| Still Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Aug 28 2014, 11:04 AM (1,515 Views) | |
| Mobson | Aug 28 2014, 11:04 AM Post #1 |
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This programme aired a week ago today on Radio 4 in which reporter Allan Little returns to Sarajevo to explore the role of the arts in restoring the city's identity, twenty years after the siege which saw its cultural life flourish against the odds. When Sarajevo's multicultural identity was targeted by Serbian nationalists - firing from positions only 200 yards from the city's treasured National Musuem - it fought back by maintaining an artistic life worthy of a European capital city confident of its cultural heritage. Allan Little finds out how these values are faring in a peace which allowed for no State Ministry of Culture and fragmented the multi-cultural society the city once symbolised. Allan takes internationally acclaimed theatre director Haris Pasovic back to the Youth Theatre in Sarajevo where he invited Susan Sontag to stage her now legendary production of Waiting for Godot. Lit by candles, under constant mortar fire, and with actors so hungry they had to lie down when not performing, each of its twenty performances was a sell-out. Both audience and actors risked their lives to be there. Why? Pasovic, who also founded the Sarajevo Film Festival during the siege with ten VHS tapes and a TV set, says, "In war it is not the most important thing to survive, the most important thing is to remain human... you are human when you let the child in you speak. When we do that we are not aggressive, we are creative. That is why art is a primary need like food, sex and water." How are the citizens of Sarajevo fulfilling that basic human need for art in a transformed cultural landscape? Allan talks to National Theatre actors Vedrana and Aleksandar Seksan, Mirsad Purivatra (now director of the Sarajevo Film Festival) and artist Sejla Kameric. BBC Radio 4 21st August @ 11.30am - duration 30 minutes:....listen here .... http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04dqlc3 |
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| rumbaba | Aug 28 2014, 12:54 PM Post #2 |
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Interesting, I have just been video conferencing with some people from Sarajevo. I worked with some really good people there. Sometimes they would talk about the war but mostly they wanted to look forward. However, nearly everybody thinks that it will explode again, because the current political solution is so unsatisfactory. The people I worked with in Mostar regarded themselves as Croatians and the people from the north in Banja Luka considered themselves Serbian. I always referred to 'local language' rather than be more specific. They speak 'Bosnian' or 'Serbian' or 'Croatian' , nobody speaks 'Serbo-Croat' but it is all very similar. In the north they started to use cyrillic more after the war. A strange place, I wish I had visited it before the war, to have some perspective. |
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| Caro | Aug 29 2014, 03:48 AM Post #3 |
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Have either of you read The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway? It was a great book about the power of art in such a situation. A review I saw of it mentioned that the author hadn't spoken specifically of the ethnicities of the protagonists either. And another similar one I read and absolutely loved with The Conductor by Sarah Quigly, about a not completely top-rate conductor of an orchestra in St Petersburg/Leningrad when it was under siege in 1941. He was left with an orchestra in tatters, and managed to conduct Shostakovich's 7th Symphony. This was based on a true event. |
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