Authentic Interpretations: ‘68

The Authentic Interpretations: ’68 play was created in its original, draft version, back in July 2018, and has been developing continuously to this day, passing through “new alleys” in the narrative process - as actor Milutin Milošević put it - learning about the intimate stories of the participants of the 1968 student protests in Yugoslavia, as well as documentary material. The play is based on Borka Pavićević’s memoires and her texts related to June ’68. Ivan Medenica wrote that “the entire play can be interpreted as a smart, tender, sophisticated and certainly unimposing homage to Borka Pavićević… A leitmotif taken from Borka’s fashion column is how beautiful Belgrade is in June. Borka loved June, the scent of linden blossoms, ‘freedom of movement in summer clothes’, and the ‘slender and daring movements’, the scent of the revolutionary June of 1968.”  Borka herself wrote about the play that it is a “work process based on the principles of gifts and countergifts, sharing knowledge and experiences, inspiration and instrumentalization befitting the gift, the capacity of exchange, a staging from the inspiration and continuity of the analysis and synthesis by director Ana Miljanić, spiritual and nondogmatic.” Authentic Interpretations: ’68 is not a reconstruction, not an attempt to comprehend the June 1968 student protests as a historic lesson, as something from which we might possibly draw some useful conclusions for the future. Precisely owing to its innovative form (neither Stanislavski nor Brecht), through an imaginative approach to the material that comprises it (combining media, changing the “lens” and viewpoint), this play offers the possibility of thinking utopia. Borka herself described it as “a retelling, counterpointing, and synchronization of the cinematic, supposedly fairytale-like material, as well as its projection, the costume as a special added value that transcends the heroes into their future meaning, the camera as a participant in the performance, elements established in an oneiric sense, supposedly fairytale-like, like when we were little and dreamed, or like a dream about meta-utopia. The substrate of the June Turmoil, the utopian event about utopia.”

                One of the keywords pertaining to the Authentic Interpretations: ’68 play is “process”, i.e. duration, continuity and perhaps even supratemporality. Change and development. Through method development, changes of historic moments, and in a sort of continuation - also based primarily on the memoires, texts and work of Borka Pavićević - in a leap to the period of the 1990s student protests, Ana Miljanić and the Authentic Interpretations team - while maintaining the focus on the topic of students and fashion - are working on the “sequel” of the play, Student Destitute Fashion (2020), while contemplating the “third part”: And, after (2021). Because, as Borka Pavićević wrote in her article published in the Danas newspaper in July 2018 about Authentic Interpretations, “in November and December we will see and feel everything that I have promised you, once again with feeling.”