Borut Šeparović

http://www.st.nu/noje/kultur.php?action=visa_artikel&id=768957

http://www.afpbb.com/article/life-culture/life/2528790/3423879
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http://borderterriers.xooit.fr/t1536-Des-chiens-errants-sur-scene-pour-changer-le-sort-des-exclus-de-la-societe.htm
http://www.chien.com/Echos/actualite-canine_2140-croatie-des-chiens-errants-sur-scene-pour-changer-le-sort-des-exclus-de-la-societe.html
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http://www.clicanoo.com/?page=article&id_article=194455timbuktu-www-links

Igor Ružić: Odjeci angažirane predstave Timbuktu

Theater director Borut Šeparović puts homeless humans and dogs on the stage of the Travno Puppet Theater in the performance Timbuktu, confronting them by way of doubly engaged “exhibition” of unwantedness, incomprehension, “egregious” dereliction and unseemliness, social displacement. Along the sides of the audience the city’s homeless silently line up, while the stage is taken by running dogs from the Shelter for Abandoned Animals in Dumovec. They are linked by a text from Paul Auster’s novel Timbuktu, narrated in the first dog singular, in the voice of the actor Sven Medvešek. This rhetoric trick of dog perspective initiates numerous identification processes in the audience, allowing, at least partially, the possibility that a dog can be more than a biologically programmed food, reproduction and excrement machine.
Namely, Auster’s dog Mr. Bones is disposed with both a language and various theatrical abilities to control the attention of the audience. Mourning the death of his master, Mr. Bones also serves as a narrative lever the director uses to compare the rich, corporate and soulless America with its „loser“ poets come caretakers of mutts. Mr. Bones is no revolutionary here; his acceptance of a life in a provincial family says much about the limits of Auster’s criticism, trapped at the possibility of a food filled bowl.
As for the performing dogs, they portray a range from absolute devotion to acting tasks, performed under the gazing eye of a coach (Mr. Bones is played by a “rescue and multiple intelligence tests champion” named Cap), to spontaneous humping of the nearest partner and urinating on stage. The very fact that “dog” was not understood as a generic term, nor as a fetch slave, but that the stage allows us to think about the wolf’s closest relative as a creature capable of learning and self-control as well as instinctive release, is the truly radical quality of Šeparović’s play. As for the canine acting competence in comparison with human, I would say that the mentioned performance groups are marked by a significant symmetry. If Cap’s fanatic obedience while staring into his coach, awaiting his new assignment bothers us, we can just as equally be bothered by the “trained”, reciting voice of Sven Medvešek at the very beginning of the play. If the curious eyes of homeless dogs and people move us, we are just as shaken by the closing „little conversation“ of the now completely convincing human dog Medvešek and his human master (interpreted by Mario Kovač, Vili Matula or Bojan Navojec). It is interesting that this concluding position of utter equality between the human and canine creatures sitting side by side on the stage (while Cap lies in their lap) was the most painful for the audience, because it most accurately describes the complex emotional turmoil, as well as the constant “Babylonian”, the omni-lingual dialoguing of the human and animal kind. This is knowledge that not even the human species can precisely conceive nor articulate, we also haven’t the vocabulary to speak of mutual belonging, pervasion, exchanging of souls. One small sepulchral scene at the end of the play Timbuktu, performed without any religious pathos, made many people tell me that they probably would have “fallen apart” if they had opened the hatch on their strictly controlled emotionality a little more. Timbuktu definitely touched its audience more that it was prepared to bear. Does one need a clearer definition of engaged theater?

Thus, as the theatrologist Nicholas Ridout points out, in the realm of theater economics the strangeness of an animal on stage does not arise from the fact that it does not belong there but from the fact that we suddenly foresee that there is nothing strange in an animal being on stage, that in fact the animal can also be used there just like a human performer.

It seems to me that Montaigne’s question “When I play with my cat, who’s to say whether I’m entertaining it or it is entertaining me?”, which,as Tillyard emphasized, might act subversively on educated Elizabethans, and could be applied to the dog Cap, a pedigree border collie, main, but also the only scene-bound actor in the play Timbuktu, whose subtitle definition is “a monologue for a dog on stage spoken by an actor in the audience”, hence, as a play which makes visible on stage the brazen dichotomy between the soul/spirit, i.e. the actor’s voice, in this case the voice of Sven Medvešek, and the canine, and in this case the only performing body – Cap, the dog in the role of Mr. Bones from Auster’s novel Timbuktu, that is – colloquially, as the dramatization puts it, in the role of a canine mixture, a cocktail – Kosta. In truth, the play itself has an ironic relationship toward its own synchronization, for which the dramatization says that it is not “the best of solutions, reminding a little of kung fu films”. Certainly, this is ironic, because as Cap’s coach, Alen Mareković, puts it when asked how aware Cap is of this unusual situation he was put in – his own acting, performance – on the scene of a theater?:
“Even though I could with all responsibility claim that there is no acting there, but that it all comes down to a series of tasks to perform in his head, I still have a feeling that he really knows that he’s ‘acting’. His interaction with Sven’s voice, his anticipation of the up-coming scene sometimes even fascinates me.”

Canine performers
Furthermore, it seems to me that in the moment when the iron curtain falls, and this is the very end of the play, that is, in the moment when homeless dogs from the City Shelter for Abandoned Animals in Dumovec appear behind that iron fence, and the pedigree collie Cap moves toward the proscenium as trained, according to the command of his coach Alen Mareković, we receive through this animal existences a visible definition, a determinant of differences between performers and actors. The homeless dogs, dogs who might possibly be adopted via this play – of course, if there’s an open soul in the audience – perform as performers, or as Sven Medvešek puts it – they are not actors, they are real dogs. So let’s listen to the determination of those canine entities as Sven Medvešek describes them on scene:
“They are real mutts, real homeless dogs. These dogs are not acting, they don’t know they’re in the theater, they don’t understand why you’re watching them right now. They are not trained, they have no pedigree, no master, nothing, but they do have a story much like Kosta’s.”
The scenes that follow when these homeless canine performers appear are urinating, barking, running, playing, rolling around the stage because it doesn’t mean anything to them. Furthermore, there was lovemaking involved; a dog wouldn’t be bothered to freely make doggy-style love with the mate of his choice. Although, one does see the realization of the previous metaphor, because the stage literally starts to mean something to these canine performers, considering the possibility of being adopted. The play opens a humane option of adopting the twelve dogs from the City Shelter for Abandoned Animals in Dumovec, an opportunity for a new happy ending, making the theater directly involved in the destinies of these performing dogs, hence –theater does literally mean life for them. I found out later from Alen Crnčan from the Friends of Animals association, who participates in the realization of the play as one of the stage guides for the mentioned homeless dogs, that by the last performance they had managed to find a home for only three dogs out of the twelve homeless performers on stage.

Cap as a working dog
Unlike the said performers who thought the stage was just another suitable territory to piss on, the canine actor – a pedigree sheep dog, a border collie, as Sven Medvešek put it – is not here on stage alone because his coach is sitting in the first row, and Cap unmistakably transforms his movements into working, acting tasks, thus becoming an animal counterpart to the actor, Sven Medvešek as a, let’s say, normative actor in the mainstream theater. Still, the determinant of difference between the two actors is impressed; namely, while Medvešek is here – on stage of a theater according to his own conscious decision to submit to a very strict training of memorizing text and physical expressions, on the other hand, Cap is which ever way we put it, as an animal submitted to the laws of working, acting training, where we cannot be certain whether this unique animal entity participates with its own will in the shaping of a performance about the canine destiny of Auster’s Mr. Bones. Thus, as the theatrologist Nicholas Ridout (Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, 2006) points out, in the realm of theater economics the strangeness of an animal on stage does not arise from the fact that it does not belong there but from the fact that we suddenly foresee that there is nothing strange in an animal being on stage, that in fact the animal can also be used there just like a human performer. Still, regarding the ethics of the play which is subject to the possibility of adopting homeless dogs as making the sad existences of homeless humans, people without a permanent address and with a temporary shelter in Heinzl Street, visible – let us remind that these twelve people volunteered to participate in the realization of the monologue-play – then Cap’s working education, thus, not – handling, is annulled and I start to see the play Timbuktu as one of my personal favorite theatrical projects.
Let’s see what Alen Mareković, the pedigree shepherd dog turn actor, Cap’s, trainer says about the manner of training with Cap and how different the performance training is from the usual so-called handling of dogs, that according to some is necessary for the socialization of dogs in everyday life:
“We began our rehearsals for the play back in May. Cap knew from before most of the things Borut had in mind. Still, for example, running in circles and the removal of the American flag was something that he needed to be taught. But, I think someone’s experienced eye can notice that this part of the play was his favorite. That means that we’ve done a good job. Actually, I always joke that Cap keeps thinking throughout the play: ‘flag… flag… flag’. I must admit that the term ‘handling’ creeps me out a little. It reminds me of those poor animals in the circus. Or when someone says that they’re breaking in their child. I’d say I work, train and educate my dogs. The biggest difference between the basic training, that is, a dog trained for a normal (co)habitation in an urban environment and an advanced education, that is, a working dog, is in the duration of concentration a dog is capable of keeping. A working dog must be able to concentrate on a task, or its owner, for a lot longer, in order to successfully cooperate with him.“

The American flag or a paper bag floating in the wind
So, the American flag going down to the musical matrix of the ironic song America (We’re all living in America) of the group Rammstein, is the stage metonymic of the myth about the fake and transparent Coca-Cola American dream, the myth of corporate capitalism, symbolized in the American Family, which adopted Mr. Bones after Willy’s death, whose false, sugary-Disney-like life Mr. Bones – Kosta, finally found savior from by committing suicide on the highway, in a game called „Dodge the car“ in order to join Willy, a man with a dog’s heart, post mortem. At that, each and every member of the audience was ironically met by the omnipresent plastic bottle of Coca-Cola on the seats of the stage on Scene Travno, considering that this is also one of the sponsors of the said adoption-theatrical project, but one must not forget that this is also a corporation often related with the violation of human rights. To be more specific, when the song We’re all living in America starts to reverberate the stage, Cap the dog starts to run around the stage within his trained working task, barking in a very agitated and loud manner, and at the moment when an American flag is lowered from one of the ramps, Cap hides behind the curtain of the American dream while his head peeks behind this flag-curtain of corporate capitalism as a puppet, he finally sharply, madly, barely restraining himself – tears it down with his teeth, letting it remain rumpled on the stage like a stinky canine cake, lots of which will later be left anyway by canine performers on this pissing territory. So, at the moment Mr. Bones, Kosta, who Willy believed to be an angel trapped in a dog’s body, meets the American Family, he gets to know the other side, the dark side of America – the one from the myth about the American dream, which he himself amazingly differentiates with the example of a paper bag floating in the air. With Willy he used to watch a bag floating in the wind for hours. Willy called it poetry, and Daddy Dick, from the American Family called it garbage.
Let’s stop for one more moment on the first scene that anticipates Kosta’s final suicide in order to realize a postmortem reunion with Willy and entrance into canine paradise Timbuktu, in which dogs can probably communicate with their human friends. So, in that scene in the beginning, Cap is sitting on a darkened stage on his hind legs, while around him remote controlled cars angrily speed to a vehement musical matrix, which is a marvelous anticipation of his final suicide, off stage, on a six-lane superhighway.

Paradise for homeless dogs and humans
The said play was determined by Borut Šeparović along with Jasna Žmak, the dramaturgist, as an engaged play, formed by Paul Auster’s namesake novel, which brings a devoted story about a love between a homeless person Willy, who is a man with a dog’s heart, a promoter of the philosophy of kindness, who only fantasized about leaving the world a better place than when he found it, and his dog Mr. Bones, who Willy deeply believed was sent to him directly from above.
So, I repeat: even though I am ethically vexed by the use of animals even as subjects in theatrical plays and performances, the morality of this play that speaks up in the name of human and non-human homeless, fills me with absolute joy and a renewed belief in engaged art, an art that directly penetrates life; an engaged theater which portrays that it is indeed possible to perform locally, which might finally open the possibility for all those abandoned dogs to be adopted, something I sincerely hope for. Aside from that, this is a theater that openly speaks about our fruitless reality in which, unfortunately, most of us have no sense for others – those who are sick, powerless, abandoned, lost, those we see clumped up like dogs on our park benches. Or as Ivan Mašina, one of the homeless, said, in a statement for the press – before he was accommodated in the shelter in Heinzl Street, he loitered around Maksimir “bench No. 8, bush No. 4″, adding that unlike him, even dogs have guardians.
Of course, in one of the utopian demands of this engaged play, it would be desirable that all these homeless humans and animals find their own social paradise, a hither Timbuktu. Or, as the monologue-play Timbuktu quite accurately diagnoses in the end: „Dogs don’t talk, but there are people who understand them“.

LEAD 1: At the very end of the play Timbuktu we reach another conclusion about the theater as training, theater as directing, theater as a system of rules, theater as America, theater as a space of castration, theater as dog hell, a place where entrance for roller-blades, ice-cream and dogs is strictly forbidden.

LEAD 2: During the play I, completely unexpectedly, and due to the masterfully simple interaction between an actor and a director, Sven Medvešek and Mario Kovač, and their almost „surrogate“ performance of an extremely short conversation between the alive Mr Bones (Kosta) and Willy’s ghost, managed to notice the small spark of Tim-buk-tu, that illusive otherworldly canine (and human) ideal.

The revival of New Zagreb in the last several years became one of the main preoccupations of the city authorities – abandoned swamps are cultivated, new sports and recreational centers are created, conglomerations of stores labeled with English syntagms arise, the sweet-talkingly initiated projects of hosting cultural institutions, whose primary definition bypasses the fast-track profitability that seems to hold the leading position in the set of values of the designers of the city’s political fashion, are being finished reluctantly and lazily. This last example, the finishing of the Museum of Contemporary Art, has for a while been the subject of discussions and newspaper articles, but on the right side of Sava in Zagreb, there was a case, not even closely as infamous a year ago, regarding an unfinished and (again) in the short-term, unprofitable structure, this time a theater hall. For several years now there is a theater that took a long time to build, between a concrete plateau of the most populated Zagreb apartment building, the Mammoth, and a church, „created“ speedily by God’s hand (on what used to be a children’s park). Attempts of focusing the public attention to the fact that it was incomplete can be boiled down to mostly puppet plays, once under the direction of the International Center for Cultural Services (MCUK), the organizer of the International Puppet Theater Festival PIF, and also the organizer of the entire complex in Travno, whose main hall was unprepared for hosting plays, except in rare cases (if we remember Battle for Stalingrad directed by Rezo Gabriadze and performed as part of the second World Theater Festival). In the finally well arranged space, in the deep shade of the Mammoth, which obviously hid both the political intrigue surrounding the change in the theater’s leadership, as well as any larger media coverage of the opening of the new-old theater space a year ago, Montažstroj, one of the rare modern theater groups that can boast its own audience (three performances of The Theater You Deserve at ITD in Zagreb last year, were sold in advance) and a „good reputation“ about its theatrical youth, sets up its new project in cooperation with the Zagreb Puppet Theater as the new director of Scene Travno, named Timbuktu, and subtitled A monologue for a dog on stage spoken by an actor in the audience.

USA and T(im)B(uk)T(u)
If we think of the tales spun around the last few productions of Montažstroj, the already mentioned Theater You Deserve, and partly T-formance, the authors didn’t have to overly exert themselves advertising Timbuktu – in a very short period of time (even before the premiere) unstoppable rumors spread, which according to a snowball hear-say effect, became of enormous proportions after only a few interlocutor changes. This time, before the play itself, rumors had it there were stray dogs on stage and they were to be adopted by each spectator, and silent consternation was generated by the mention of Zagreb’s homeless, which were supposedly also to participate in the play, and a related association that this art will once again ask of us some form of psycho-physical exertion. The reality is actually completely different – a plastic bottle of Coca-Cola as a small present waits on the red seat in the newly designed hall, much like the multiplex movie theaters. All that along with the program book/poster for the play, an American flag folded military-style, undoubtedly point to the political now as a repeated focus of the authors (just like in previous projects, the concept and directing was done by Borut Šeparović, along with the dramaturgic help of the new Montažstroj member Jasna Žmak), inspired this time by Paul Auster’s novel. However, within the story of a homeless man and his dog which, situated in the audience and subsequently illuminated by a spotlight, the first „dog“ singular is expressed in a monologue by the actor Sven Medvešek, while on stage we observe the „mime“ of the dog, Mr. Bones (or in Croatian, Kosta), as the main character, who thus „emulates“ his canine life with and without his master Willy, his canine philosophy, canine religion and canine thoughts, America, that is, anti-Americanism, doesn’t figurate as a cheep political slogan, that would shake the „stale“ political attitudes of the audience in Zagreb, which is supposedly extremely unwilling to accept any theatrical experiments. The viewers, unlike the last two projects by Montažstroj, remain safely in their seats, which of course, doesn’t diminish in any way the high artistic range of their new play.
Completely opposite from the America depicred in the story through Santa Claus whom Willy looked like, and Mickey Mouse that bosses around a poor dog, and Disneyland that doesn’t welcome dogs, let alone dog cocktails, or mutts, or the American dream, which castrates Kosta out of its need for extreme cultivation, there exists a canine Eden with the mystical name of the African city of Timbuktu, or better yet Tim-buk-tu, a place some dogs go after their death, which is characterized by the ability of unbridled communication between a dog and its master. Even though the discovery of a universal language meant for exchanging thoughts with other, and traditionally understood, lower living creatures to us humans does not seem as a bait that would obligate us to do right in this world or as a reward worthy of being strictly reserved for the otherworldly, Tim-buk-tu stands as a realization of a dog’s deepest desire, where a form of becoming one with the universe, of melting with the divine self, occurs. On the other hand, the human aspiration for the divine, „the higher“ being or the Lord, is transponded into a canine perspective by Auster and Montažstroj – humans and dogs are, in a way, equalized in the „religious“ sense, in their aspiration to communicate with the unattainable. Thus, neither dogs nor humans are obviously not meant to communicate with their M/masters in this world, fate obviously intended for them a paradoxical existence – in Timbuktu’s text, dogs in this world are forever condemned to bark, and humans to talk; furthermore, dogs are, in Kosta’s philosophy, angels trapped in dogs’ bodies, which is easily proven in the simple reversion of the English word for dog into the word god.

Barking at Illusion
In this manner America and Tim-buk-tu in Montažstroj’s play are given as opposites between the need for false civility on the one hand and an intersubjective communication unbridled by language, on the other; between the seemingly perfect family living its (American) dream, but for which a master-less dog must yet be educated, whose movement must be limited by a chain, and whose sexual organs must be castrated, and an almost Utopian relationship between a homeless man and his dog where the master’s homelessness suddenly stops being an obstacle, and where the master-slave relationship transforms into one of friendship, where borders between the anatomies of two different living beings are lost. Tim-buk-tu and America as the difference between canine heaven and canine hell.
If we were naive before, due to the half-hour „communication“ between a dog on stage and people in the audience where, by the way, not a single „wrong“ or unplanned movement of Cap, the dog playing Kosta, happened, and we thought that maybe the theatrical act itself might be the earthly substitute for the unattainable ideal of the unobstructed conversation with a different being, that maybe the theater is Tim-buk-tu, Kosta asks himself the very opposite question, doubting in blasphemy into canine highest truths and divine-canine revelations – perhaps Tim-buk-tu is organized as a theater? Perhaps dogs are forbidden from entering into the canine utopia just as they are forbidden from entering into theater, along with rollerblades and ice-cream?
Perhaps Tim-buk-tu is nothing more than America, a strictly codified theater with its own rules, regulations and laws, where communication and understanding must be conducted through artificially created symbolic languages. The theater in this sense cannot play a utopian role, but only impersonate it, be a front, which falsely masks and hides completely opposite intentions.
The play Timbuktu after the initial half an hour, reserved for gentle sighs and cuddling looks of the audience meant for the lonely dog on stage, seems to grasp the fakeness of the theatrical illusion that incessantly attempts to surreptitiously disguise the conventions of its own functioning. On the other hand, one mustn’t forget that the uncovering of the conditions of the creation of a theatrical performance, and the penetration of the real into the sanctity of the closed system of artwork, here a theater play, has long since become the shaggy postulate of the postmodern or, to put it more precisely, post-dramatic theater. However, it seems to me that Timbuktu skillfully avoids the general and spent issues of the theatrical scene and manages to find its own uniqueness within a never more numerous domestic (and, I believe, wider) theatrical production.

Pavlov’s theater
Starting with Medvešek’s emphasis of orders that the dog on stage dutifully obeys („slowly“, „place“, „drink water“), followed by the entrance of the coach (Alen Mareković) from the audience where he sat in the front line and indicated the actions and movements that Cap was supposed to perform during the play, Timbuktu was obviously trying to emphasize an image of the theater which is completely opposite from the naive ideal of the mutually unproblematic communication, that is, of Timbuktu as a canine heaven that was presented in Kosta’s story. As the play continued, I spent less and less time swooning over how the speech of Sven Medvešek flows into Cap’s actions into a meaningful whole that entices the joyful reactions of the audience, and my attention was beginning to be captured by the movements of the coach’s hands, that is, the orders the dog was blindly obeying during the one and a half hours of performance. The steady canine gaze suddenly turned into a “robotic” one, and the loyal dog into a Pavlov’s dog, which performs even the basic functions of life, such as drinking water, feeding and barking, dependant on the coach’s, or in this case, the director’s whims. Like the kids which, while the audience is entering the theater, control their remote vehicles circling the somewhat confused Cap on stage from the back row, the reactions and actions of Timbuktu’s main protagonist, are forced by the pressing of a button on a remote control, even though there is always a possibility of refusing obedience to his Master. Montažstroj thus uncovers the theater as training, which is always under the threat of a possible rebellion. The theater as a permanent crossroad between directing and a never completely subduable body that is eager to resist.
In his copyright application to Paul Auster for using the novel Timbuktu as a textual template for Montažstroj’s new play, the group director, Borut Šeparović, also writes that within this project he is interested in the „breach of reality relating the conventional theatrical illusion“. This item in the letter is completely realized in the „controversial“ scene, causing out-of-theater whispers and rumors, in which twelve stray dogs currently accommodated in a kennel are brought on stage, while an equal number of homeless people from Zagreb are positioned in close vicinity of the audience. Like replicants forced to meet originals they were created from, the imaginary characters, the roaming Kosta and the homeless Willy, humans and dogs a text can only talk about in a „well tailored manner“, are through this act of directing faced with tangible people with first and last names and dogs of flesh and blood, whose life stories are quite present on their skin, branded by hunger, cold and alcoholism, as well as dog bites or kicks. According to some opinions, says Sven Medvešek, when the everyday climbs onto the stage and when the theater starts to bring in real people on the stage instead of actors, we are talking about „surrogates“ who should have no business on those boards. However, Timbuktu attempts to point to the opposite and manifest that the theater must not loose what makes its special by a profanisation of its own elements, but can build its uniqueness on those grounds.

Dualities
Attempting to conjoin, conditionally put, the fictional and real level, emphasized by the fact that the members of „the breach of the real“ are the very members of, stereo-typically understood, lowest social class, the bums and carriers of rabies, puts into the foreground the procedure that must be done in order to „cross the ramp“, the difference between the stray dog in the pound and its counterpart on the stage, or the homeless man from a shelter in Heinzel Street and his fictional „fake“.
Even though the story about the illusory and real dimension of artwork prevents the theater with its specificity – the presence of real bodies on stage which defy being put into different fictional drawers – Timbuktu nonetheless emphasizes the separation between the whole work of art and the surrogate, lowly reality into the divide between the dog Cap, who only plays a stray, and dogs who really are strays, using an iron fence, which closes off the stage space and completely divides Cap from the other dogs, or between Mario Kovač playing Willy, while twelve homeless people really live that very story. Just like Kosta, in order to find his new masters, that is, a roof over his head and a constant source of food, must be „civilized“ by washing, scrubbing, muzzling, castrating, chaining and other acts and props, it is obvious that the other stray dogs from the play need the same procedure to take the place of the main actor. Even though we might have believed the illusion about the mixed (as Willy would put it, postmodern) origin of Cap during Timbuktu, we are finally introduced with his pedigree breed and his coach. With the fact that a mutt and a stray cannot play Kosta, because the rules of the game are „familiar“ only to trained dogs, the way the theater works once again reveals to be very similar to the training of pets, according to Montažstroj. The same way the American dream refines Kosta, the theater must first cleans the reality from unwanted elements, then civilize it, pack it and put a bow around it in order to put it up on stage – like the final scene in Timbuktu in which several employees of the kennel cleans and sterilizes the stage from the twenty-minute-long stay of unwanted elements, uncultured stray dogs which, opposite from the civilized Cap, obviously didn’t know all the rules and regulations of a theatrical institution, so they relieved the burdens of their bladders and bowels in that sacred space. Because, in order to climb up on stage there must be a certain knowledge that tells us, firstly, which actions are forbidden in theater, even if they are the functions of a living body and, secondly, how to perform the ones that are allowed – Cap’s barking is an order controlled by the coach and not, like with the other dogs, a spontaneous reaction to the endangerment of their personal space; the green commando and torn pants of Mario Kovač are a part of the theatrical or perhaps private costume, which is not exactly what the other homeless people are wearing; just like Iggy Pop might be able to afford signing Now I wanna to be your dog, wishing for a subdued position, to be (what else) but a dog, there are still those who are dogs in real life, that being not their choice, but their life’s destiny. So, at the end of the play, we once again reach the conclusion that the theater is training, the theater is directing, the theater is a system of rules, the theater is America, the theater is a castrating space, the theater is a canine hell, a place where entrance for roller-blades, ice-cream and dogs is strictly forbidden.
At the very end of this article in which I overly neglected to comment on the performance character of the play and bashfully avoided to express my personal enchantedness with certain exceptional scenes, in order to clear the reputation of the official romantic and incorrigible utopist, I must oppose my own pessimistic reading of Montažstroj’s noteworthy new project, and emphasize that during the play I, completely unexpectedly, and due to the masterfully simple interaction between an actor and a director, Sven Medvešek and Mario Kovač, and their almost „surrogate“ performance of an extremely short conversation between the live Kosta and Willy’s ghost, managed to notice the small spark of Tim-buk-tu, that illusive otherworldly canine (and human) ideal. The time for my theatrical atheism is obviously not quite here – the faith in the paranormal abilities of theatrical communication is still strong.

The play achieved success due to the people without a permanent address who expressed their will to participate. I did not invite them out of pity; I wanted them to be equal to others in the play – said the director of the theater play “Timbuktu”, Borut Šeparović, which was made according to the novel of Paul Auster, an American cult writer, performed last night on the Scene of the Zagreb Puppet Theater in Travno.

Bench No. 8, bush No. 4
To be more specific, 12 homeless extras from Zagreb’s shelter in Heinzelova Street appear in the play. One of them is Ivan Mašina, a 65-year old who came to rehearsals regularly for months. “What, they invited us, why wouldn’t I? It’s nothing difficult, and it entertains me”, says the becoming Ivan, a locksmith by vocation with 26 years of past service. He recently submitted a retirement demand, and he’s been at Heinzelova Street several months now. “Before this I loitered in park Maksimir, bench No. 8, bush No. 4″ – he laughs to himself and adds that even dogs have guardians while he lives with other hobos. Boris Davidović, previously homeless, liked the play so much that he came to rehearsals even after he found a job and an apartment this summer. “The play is excellent, so I don’t find it difficult to come and rehears after work. I really enjoy it.”, says a 48-year old who spent almost four years in the shelter. Šeparović says that the homeless make sure everything in the play goes well. “As soon as they get here, they ask for Sven. I find that very sweet, because then I know they care.”

Adopters, come forward
Aside from the interesting participants, this play is intriguing because there is just a dog on stage almost the entire time (Mr. bones aka Kosta) performing a monologue (spoken by the actor Sven Medvešek in the background). To put it more accurately, he tells us of his life remembering, among other things, the good times with his first owner Willy who died and left him alone. At the end of the play, dogs from the pound come on stage. Anyone from the audience, who wanted to adopt them after the performance, could get in touch with the director, the actors or the dogs themselves.

“The shelter wasn’t great. Still, I found some friends, but everyone should have their peace. I was happy when we started rehearsing.”
Boris Davidović

“The director is not bad! I don’t think I was ever a part of a theater play. Although, we are only extras and come in at the very end.”
Ivan Mašina

It is very difficult to set up a play about the insupportability of violence, whose language wouldn’t repeat the patterns of a TV-report or the shouting of angry slogans in the street. In his previous play, “The Theater Your Deserve”, director Borut Šeparović didn’t manage to find an autonomous language of stage revolt, even though he bitterly accused each member of the audience as a passive consumer of his/her own degradation (the acting crew gave brutal orders to the audience, insulted us, made us write out our personal information, etc.). But in the newest adaptation of Auster’s novel “Timbuktu”, hosted by the New Zagreb Scene of the Zagreb Puppet Theater in Travno, Borut Šeparović and Jasna Žmak, the dramaturge, speak a lot more complex, and subsequently much more accurately, about the similar problem of radical powerlessness. This time we witness the perspective of an aging mutt dog whose survival depends not only about whether he will find an adoptive family after the death of his beloved master Willy (a worm and homeless schizophrenic), but also whether he will endure the cruelty of the world, the all-surrounding “America”, ruled by the merchant measures of interest and profitability.

Relationship as the basis of theater
Of course it doesn’t pay to have a dog, nor any other altruistic, uncalculated (love, friendship, aesthetic, etc.) relationship. The hard line of efficiency cannot bear the „surpluses“ of intimacy. Theater, on the other side, decidedly insists on them. The play “Timbuktu” with a barely withstandable intensity, mobilizes the critical compassion of the audience: as soon as we are eye to eye with a dog, the walls of soullessness disappear as if made from air, instead of the concrete blocks of the world’s banks. For the larger part of the seventy-minute-long play, the audience spends observing the smart muzzle of a trained black-and-white collie (a champion named Cap, as we find out at the end of the play), while Sven Medvešek, situated in the back rows of the auditorium, is in charge of his „biographic“ confession. Then twelve equally irresistible homeless dogs come on stage, brought there in cooperation with the Shelter for Abandoned Animals, and their adoption is being offered to the audience. This scene is directed so that it takes place behind a steel wire, with the noise of the song “I wanna be your dog” performed by Iggy Pop. Even though nobody says that the dogs which are not chosen will probably end their lives with a lethal injection, it is awful to watch their playful bodies and patient gazes, knowing that in the five performances played so far, only two of them were adopted. On the other hand, an artistic act that saves the life of at least one dog is worthy of any praise.

Paradise for dogs and their pet people
Sven Medvešek slowly eases into the first dog singular. At the beginning of the play the recitative rhythm of his intonation lacks a lifelike directness of communication, but he is excellent once he’s on stage, addressing us from the floor, as the four legged subject Mr. Bones (Kosta), embracing a collie. The moment when this human Dog meets his deceased friend Willy, performed by Vili Matula, is also very moving. Matula brings an entire novel of emotions during his short appearance on the “otherworldly stage” (Timbuktu is Auster’s term for canine heaven): from rage and a kind of aggressive delirium, to a vibrating, joking and gentle trust in the unbreakable alliance among friends. Sven Medvešek perfectly plays the unrelenting “doglike” loyalty to his human counterpart in this final scene. The long looks the two of them exchange, discussing casually the unverifiability of reality and the truthfulness of dreams, are a special dedication to the best of emotional relationships which roam the world with or without a tail.
Odysseus’ dog Argo, Toto leading Dorothy into Oz, Šarik from Bulgakov’s story “A dog’s heart”, Auster’s Mr. Bones (Kosta) and many other literary dogs fit perfectly into the human stage: they play us much better than we ever could. They play us without holding back, which is also what the excellence of theatrical impersonation is based on.

Nataša Govedić: Pas je najbolji dio svakog od nas

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http://tricenasesvakodnevice.blog.hr/2008/10/1625463908/timbuktu-predstava-koju-morate-vidjeti.html

That a dog is man’s best friend, we’ve known for a long time, but that he can become the lead actor in a theater play, we did not know before, at least in this country. And that is exactly what happened in the play “Timbuktu”, directed by Borut Šeparović and produced by Montažstroj, which premiered in Zagreb’s Scene Travno.
“A monologue for a dog on stage spoken by an actor from the audience”, as its genre is determined by the author, was based on the well-known namesake novel by Paul Auster and in the dramaturgical adaptation by Jasna Žmak and Šeparović, it was not at all accidentally premiered on World Animal Protection Day.
This utterly unusual and original theatrical project, aside from the extremely disciplined and trained dog as the “lead actor”, brings out on stage an entire pack of his “brothers” from the dog shelter as well, and demonstrates a strong social note by including local homeless men as extras.
The story of a faithful dog Mr. Bones (Kosta), suffering for his deceased homeless master, communicating with him in dreams and fantasizing about how some day he will join his life companion in this Timbuktu, a metaphor for paradise, is a lot more than a drama about the relationship between dogs and humans.
The play is also a story of the differences that exist between the creatures on earth, which are so difficult to overcome, whether they be generic, racial, national, religious or sexual. It is also an image of the condition in contemporary America and the world, and a story about good and bad people, who are not always easily discerned.
Timbuktu is finally a metaphor of our modernity, sometimes tragic, but often funny. An emotional story about fidelity and love, in the end fuses together a dog on stage and an actor speaking his monologue from the audience, Sven Medvešek, who comes on stage himself later in the play, so the human is a bit of a dog here, and a dog human, much like in Smoje’s „Canine novelettes“. Anyway, Mr. Bones or in Croatian version Kosta, much like Smoje’s Šarko, becomes a true character, a character indeed – a man, who induces both tears and laughter.

From playing a role to adoption
Although one could hardly say that the ending is happy, because Mr. Bones (Kosta) dies as well, though joining his master in paradise, “Timbuktu” might end happily for a dog or two in each of the performances: since the audience has the opportunity to adopt one of the dogs from the shelter that participate in the play. Timbuktu grew from a confession of a dog into an image of the modern society, which forgets its humanity, running after profit and success, so Šeparović’s production is a welcome reminder. Provided by a single – dog.

Jasen Boko: I pasja rasa putuje u raj