DOCUMENTS OF TIME (1999)

Actresses: Aleksandra Jelic, Sanja Krsmanovic-Tasic
Music (copmosed and played) by: Nebojsa Ignjatovic
Direction and Dramaturgy: Dijana Milosevic
Set: Nesa Paripovic
Costumes: DAH Teatar
Texts: Jack Carnfield "Chicken Soup for the Soul", B. Brecht, Helen Keller

Documents of Time was created in Belgrade, May and June of 1999, while NATO was nightly bombing Yugoslavia.

The performance is a record of lived-through reality bites, carved on the performers bodies, vanishing when they leave. It is the testimony of reality dissolving in front of us . The piece represents the impossibility to capture a time, and seeks to fill a need for a different kind of record and witness.

"When NATO started to bomb my country in the spring of 1999, the last year of this century, suddenly all that we knew as human beings and artists was questioned. Personally, I realized that I understand nothing about this century, politics or history. My mind was empty facing this strange logic of the contemporary politicians - to kill more in order to prevent killing. My colleagues from the theatre shared very similar thoughts with me. We realized that we needed the wisdom of somebody very, very old, who can look from above upon the dark times in which we live.

So, we chose to speak in our performance through two very old ladies who came out of old museums, archives full of dust, using the collective memory of humankind that is recorded in the books. They meet at the staircase of the museum where they dance through their memories, bringing something that surprised also us, the artists who created them, forgiveness." - Dijana Milosevic

"It is not just that the creative people are ultimately powerless against guns and prison camps, that the cultured person is at the mercy of the ignorant killer. It is something much worse: that the cultured person and the ignorant killer have often been one and the same."
Fintan O'Toole