Odysseus

The initial and, according to many, still the greatest literary text of European culture, this year also became the basis for the largest cooperation between three Serbian and two Croatian theater houses with SNG Maribor. Odysseus is that Greek hero who, after a successful campaign for the Greeks with a Trojan horse - which is not a computer virus - traveled home to his family for ten years. With his return home and the establishment of pre-war conditions in Ithaca, Homer's work ends, but the uncontrollable European creativity begins to this day. We must definitely include the work of Goran Stefanovski, who wrote the text for an international theater co-production based on the motifs of Homer's Odyssey, created under the direction of the Macedonian director Aleksander Popovski. The performance concept is based on two thematic sections: return and home. The director sees both episodes in the sense of the fundamental living issues of modern man, as a result the performance is not about history, but about modernity; archetypal situations from Greek myths are the starting point for revealing similar situations in today's life. With this information, it becomes clearer that the Greek epic is in fact only a starting point for today's current questions: what do the concepts of travel and home mean today, when the world has become digital, virtual, open, what does the concept of returning home mean today, or what force pulls Odysseus back towards Ithaca? The director was not looking for simple answers to these questions, because home, as seen by Odysseus, is a complex intersection of the positive, such as a child's memory, and at the same time a place where it hurts, where we pay the bills... The play also deals with expulsion from home, with home in exile... The co-production, where creators from Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia and Slovenia participate, will be a guest on the stages of all the producers; comes to us after the summer premiere in Brijuni.