Review by Ana Matić

Is the Need to Share One’s Story a Sufficient Reason to Create a Theatrical Performance? 

I left the theatre feeling uneasy. Three times in a row. Maybe these performances simply aren’t for me, I thought. I was fully present, focused, wanting to listen carefully to each woman on stage as they spoke to me directly and honestly, to hear their stories and empathize with them. I really did. But I couldn’t. Until now, that had never been a problem for me. 

I understand that artistic work can be a therapeutic tool. I use it that way myself. I know these women on stage return to their traumas and fears each time they perform these shows. They speak their truth loudly because it is too heavy to carry alone. I see the honesty and vulnerability in their performances. I see it, but on each occasion, I still left the theatre feeling indifferent, disappointed, even angry. Their call for empathy didn’t reach me. Instead, it left me feeling denied my own theatrical experience. 

Where is my catharsis, I asked myself? Why couldn’t I reach it? This failure is something I wanted to explore in this review.

The first piece in the showcase, was Suicide as a (social) fact, directed by Serbian director Ana Janković.  At first, we are inside a woman’s apartment, witnessing a scene of raw intimacy of a woman’s daily life. She is no different from any of us. We follow the last few minutes of her everyday routine that leads to her suicide. The beginning of the show is slow, gentle, and naturalistic, asking the audience to fully focus and be present. But when actor Iva Ilinčić says that all this will end in suicide, the piece quickly changes. It becomes an ad hoc spectacle, like a show for distraction. 

The whole artistic team, including Janković, appears on stage in exaggerated, ironic costumes. They start a kind of stand-up show, ready to entertain and shock to meet the large and hungry demands of the audience. By employing a variety of provocative and sensitive themes, dramatic and performative tools, as well as a free, associative flow that pushes the performance’s dynamics and concept to a boiling point of audience reactions, they escalate the energy to its limits. 

Their symbolic choices are clear to me, but framed as a “political performance,” as they explicitly define it themselves, all the employed elements nevertheless remain at the level of producing the fastest and strongest audience reaction, rather than being used in a deeper way to create the sociological and psychological atmosphere that is, in fact, the reason for the performance. 

I didn’t feel comfortable being part of this audience—and it seems many others didn’t either. How did I become the antagonist here? I felt offended because the show suggests that I am shallow and capitalist in my view of theatre. It blames me for the fall of classical theatre values, which made these artists unable to create noble and brave moral stories. Instead, they use vulgarity as their only way to get attention. Though at times, in breaks between the chaos, we see the fragile private lives of young artists struggling with a broken system and changing social values, trying to survive without betraying their art, the feeling of connection is missing. The close relationship with the audience is not supported or encouraged; instead, the show is designed to get quick reactions. 

Moving on to the next piece The Machine by Bojana Robinson, a choreographic work interspersed with subtle, yet somewhat fragmented and hermetic dramatic sequences. It tells an intimate story about learning to live with a machine that helps her child to breathe. In the beginning, Robinson becomes a gentle narrator, her words cradle the audience. She invites us in, to listen, to empathize. Unfortunately, the slow and repetitive movement dynamics that exquisitely exhaust and beautify express the author’s own experience, soon drain the audience’s attention, hindered by the absence of the anticipated verbal or overt dramatic exchange. The story remains only partially apprehended. By choosing theatre as a form yet not pushing its boundaries toward participatory or collective engagement, the piece remains locked in self-reflection. 

The final performance, This is my truth, tell me yours by Croatian dramaturg Jasna Žmak, operates within the dramaturgical framework of text and narration, gradually unveiling Žmak’s personal truth through charming writing and direction. 

Žmak leads her performance with organic immediacy, playfully manipulating dramatic causality and conventions, deftly constructing a comedic foundation beneath a deeply serious and touching story. The audience here is not just a witness to Žmak’s testimony, they are participants in creating the meaning of the events, playing an essential role in reconstructing the events that become the author’s truth – how an ordinary theatre visit turned into a 13-year battle with tinnitus. 

This performance raises an important question (that I also wonder about): What are the limits of the author’s responsibility regarding audience participation? Unfortunately, even with an awareness of the special and sensitive space that is built between performer and audience in this piece, based on the author’s ethical message from her own experience, catharsis is still missing. I think this is because the story moves quickly, trying to keep a light, entertaining tone. Although the author, at moments, plays with various familiar, even slightly caricatured forms of establishing a relationship with the audience – by asking questions, inviting spectators onto the stage, shifting focus to the auditorium instead of the stage, and so on, she never carries these gestures through to the end. They remain teasers of what could have created a closer and more committed relationship between the performer and the spectator. 

In all three cases, I found the same unresolved tension: a desire to provoke audience empathy through intimate storytelling, without truly activating or sustaining a relationship with that audience. I believe this is not merely a matter of staging or taste, but a deeper issue of genre, or more precisely, of not fully embracing the form through which the story is told.

Could another artistic form have offered a safer or more adequate space for these confessions? Possibly. Especially, forms that ask less of the audience’s real-time emotional presence and vulnerability. And yet, I understand the choice of theatre. Because theatre can provide a space of collective healing, shared breath, and immediate human connection. But only if we dare to fully open it up, not as a stage for symbolic exposure, but as a place of true encounter. And that, I fear, did not happen here. They did not explore, or perhaps, did not trust, the full range of theatre’s potential for co-presence, exchange, and vulnerability.

After each of these performances, I departed resentful, not because I didn’t like them, but because the intimacies they invoked were left for me to carry alone. Who is responsible for the questions, the self-reflections, the unease they provoked in me? I longed for conversation, an embrace, a space to share the emotional weight. Instead, I felt abandoned. 

Returning to my first question: Is the need to share one’s story enough reason to create a performance?

Yes—but only if it is accompanied by an awareness of what theatre, as a medium, demands in return. Theatre is not therapy, even when it borrows its tools. It is a collective space of intention, responsibility, and exchange. To enter someone’s intimate space must be done with care, it must include an invitation or at least a suggestion of the role the witness (the audience) is expected to play. The boundaries of intimacy must be shared, not imposed. Creating the conditions in which the audience can feel or accept those boundaries is as much an artistic task as crafting the content itself.

In this regard, I humbly offer a terminological and conceptual proposal for a theatrical/performative category, which would be more suitable for this type of content.

Collective Intimate Performance – an authorial work in which the needs of both performer and audience, the latter capable of participatory or even performative engagement, are mutually exhausted; a performance that deliberately abandons its dramatic structure to cultivate a collective cathartic experience; a performance that uses artist’s personal story not as the sole content of the work, but the starting point for a shared emotional and ethical experience; a performance that requires the creation of dialogic or participatory frameworks—be it through post-performance discussions, ritualistic closure, spatial redistribution, or dramaturgical openness that allows for affective response and exchange; a performance that places the human experience at its very centre.