Authors Team:
Director and selection of music: Ivana Vujić
Dramaturge: Slavenka Milovanović, Tatjana Žarković
Set Designer: Kosta Bunuševac
Costume Designer: Dušica Knežević
Choreographer: Dunja Mahorčić
Video Work and Video Animation: Svetlana Volic
Assistant Director: Ivana Sarapa
Makeup: Nijaz Memiš

Coproduction: The Concrete Hall Theatre, BELEF Center, Belgrade University of Arts

Casting:
First Professor and Vladimir Velmar-Janković: Danica Ristovski
Second Professor, Cvijeta Zuzorić, Flora Zuzori: Ivana Jovanović
Constructor of bridges and scale models: Kosta Bunuševac
Singer: Igor Ilić
Folk students: Dunja Mahorčić, Jelena Dimitrijević, Bojan Dimitrijević,
Bojana Mitrović and Tijana Prendović
Kalemegdaners, the Society of Friends of Kalemegdan chaired by Mira Čičak

A Word from the Author

When one speaks about Vladimir Velmar Janković, it means speaking about a playwright, narrator, essayist, critic, psychologist and translator, an exceptional personality who, like many intellectuals of Serbia, left Serbia and ended his earthly days in Spain.

The scenic performance is going to be the premiere of this work, exactly on his day of birth. "A View from Kalemegdan", as a scenic project, was imagined as a post-drama essay with an expressed political issue regarding the past, reality and future of Serbia and Belgrade.

The scenario of the play is a dramatization and adaptation of the homonymous work of Vladimir Velmar Janković, permeated with some parts of the Dvorniković’s "Characterology of Yugoslavs", as well as quotations from Bertolt Brecht’s essays on theatre and reality, on actor, on intellectual and his impact on the reality.

This theatre essay is a form of a post-drama theatre, which in the language of music could be designated as a rondo for two actors, a dancer and a voice.

The project is addressing the Serbian, Belgrade public, a young man in the first place, who has a chance, through the project, to get insight into the past and present and to form his attitude towards the future regarding position and activities of a Belgrade man with himself and the world within himself and in the world.

The space solution of the project is a car, a truck, like the cart of history and war of Mother Courage, which is both the stage and history moving or stuck in one place, depending on the driver.

Even when this performing is over, the project may travel and on its truck scene animate the suburban municipalities of Belgrade, other towns of Serbia, and be mobile, and this moving through different environments could be another view from Kalemegdan.

The rights for performance were obtained in full from Velmar Janković’s daughter Svetlana.

The study A View from Kalemegdan by Vladimir Velmar-Janković (1895-1976), jurist by education, man of letters by his internal vocation, psychologist in emigration, was written in 1936 and published in 1938, in Belgrade. The communist ideas at the time were fully on the rise, therefore this study on a "Belgrade man", which indeed does not advocate those ideas, was fiercely attacked as reactionary and rightist. Its author, in late 1960s, then in emigration in Spain, was explaining to his daughter that he had never considered himself a right-winger and that in this book he only tried to define a possible role of Belgrade and the "Belgrade man" in the world cataclysm of which there was not only a sense of foreboding but of its approaching, too. In this connection Velmar-Janković, as a son of the Varaždin head-priest, who spent his childhood in Slavonia, his boyhood as a boarding-school pupil of the Institution "Tekelianum" in Budapest, and his student’s days in Zagreb, had to get to know very well and to experience what it meant to be an Orthodox Serb in Croatia, in Hungary and in Austro-Hungary, not only in the 20th century but in all the preceding centuries, after the Battle of Kosovo. Therefore, for the author of this study Belgrade was and has remained a mythic Gate of the Balkans but also an intersection where East and West, Byzantium and Rome, Orthodoxy and Catholicism are confronting each other by fate, while the "Belgrade man" is a Balkan offshoot who will be able to survive in the future if only he manages to stay true to the values of his spiritual being that he has to get aware of.

Of the first edition of the study, the one in 1938, many copies were left because it was not read at that time; however, more than 1,000 copies were burned down in the Velmar-Janković apartment, destroyed by fire from German bombs on April 6, 1941. The second edition, published in 1991, was immediately sold like hot cakes: that unknown study by a forgotten author won the first place on the top list of the most read books in October that year. The same happened to the third, even fourth edition printed by the Publishing House Dereta and the Library of the City of Belgrade. If he were still alive, Vladimir Velmar-Janković would for sure thank the publishers, and readers, and visitors of this year’s BELEF, and particularly those who made it possible for this study, in the form of the "ORATORIUM WITHIN US" to be performed this summer, on Kalemegdan. In his name and on his behalf – thank you.

Svetlana Velmar-Janković