The Liberation of Skopje is a map of a war-torn landscape: a map of memories of a war, fragments of childhood memories marked by lost games, the bitterness of daily survival, and the fractures of family bonds. Jovanović makes no claim that the story of The Liberation of Skopje is an objective historical truth; it is merely a mosaic of impressions, feelings, and images of a totally destroyed world that is broken both in body and in spirit. And that is precisely why the world of Jovanović’s Liberation is all the more complex and comprehensive in its depiction of a world disconcertingly similar to our own, a world in which words are silenced rather than spoken, desires and aspirations abandoned, and life shrinks to mere endurance, and children’s games have serious consequences in war. Complete collapse, in other words.

But let us not be misled: in the darkness and turmoil of Jovanović’s world, there is room for humour, poetry, and light. At its heart, the point of departure for our staging is not a specific war, nor a reconstruction of war, but a family; the family table as a space that Zoran lost as a child. The production is navigated by the shards of Zoran’s recollections. These are the remnants in the memory of Zoran, who enters the play as a mature man, whereas other characters have remained as old as they were when he last saw them before they got lost. Freedom happened, life happened, he grew up. What remained are fragments: at first just torn shards and impressions. However, they gradually coalesce into a coherent memory, into a complete story of the tragedy of a family and its dearest and nearest.

Our staging principle is a palimpsest, a kaleidoscope of views. Zoran’s narrated remembrances weave in and out of realistic, even naturalistic scenes, chance encounters, fleeting moments. But since these are Zoran’s memories, they are also transposed into the poetic, the metaphorical… These scenes are intertwined with nonverbal images, dream images, nightmares depicting a landscape of children’s games as well as war, and everyday life, and which often can no longer be distinguished from one another. The image of war is not in the foreground, especially not in the context of “violent” actualization, but as a landscape of decomposition viewed through the intimate lens of one family’s experience.

As mentioned, Zoran is not a child. Nor are his peers children. He is made a child by the people he comes into contact with – as if the reconstruction of individual events were beginning to take place in the narrative. The war is over, times have changed, but the weight of events demands that he return to the past to try to explain the events and fears that he still lives with. The set is a landscape, hovering between a ruined dwelling where only a lone table survives amid scattered debris, and a devastated wilderness. With each subtle shift of furniture or curtain, and each actor’s movement, determining the situations, the landscape is transformed.

Luka Marcen and Rok Andres

We would like to thank Ljudmil Dimitrov, Sandi Horvat, Samanta Baranja, Žanina Mirčevska, Saša Tabaković and Rok Vihar for their contributions to shaping the spoken language of the staging.

A special thanks to Dr. Saša Vipotnik, Neurologist.

The set and costumes were made at Gledališki atelje Ljubljana. The costume of bear was made by Zoran Srdić, Marjeta Valjavec and Olga Milić at workshops of Lutkovno gledališče Ljubljana.

Extracts from three poems from collection Nisem by Dušan Jovanović (Beletrina, 2011) are used in the production.