Threepenny is a group founded by young theatre professionals in Belgrade. It has been grounded with a mission of developing the alternative performing arts scene in Serbia through art practice.
The future goal of the organization is creating a network of artists through which it is going to support young performing artists and directors. We wish to create a working space and logistic support for this authors to be able to express freely.
Our motivation is our feeling that our city and Serbia still lay out of the paths of young artists and intellectuals from the rest of the world, and that is a serious drawback for the development of our culture. We know that the only way to progress is through intercultural exchange.
We are gathered around the ideas of research and experiment, but not the ones that would lead to hermetically closing the world of arts for the “regular” audience. We wish to reach people who do not visit theatre often, to see what excites fresh, “innocent” audience. Art has been turned into a product valued by its price and consumed by limited elitist audience ready to pay for it. Theatre should be intimate, but not elitist. We believe that we, the young artists, should fight against the boredom and the abstruseness that seem to have become synonyms for theatre in the eyes of the modern aged audiences. In our opinion we should fight not to keep the old theater goers in the old theater houses, but rather try to speak to our own generation, and bring theater to people who usually don’t like it. It means that we will put focus on developing the imagination and freedom of expression both of the artist and the audience itself.
We hope for reaching a sense of community, a unique sensational and metaphysical exchange between all present in theatrical act, for impression of shared experience – opposite to institutional form of theatre performance.
Besides the spectators, we are interested in questioning the common ideas about theatrical space. Any space should be turned into a place of intimacy for uninterrupted communication flow. As a group without performing space, we need to be ready to adapt to any circumstances and adjust the current given space to our ideas. That will give a special dimension of unexpected and surprising to every performing case. In that sense, we would like to experiment with dialectical unity of matter and form, their ability to change, transform and produce new images and meanings.
There is no artistic means that we prefer – we are not just turned towards new technologies, or towards digging in theatre history. That is all a question of style, and every participating person should have a possibility to create/express their own. We are rather gathered around the idea of professional art outside of the existing institutions. Although we do believe that a theater process needs an organic leader, the one who is going to pump in the energy and to create the working circumstances, our main stand is that a theatrical process should not be organized strictly hierarchical, but rather constructed organically. We advocate a democratization of art, in which nobody is going to be the holder of the greater concept, and the rest executioners/consumers of his/hers ideas.
That is why our aim is to make first a local, then regional and finally international connections between various alternative art groups and individuals, thus to form a stronger network and a platform for development of the independent art scene in Belgrade and Serbia. We want to achieve that through working on the affirmation of young artists.
Our strategies are: realization of our own projects, building a professional network, education in and through theatre.
Goals of Threepenny from the Statute of the organization:
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Strengthening the platform for creating a unique artistic scene in Serbia.
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Creating a space and working conditions for artistic work and affirmation of young artists, mostly in the field of performing arts.
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Creating a network that would help young freelance artists from Serbia and region between themselves and with artists all around the world.
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Development of culture needs and creation of new audiences.