A terrible lion from a drawing, which was actually created from the letters that the great writer Duško Radović put together so expertly, was the inspiration for the director Nikola Bundalo to tell a story in Banja Luka, at the Children's Theater of the Republic Srpska, that begins with the words: "Once upon a time there was a lion". Talking about how the story unfolded on the stage, the young director talked about all our fears and worries, not only those that are part of childhood, but also the lives after that, and he also talked about the importance of recognizing every particularity of every person around us, appreciate it and cherish.
What was your initial idea that you wanted to develop in this play and tell the children?
We started with a drawing of a scary lion, and we were inspired by a song. We were interested in why always, whenever that song is talked about, that lion is imagined as scary? Is he really scary, or has society made him scary? Usually, when we see something strange and different, something out of the ordinary, we always give it some negative sign and it stays that way almost forever. And so, a lion that is not terrible at all, but special, remains a terrible lion. Few people think that this lion might just be out of sorts. We started from that premise, that the "horror" of the lion is the child in us, some talent, some creative dislocation from the system. The terrible lion is when you are a little different. And then we decided to observe the lion as such in various situations: in nature, in society, in the city, in various places, how he manages, even with his best of intentions to get labelled. We went through verses that are not the cause, but the effect.
Can it be defined, who is the terrible lion for today's children, or what is he?
I would not name any personality, nor any phenomenon. That "scariness" is any strangeness or insecurity that a young person has, whether it's something physical, whether it's some interests that are not standard. The fearsome lion is what makes us taller and I think that's the beauty.
Are children better than us, or do they consciously or unconsciously take over the matrices that we, again consciously or unconsciously, impose on them?
They are better, but they certainly take over their parents' matrices, which again depends on the parents, how they deal with their matrices. When we make a play for children, we also communicate with parents in a way, we address them as well because we convey the message on multiple levels. For example. the objects we use in the play are intentionally some that have been discarded, second hand, because the point is to say that everyone has the right to imagine, that everyone has some potential, undiscovered, and it's up to us to spot it and ignite it. It is important that children believe in the infinity of imagination, that they have faith in that imagination.
Does children's theater have enough imagination to be as creative and relevant as the Internet, which excites the senses in unfathomable ways?
I'm looking for that answer, I'm young, I've just started working, I'm fresh out of school. I'm looking for that answer, because I think it does exist. Theater has existed for more than a thousand years, in the East even longer. People have needed it for so many years...The theater searches, makes mistakes, but also manages to awaken something in people, and to each of us and at least once in our life, theater has offered an experience that was not to be had anywhere else. That is the flame we keep searching for.
As a young artist, do you have an answer to the question we are all asking these days - what should we tell children after what happened on May 3rd in Belgrade?
Like many people, I felt helpless and terrified because of that tragedy. But I also felt anger because of the cacophony created on the networks and in the media. After the horror at the school, we can only pray for the souls of those children, stop and be silent, look at each other. And we didn't stop, we didn't shut up, we didn't look at each other, we started to blare out our “wisdom”. We started to be loud, to give diagnoses to society, so that we all now know why it happened and what it was. And not even a week has passed. Let's see what happened there - because we are all guilty. Let's get together and see if we can fix things. It is customary here for people, whenever something happens, to air everything out without thinking about the other person next to them, those who suffered, to spit out everything regardless of the consequences. That's not good. Too many people who are not competent get involved in something that is very delicate, that has caused a great shock. Unfortunately, something like this had to happen so that we would start talking about violence and aggression. During my first year of studies, I dealt with the topic of violence among young people and it's incredible what I found out, what kinds of violence exist in schools. If the system was doing its job, we might not have come to this. There were so many indicators that it was going to explode somewhere, and we did nothing.
Maybe there should be a campaign about the importance of people turning to something that makes them leave their phones, that is, to connect with themselves at least once during the day instead of the phone. To connect with other people. It may sound quixotic, but the book itself could be the reason for a person to disconnect from all connections...
Of course it would be better if people could connect with the stories in general. Stories develop empathy, imagination, creativity, thinking, I just don't know how to change that, to convince people to go back to reading books.
And why don't directors and actors read. One gets the impression that they don't read anything after the academy, they only recite Shakespeare, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, clinging to them as a safety net. Have there been no writers after them? Isn't that something like trying to play safe? For example, in Banja Luka, the fantastic Stevan Grabovac wrote an exceptional novel "Mulatto Albino Mosquito", Banja Luka's "Imprimatur" published Slađana Perković's book "In the ditch", which has fantastic dramatic potential. It is totally Nušić of the 21st century. And no cares or dares to put them on stage...
I agree that it's a big problem, because it's like there is a catalog of I don't know how many writers that are constantly used to put on performances, and there are so many young contemporary authors, our colleagues who graduate from the academies, not only in Belgrade. But it's all up to the director and the theater. Why not give them a chance, let them take risks, and let them make mistakes... The theaters don't even have the understanding to give them a small stage to work on. Our repertoires are Sterija, Nušić, Kovačević, for which I have immense respect, but we cannot perform them all the time. There are Biljana Srbljanović, Milena Marković, Tanja Šljivar, and there are many others. While I was studying, the professor once introduced an excellent Romanian director from Bucharest to us. This director only stages contemporary texts. One of the students asked him to send us some of the texts, and he said - no. He believes that more than 50 percent of the director's work is looking for right books. He told us that it is our duty to, by reading those texts that haven’t been staged yet, look for and find those with which we will connect and thus discover our theme, a new writer, a new reading material, a new angle.