Part of ZOOM festival, Rijeka, premiere 8th September 2023
A couple of years ago, while looking through my family’s bookshelves, I stumbled upon an interesting book that belonged to my grandmother. It was called What You Need to Know About Sex Life by Dr Lombard Kelly, and the Serbo-Croatian version was published in 1955. Naturally, I was intrigued by this discovery. Here was a rare opportunity to experience how previous generations learned about sex. From what I can remember, the book was well written, detailed yet with simple in style, containing straight-forward explanations of anatomy as well as instructions for preventing STDs. Factual, basic.
Sex talk between parents and children isn’t always easy. There’s usually a good amount of awkwardness. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule but it seems those cases are, I’d imagine, still quite rare. Personally, I was one of the exceptions. My mother explained things in a chilled and insightful way, telling me what I needed to know.
Women’s first sexual experiences and the question of adequate sexual education and healthcare in Croatia are central topics of the new documentary play, Girls. Directed by Tjaša Črnigoj, this play forms a kind of diptych with director’s other project Fight, part of the bigger lecture-performance series Sex Education II. Both Girls and Fight explore themes of women’s reproductive rights through history from Second World War to today. There are also some similarities in performance style. Both feature bloody underwear hanging from a clothes line to illustrate the way in which home remedies were once used for unsafe abortion. The way in which the performance space was used was also similar, with different spots representing real sites in the world. In Girls, another clothes line is used on which the names of Zagreb sites are written, from South to North, a path one of the actresses took when rushing to get checked up by a gynaecologist to find out whether she was pregnant or not.
The play is performed at Exportdrvo Hall, a former storage facility used for shipping wood products from Rijeka, as the name suggests. The actresses, explain that their play follows a similar path to that of the wood, referring to the family tree through which they are about to lead us. The Igralke Collective consists of Rijeka-based actresses: Ana Marija Brđanović, Anja Sabol, Sendi Bakotić and Vanda Velagić (the latter two also perform in Fight). All four of them are dressed in long white costumes with red and blue embroidered details that resemble folk attire (designed by Tijana Todorović). This indicates the ancestry of the female line as the play chronologically maps women’s sexual experiences starting with the actresses’ grandmothers in the 50s, to their mothers during the 80s, ending with the actresses personal stories from the early 2000s and 2010s. The colour white dominates the stage (design by Todorović and Ivan Botički), the screen behind them is used for projecting family photographs and the floor is covered in plastic. This makes a great contrast with the red paint that will soon be smeared on the stage and different props. In the end, the stage will actually look like a map, where one can, by following the blood trail, track the never-ending blood cycle that women endure during their lifetime, literally and figuratively.
The play starts of with the definition of the word ‘cura’ which is a Croatian slang for ‘girl’. As it is explained, ‘cura’ is derived from the verb ‘curiti’ which translates to ‘leak’, explicitly relating to menstrual flow and period blood. The play moves from this etymological aspect of the word to the sociological – what is it like to be a girls today and what was it like for out mothers and grandmothers? As expected, each woman had a different, unique journey discovering their sexuality, but there are some common experiences they all (even women in the audience) had. For some women, like Sabol’s grandmother, the only sex education were the beatings she would get from her father because he didn’t approve of her boyfriend choice (later Sabol’s grandfather). Sabol effectively demonstrates the abusive behaviour by whipping the white cover on the floor with a belt, tearing a hole in it and then smearing it with red paint, portraying simultaneously two tearings – one from the whipping, and one from losing virginity. Other women have had sex education in school as part of the biology classes where they learned only the anatomy of human bodies and what kind of STDs can you get.
A line that is often repeated in two variations is being or not being careful when women sleep with men. With a lot of misinformation circulating then and now, there was also a lack of contraceptives and other methods apart from ‘being careful’, the only method available and known to some, sadly. Fear and shame are frequently mentioned. Pregnancy scares, having an abortion, asking parents to send you money in order to have an abortion, wanting to be slimmer, developing an eating disorder, hearing rumours about oneself and being ostracised for losing your virginity at a young age or feeling guilty for having fun with multiple boys – these are just some of the experiences talked about. This further raises the question how far has the society progressed since the 50s, or even the 80s, in terms of women’s reproductive rights. Or, an even scarier scenario, has the situation regressed?
Another recurring motif of the play is the lack of communication between parents and children about love and sex, whether it happens out of shame, a lack of education in schools or simply never having the ‘talk’ for whatever reason. The actresses dedicate a moment of silence for all the talks they never had with their mothers and grandmothers but also to all the time spent in ignorance
Credits:
Concept: Sendi Bakotić, Ana Marija Brđanović, Tjaša Črnigoj, Anja Sabol, Tijana Todorović, Vanda Velagić//Direction and dramaturgy: Tjaša Črnigoj//Costume design: Tijana Todorović//Set design: Ivan Botički, Tijana Todorović//Video: Mara Prpić//Lighting design: Marin Lukanović, Tjaša Črnigoj
Producers: Igralke Collective, Croatian National Theatre Ivan pl. Zajc, Zavod Vidne, Mladinsko Theatre and Maska Ljubljana
For more information, visit: Mladinsko.com
Further reading: Review of Sex Education II
Nora Čulić Matošić (1998) is a student of Comparative Literature (MA) at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. She has written theatre criticism for the Croatian radio programme Theatralia and web portal Kulturpunkt.hr. Besides theatre, her interests are other forms of performing arts (particularly dance performances) and film.
