Stitches consists of a series of short stories that originate from the same triggering moment – war – but are very different in format and content. It is diverse in terms of time, generation, and genre. How did the selection of the stories actually take place? What was important to you in the final selection, and what effects did you hope to achieve?
The selection sort of “found itself”, as it often happens to me when I’m working on a music album. I had a lot of stories in my memory and in my head, and it seems as if the stories then made their own “natural selection”, as if they “claimed” their own place. But at the same time, it’s also about constantly building on them. Just a few days ago, I brought a whole new story to rehearsals that had been brewing somewhere. The crew accepted it, but I still didn’t know how to fit it into the performance, because it was long, full of information, but I didn’t want it to be a kind of novel, I wanted it to have a quicker point. Well, then, it found its place in the plot on an equal footing with all the others. I must also point out that I feel a tremendous bond in the team at the level of interpersonal trust, so our ideas and suggestions circulate all the time and are absolutely on an equal footing with each other. We talk a lot, we exchange opinions, we look for positions together that we will adopt as our own, and we stand firmly behind them in the performance.
On the other hand, the individual stories chosen are different, some of them are my experiences of war, others are the experiences of others. I am interested in the invisibility of the pain or in the consequences for those who have survived the war. Who have terrible traumas and losses, but they don’t talk about it, and I just know what they’ve been through and are still going through. I am interested in those stories, but of course, it is not easy to get to them. I know a lot of the people involved, but often, my questions about the war experience have been answered in a single sentence. It is simply not talked about, and I wonder how these people get on with their lives. I may know the story, but only they know how they really cope with it.
How do you understand the position of responsibility to speak out in this context? Where or whose responsibility is it really to shed light on the catastrophes of war when it’s your story, but also when it’s not your story?
Rather than a question of who is responsible, I think the main responsibility lies in how we approach other people’s sensitive, intimate stories; the responsibility for me is to leave them in their original form, not to use them for my own benefit – even though I am telling them in the first person. To tell them and at the same time already “let it go”, not to judge them, not to put my own spin on them. It’s not a matter of being vague; everything is said, but it is about preserving the possibility of one’s own individual interpretation. It could be called “responsibility for authenticity”. It is very easy to bring our own interpretation into other people’s stories. In cases of “trauma bonding”, it is even quicker to project our own projections onto someone else’s. In the case of the story of Jasenovac is a representation of my father’s total denial of the fact of his father’s (my grandfather’s) death, which took place sixty years ago. He chose ignorance instead, quite legitimately. I accepted his denial and never pressured him. Today, my father is an old man with dementia, and I will never know what exactly he felt. That is what interests me. How people like him, who have always denied the truth, have dealt with it in their lives.
Traumatic experiences always contain a (temporal) paradox. Sometimes it is only with the passage of time that we realise that they were not so catastrophic after all, and sometimes it is the other way around – only after many years do we realise how catastrophic they actually were.
Just as I was on my way to this meeting and interview, I was thinking about my cousin and how he deals with the past because he acts as if nothing had happened. I know exactly what happened. The reasons for balancing consciousness are always different and not necessarily at all related to medication, the tranquillisers. Often, memories overlap with different activities, but there is simply no single answer here. From the outside, these situations seem complex to you, which is normal, but when I think about my own experience, I do not really find any complexity. It is the story that adds complexity. But again, as I said at the beginning, imposed complexity can sometimes be an abuse in describing a story. The performance is about war, it is logical for people to expect complexity, but there is none here, everything is said in a rather “classical” way. And on the other hand – what is complexity anyway? Complexity is also the fact that people who have never picked up a book in their lives read an unusually large amount during the war.
Where do you see the advantages and pitfalls of presenting images and stories of war in a very direct, illustrative way and, on the other hand, in a poetic, allegorical way?
I feel that I always take the “direct” route, but the key for me is to leave the narrative – however direct it may be – open and ready for wider interpretation at the end of the day. I don’t want to impose a direct, single-minded point of view, not only on other people’s stories but also on my own stories. I often experience this at concerts when someone in the audience tells me their vision of a song, while I personally perceive it in a completely different way. And that’s perfectly legitimate.
On the other hand, there is also the contact between reality and art on the level of our visual animations in the performance, which sometimes show very concrete images, but nevertheless contain a distance, because they are not photographs, but animations, and therefore the interpretation that animation as such always contains.
How do you perceive your own position as a creator – both as a performer and as a musician – at this very time when social consciousness is so strongly marked by war, by the wars in Ukraine and Palestine. What happens, what changes, and what do you think is “resonating” in your expression, which, in fact, you don’t really have any influence on because it is only society, politics and the public that can draw attention to your (war) identity, your expression.
We were already talking about this project with the Maska Institute before the war broke out in Ukraine, so the beginnings of the conception and discussions go back to before that. In the meantime, there was this kind of parallel with my album Mainstream Horror, which has various allusions to the war and also describes some concrete war or military scenes. Of course, the album was made before that, but it came out at the same time as the war in Ukraine started, and because of a few verses, it got a kind of cheap relevance, so I changed almost half of the songs… I was really scared of the topicality appearing on its own. I didn’t really want that. But with Stitches, it’s clear that no ideological side is taken in any of the stories, which is why the portraits of the people go beyond the war identity. In any case, it was clear from the beginning that the intention was not to address any particular war that is going on now. It’s also that my own experience of war makes me very aware that I can’t possibly be talking about their war – it’s such a very different experience. Besides, it is a different time, different weapons, everything is different. Every war is a tragedy, but every war is different.
Every war is always a collective act, but its memory is always individual, isn’t it?
I remember my own delusion when, after the end of the war, I thought that the whole world had ended where our war had begun. No, of course, the world went on. It took me almost ten years to really grasp that. The facts about when people left the war zone in Bosnia are also extremely interesting. The first ones who left before the war started, the second ones who left in between, and the third ones who left when the war ended. When I met them again years later, I could tell exactly when they had left without being told. It was clear from the way they talked about their town – they talked about it as they last remembered it, not as it is now. I know someone who left Tuzla for England during the war, stayed there for a year and came back when the war was at its worst. We thought he was mad. He said, “There‘s nothing in London.” It was as if going back to the war had made him “happy”. Very strange. I see these stories, let’s say, as potential for a future project …
Could it be said that in Stitches, you place the drama primarily in the human being or in the fellow human being in the war? The drama of war is seen and happens in itself anyway.
Certainly, the human being is at the centre of all the stories. The human being in the war and how he copes with it. How do people deal with themselves after the war? What happens to them, how they struggle with their own existence, with memory, with forgetting… These things are not easy to find out in everyday life. At the same time, these are quite ordinary people who have not necessarily ended up on tranquillisers either. Perhaps the most accurate starting point would be: How are they coping with it all? How do they live after the war without any complaining, just living… At the same time, I know that everything is stored in the memory and that we are always just one association away from the horrors of war and old fears coming to the surface.
Zala Dobovšek is a dramaturg, theatre critic, theatre scholar, and assistant professor in dramaturgy and performance studies.
