TIJANA: Baal was Brecht’s first text, written when he was only 20 years old, yet he returned to it again and again throughout his life and work. What have your encounters with Baal been like, and what drew you to this Brecht text today?

PRIMOŽ:

My encounters with Baal have been unusual, and some of them reach deep into my personal history.

Many years ago, before I knew that I would make theatre my profession, although I was already interested in it, I saw a reinterpretation of Baal — at a time when this was by no means yet a trend in theatre 🙂 — directed by Dragan Živadinov, entitled The Retro-Guardist Event of Mario Nablock.

It was in the mid-1980s, at a time of very turbulent developments in music, theatre and society in general: retro-guardism, Laibach, Irwin, NSK, punk, the New Wave, new social movements.

As spectators, we watched the performance in an abandoned house in the city centre. It began at midnight. We sat in the middle of the stage, which had been constructed with holes cut into its floor, through which only our heads protruded. Baal, Ekart, Sophia Berger and the others moved among our heads.

That performance was, for me, an initiation into theatre.

My second encounter came somewhat later, when, as a student of comparative literature, I used this text for the first — and only — seminar paper I ever wrote, because shortly afterwards I enrolled at the Academy.

It really cannot be a coincidence that a few months ago, among the things I had left at my parents’ house when I moved away, I found that very paper, typed on an analogue typewriter. I read it and was astonished by my own thinking about the text at that time.

The third time Baal “happened” to me was when Damjan Kecojević invited me to direct the play.

And clearly, at different periods of my life, in different roles and as a different person, I keep returning to Baal. Much like Brecht himself.

TIJANA: What do you recognise in it as still alive in relation to your first encounter with the text, and what may have become insufficient for you?

PRIMOŽ: As you mentioned, Brecht wrote his first text, Baal, when he was still very young. As a bohemian student in Munich, much like his protagonist, he would wander through taverns and inns with a guitar. He was strongly influenced by Rimbaud and Verlaine, and wrote Baal, among other things, as his response to the Romantic conception of the artist that was present in German dramatic literature at the time.

Of course, I asked myself which themes in this text, written more than a hundred years ago, can still speak to us today. At the same time, Brecht’s writing is classical, and his texts contain themes that we can view from a different, fresh perspective, through a contemporary understanding of society. That is precisely why I believe his texts are still worth rereading, reconsidering and approaching differently in performance.

That is why, in my very first conversations with the theatre management, I suggested that we shift the focus of the story of Baal and place at its centre the stories of the women who encountered him. On his almost delirious journey, Baal forever changes the lives of the women he meets: Emilia, Johanna, Sophia Berger and the Young Woman.

The crossing of boundaries that takes place through these encounters was a theme that particularly interested us throughout the entire process. In my view, it is a theme that should be present in our thinking about relationships in contemporary society. And not only when we speak about relationships between men and women or between people in general, but also on a political level — in the relationship of authoritarian social systems towards the individual and towards different social groups.

As individuals, we encounter this crossing of boundaries in the most diverse situations and on different levels. Sometimes these crossings are so subtle that we no longer even notice them. Or we have internalised them to such an extent that we experience them as something natural and self-evident.

And precisely because they seem so self-evident, and because we ourselves have internalised them, we are often no longer able to recognise them — and therefore unable to change them.

TIJANA: The world of Baal is distinctly a man’s world. What, in your opinion, happens to this story when we bring the women surrounding that world into the foreground?

PRIMOŽ: Exactly. In Brecht’s Baal, the world of men lies at the centre of the action, while the female characters appear almost as incidental episodes along Baal’s path towards destruction.

By shifting the perspective through which we read the story, we direct the attention of the audience towards what is not written in the text, what is not spoken, but is very much present in today’s world. That is violence and its consequences.

Above all, it is violence that comes from the position of the stronger, the more ruthless, the one who supposedly gives himself the right to use violence because of some higher goals or because he believes in his own chosen status and superiority.

In Baal’s case, this is the position of the artist, or rather of a god, and as such it is not itself called into question.

The acute situation in today’s world is precisely this: when, based on the idea of one nation’s chosen status and under the pretext of its own security, genocide is committed against another people, or when one’s own interests are imposed through economic and military power. This is, of course, the macro perspective. But if we look at things from a micro perspective, we must be aware that violence often begins precisely at home and that women are among its most frequent victims.

For now, I have one question for you: what do you think is the role and position of stories in today’s world, in society?

TIJANA: I think stories have always been a building block of every society, but today their fundamental importance is particularly visible. One cultural theory suggests that the first human settlements and cities emerged precisely around places where stories were told. People gathered around the fire and, so that it would not go out, they told stories. There is also a theory that theatre itself emerged in this way, alongside human settlements. So the importance of stories is clear in the context of both these theories — both for the mere survival of human beings and for nourishing their spirit.

However, today, when we live in a post-truth world where everything is being relativised, stories are even more important because they shape our everyday lives and our understanding of the world. The question of which stories we tell, record and remember, and which we exclude and erase from public discourse, is a political question, inseparable from the question of who tells those stories and who does, or does not, have the right to tell their own story. In a way, this adaptation of Baal is itself a debate about precisely that.