Daydream: A story from Terezin

Biography

This is a fictional story set in the Terezin Concentration Camp where prominent Jews, such as artists and intellectuals, were imprisoned. The camp was occasionally visited by the infamous Dr Mengele, who came here to listen to Jewish artists perform Robert Schumann’s Daydream (Träumerei). Other characters include Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, Jesus Christ and Barabbas. The artists have created a piece that merges theatre and music based on Jewish religious and secular songs. As they say, by working on this performance they repaid their debt to humanity whose history is full of tragedies, including such incomprehensible events as the Holocaust.

PLAVO theatre
Scenario and direction ― Nenad Čolić
Text ― based on fragments from the lecture on trial to Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Dostoyevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers
Performers ― Maša Jelić, Jelena Martinović, Marko Potkonjak, Dejan Stojković, Ranko Trifković
Set design and costumes ― Ivana Čolić
Executive manager ― Dubravka Vujinović
Music ― Jewish religious and secular songs, Robert Schumann’s Daydream (Träumerei)
Premiere ― 25 March 2016

This is not a performance which shapes the theme of Jewish suffering or identity in a realistic manner. It is a scream of Nazi madness, a brave dramatisation of the whole intrigue… After the show you will feel very directly the core of the Jewish agon and spirit, even of the Jewish tragedy, without necessarily having any sort of connection with that tradition. It is a different kind of communication where even the intellectual patterns serve a ritual function equal to the music and dance, becoming a part of an all-out rite which threatens to invoke ghosts of a too near history.

Nevena Milojević | Kultur!Kokoška