Last night, the twelfth consecutive award ceremony for the Best Contemporary Engaged Full-Length Drama Text in Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Slovenian, Macedonian, or Montenegrin was held at the Heartefact House.
The jury, consisting of Biljana Srbljanović, Dubravka Vrgoč, and Molina Udovički Fotez, selected five plays for the shortlist, and it turned out entirely coincidentally that all of them were written by women. “Apart from the winning play, I would highlight those by Aleksandra Glovacki ‘Migrant Woman’ and Sara Radojković ‘Yuri Gagarin 69,’ which were in the final selection. However, we had the honor of discovering a new playwright named Marija Rakočević from Kragujevac,” said Biljana Srbljanović.
After a year and a half since the Heartefact House opened, we are starting to outline our theater project – Heartefact Drama. We are focusing even more on contemporary dramaturgy, not only through competitions or performances that we play here with great success, such as ‘Climax,’ ‘Finger,’ ‘Our Son,’ ‘It Would Be a Shame if the Plants Died,’ or ‘Before We Begin,’ but also through collaboration with Creative Europe, through which we will exchange and educate our new, upcoming writers. We will work on having new and young playwrights translated abroad,” announced Srbljanović.
“Every true play stems from its time, so do the plays written for this competition. They talked about the pandemic, the second theme is the consequences of war still felt in these areas, and the theme of a woman’s relationship to society and herself. So it was difficult to choose a text, and I am happy that we chose this ‘The Woman Ties the Ponytail,’ because not only by content but also by form, it transcends the boundaries of the usual and expected. I think it’s a brave text that speaks about the opposition of women in all times, in this present one, as well as the past, in Iraq, Serbia, and Croatia,” said the jury president Dubravka Vrgoč.
The winner, Marija Rakočević, said in her speech that it was a great honor but also a big surprise that her text won considering the number of entries this year in the competition. “I think freedom is the main incentive for writing. My drama represents the life of a woman in 13 selected scenes: from a girl to a woman. I described some situations we encounter, and I think there is no woman who cannot identify with at least some part of it.”
After the award ceremony, a staged reading of the winning dramatic text “The Woman Ties the Ponytail” was held, directed by Tara Mitrović, and performed by actress Natalija Stepanović and actor Svetozar Cvetković.
