theatre Centre, a theatre organization Kasapi had set up in 1999 to provide relief for children in refugee camps that sprang up all over the republic during the NATO bombing of neighbouring Serbia and Kosovo. After the war, this organization continued to exist as a multilingual and multi-ethnic arts institution and from 2002 it was based in a refurbished former pornographic cinema in central Skopje. Then in 2019 the entity was reframed as the National Institution Albanian Theatre for Children and Youth Skopje.

Now Dritëro Kasapi is an established director in Sweden, where he came initially as part of the late 1990s’ trans-European projects initiated by producer Chris Torch, and involving the British-based Macedonian playwright Goran Stefanovski as well as many others. Having settled in Sweden for love, he continues to create work that probes social complexities. Honed as it was in a place where historical tensions can seem intractable, Kasapi’s theatre work is a quiet act of hope: a belief that understanding begins with listening, with sharing stories, with seeing each other fully and without fear.

In the early 2000s in Sweden, he enjoyed the reputation of an international director with a certain mystique. But then a cultural shock ensued when he learned Swedish in order to become more integrated. It was at this point that he experienced a profound shift in perception – from an “international director” to a “migrant director,” with all the expectations and limitations that entailed.

“Between 1998 and 2002, I had a lot of work as an international director, but from 2002 to 2005, I did one production in Sweden.  When you are an ‘immigrant director’, the only stories you can tell have to do with that – with experiences of war, and so on. And that was not necessarily what I wanted to do. Or I wanted to do it on my own terms. But now I was very acutely aware that as a Swedish-speaking director I had to prove myself again to the same people that saw my work when I was speaking English. I had to once again persuade them that I can do theatre. As if I had been two different people.”

Now, as the artistic director of Riksteatern – Sweden’s National Touring Theatre – Kasapi has transformed this challenge into a powerful artistic philosophy. He has made it his mission to create theatre that brings together audiences who would never typically intersect.

“I have a very clear policy that – whatever work we do – we always have to work actively to bring at least two different kinds of audience or two groups of audiences together that have no reason to meet outside of the theatre,” he explains. “They meet in the theatre. This is the remit I give to the whole organization to think about.”

 

This approach manifests in provocative, sometimes multilingual productions that challenge societal boundaries. A recent piece by the Iranian writer director Amir Reza Koohestani The Documentary examines the shifting dynamics of a Swedish-Iranian couple as they move from England to Sweden, exploring how migration transforms personal and professional identities.

Another project, currently in preparation is Cousins written by the Palestinian playwright Amer Hlehel and directed by the Palestinian director Amir Nizar Zuabi. It explores migration, colonial history, class politics and family dynamics through the story of two Syrian cousins – one living in Sweden, one arriving as an illegal migrant. Exploring a clash of perspectives on their host country, the play deliberately weaves between English, Arabic, and Swedish, reflecting the complex linguistic realities of contemporary Sweden. These are not just plays, but potential sociological investigations, which open up spaces for dialogue and understanding.

Kasapi’s journey reflects a lifelong commitment to challenging systemic divisions. From his early days questioning ethnic segregation in Macedonian schools to his current role leading Sweden’s national theatre, he has consistently used art as a tool for social transformation.

“Why are we doing theatre?” he asks. “What is the function of theatre here and now? It is to create common cultural experiences for audiences that don’t have them really.” In a world increasingly defined by boundaries – cultural, linguistic, political – Dritëro Kasapi continues to build bridges, one performance at a time.

Main image photo by Cata Portin

For more information about Kasapi’s work, visit: driterokasapi.com