Motion

Motion (subtitled Technology and Choreography of Fear) by the Serbian playwright and dramaturg Dimitrije Kokanov won the Sterija Prize for the best new play in Serbia in 2020. The play highlights the psychological disposition of the individual in late capitalism, a time of constant crises and consequently a state that the author defines as the inability to move. In the first part of the play, several subjects speak: the first, only able to float in the sea, moving by stasis, speaks of a love breakup, of the fear of old age and of the impossibility of getting over the breakup. The second speaks of being locked in the memory of his father’s moment of death, of the movement of a river that never stops and of the stereotypical idea of the man he is supposed to become following his father’s example. The third speaks of isolation and of the fear of deviating from social norms. He swims in an aquarium, his body still, hiding like an animal. It turns out that despite his anthropocentric preoccupation, the human cannot resolve the fundamental conundrums of existence; quite the opposite, in the maze of civilisation, he seems increasingly entangled in his own snares. In the second part, the spaces of motion, which in posthumanism have become subjects, speak. The first one is a factory, a reminder in its dilapidated state of the collapse of a community. The second space of motion is a garden, a monument to destroyed nature, still remembering that there is no hierarchy in nature and that the human is one of its parts. Finally, the body speaks. With its ability to move, emote and express, it reminds us that there is still perhaps a glimmer of hope for humanity.

Original title Kretanje
Première 5. januar 2023, Mala Drama v Galeriji Cukrarna, Ljubljana
The first Slovenian performance
Running time 2 hours. No intermission. 

Director Juš Zidar
Translator Aleksandra Rekar
Dramaturg Eva Kraševec
Choreographer Bojana Robinson
Set designer Branko Hojnik
Costume designer Matjaž Plošinjak
Video designer Atej Tutta
Composers SBO Group
Sound designer Jurij Alič
Lighting designer Lev Predan Kowarski 
Language consultant Arko

CAST
Polona Juh
Nejc Cijan Garlatti
Benjamin Krnetić

The performance contains the songs I'm a Fool to Want You by Chet Baker and Uvod: u anatomiju by the music group Insan, as well as excerpts from the poems Punčki by Gregor Strniša and Theatertod by Heiner Müller, both translated by Juš Zidar.