Tri Groša

It is a wonderful and horrible feeling to start your life from zero, not to know and not to be known by anybody. Free and condemned to our empty flat and empty phone books, we decided to fill the empty space, and make theater in our living room.    

A young couple. A Hungarian man and a Serbian woman, he a video journalist, and she a theater director, searching for creative, social and economical freedom in Berlin.

Our work on the performance unleashed many conflicts between us; from the very moment of the deciding of what is our theater performance going to be, which confronted the different conceptions about theater. The video journalist, an ex-wannabe-actor, has more conventional ideas, and insists on using a drama – „The Emigrants“ by Slawomir Mrozek. The theater director has to say yes – after all, she is to scared of having to be on stage, to be able to make a monodrama.

Throughout the work, we are unable to disconnect the conflict of the drama from the conflicts of our everyday life. So, that is what we staged – a confusing, but entertaining trip through different layers of reality, throughout which the audience is never sure what is staged, and what is spontanious.

We use all the aspects of our intimacy on stage: the confusion of different languages of our private little Babylon: Serbian, Hungarian, English, German; our two artistic fields, theater and video; the trust that we have in each other, wich allows us to improvise; the different views that we have on the nature of our search for freedom.

Our show is a conflict between different realities – between the reality of the stage and the reality of the screen; between the reality of the play and the reality of our everyday life; between the „finished“ reality of the art work and the neverending reality of the audience. Through all this realities we chase the idea of freedom, although we are not sure if such a thing exists, and if it does, will we be able to recognize it when we catch it? Still, we are chasing it, while being constantly affraid that if you chase an idea for too long, you might become its slave. And what a tragicomic situation – being a prisoner of freedom.