Prize for "Dada - an Essay in Movement"

Dear Magdalenas,

My solo about Dada Vujasinovic has just received a prize for best performance, total deign and music at the ART TREMA festival in Ruma.

"DADA - An essay in movement“ is a performance about Dada Vujasinović, a journalist of the magazine  “Duga”  who was a war reporter from the beginning of  the civil war in Yugoslavia, to continue reporting in an open, clear and truthful way about the political and social scene of Serbia, and the backdrop of the civil war. She was found dead in her family apartment on the 8 th of April 1994. The official version of the regime proclaimed it was suicide. She was thirty years old.

An essay in movement is a new form of a  narrative scenic event, in which, through artistic actions,   events are shown  with  (self)critical reflections of their origin and consequences. The essay is always presented   through elements of personal history put into a context of historic events that have influenced it directly. Movement and dance have always been the authors   primary form of expression, hence the essay has to be written in movement. As with any essay, this one will also contain end notes, that will, on request, be presented in the performance space,  contrary  of their name,  at the very beginning of the piece.  These end notes will contain fragments of memories and facts, and artistic interventions, that will, as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, in the end, paint the life and work of Dada Vujasinovic , and the times she lived in, with a special emphasis on the last four years of her life, that are the first four years of the bloody civil war on the territory of former Yugoslavia.

The audience will be the one choosing the order the endnotes will be presented in the theatre space, through texts, videos, scenes or interventions in space. The essay in movement will be presented at the very end.

Excerpts from reviews of the performance:

“(…) All the scenes are highly poetic, theatrically full of imagination and extremely  suggestive. The great work of all the collaborators of the author and performer Sanja Krsmanović Tasić,  has been rewarded a thousand fold. Gentleness and human warmth that give a special tone to the whole performance, are a true path of a deep REBELLION against violence and death, that is imposed by this important accomplishment. The author has demonstrated skill and gift in the choice of the means of expression, but the most important part is that she has , with her noble work,  drawn closer the brave and tragic character of Dada Vujasinovic and has created for the audience an inerasable testimony of this young women, that paid the price of a time in which she was testing the forces of darkness into which she disappeared. I am thankful for this work and I congratulate the moral and artistic statement of the author. Bravo!“

                                        Goran Cvetković, Radio Beograd, 8.04.2014.Printed in Novi Magazin and  BETON.

“Every fragment is dramatically precisely shaped into a whole, and through their opening a strong rhythmical feeling is achieved, and the audience is additionally drawn into the events by choosing the order of the end notes. The essay itself, Sanja`s passage through the whole story, silent​ and dancing, comes at the end, as the crown of this authentic and theatrically important  form. This is an​ exciting performance, imaginative, emotional. Awakening.”

                                                     Aleksandra Glovacki,  ‘’Kultura’’, Radio Beograd, Program 202,11.04.2014.