
This trip began in community. I asked my 600 "closest friends" to help send me to Belgrade with small donations to help fill the gap my early-year health crisis created in my funding. A huge group responded, sending anywhere from $5 to $200, raising me to over my goal of $900 within two weeks.
Thank you all so much, those of you who donated. My thanks are a constant refrain in my head as I learn so much here.
I departed from JFK in New York City on June 9th, arriving early in the morning on June 10th in Amsterdam, where I passed a 6-hour layover. I point this out because it felt like a full 6 hours; in Amerstam the speakers never go silent and they also chastise you: "So-and-so and So-and-so departing for Wherever: you are delaying your flight. Please go immediately to your gate. We will begin offloading your luggage." It's not a threat--they're doing it! And this is constant! At least every 3 minutes, somebody gets publicly booted from their connection to far-off lands. First the browbeating melody raised my eyebrows, then it became funny, then annoying, then (as I tried my best to nap), taunting. Finally my plane to Paris arrived and whisked me off over Western Europe with all of its cities' symmetry slicing the land in gorgeous patterns, hypnotizing me to sleep.
Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport is a maze. I was so grateful for my long layover. Finally in my terminal, I was shocked at the European advertising: very naked women selling very pretty things by using English swearwords. I couldn't take a picture because of the glare, but the best ad, for what I'm not sure, maybe jewelry or jeans? Those were the only coverings the model wore...except for her tattoos, which hung between her clavicles reading LOVE ROCK FUCK. I love Europe.
My plane to Belgrade felt like a party bus. Packed full, everybody chatted, yelled down the aisles to friends. They served us tasty sandwiches as we sweated without air conditioning on the old plane. Below the Swiss Alps still sparkled with snow, then gave way to flat lands until finally I saw the either the Danube or the Sava, Belgrade's two rivers, cutting through the fields.
Sanja, my colleague from last year's Youth Creates summer camp at
7 Stages, met me at the airport at 8pm on June 10th, 1pm at home in the States. I had been traveling for over 19 hours, so clearly the best thing to do was go have dinner with the rest of my classmates.

We went to a restaurant called Dačo (pronounced DA-cho) on Ave. Patrice Lumumbe. The roads in Belgrade constantly change names depending on the ruling political party; this road is one of the last left still honoring a communist (socialist?) hero. In a style I would call "Nostalgic Yugoslavian" the restaurant had an amazing rough-hewn log porch, roofed in, with Yugoslavian (now, I guess they would be Slovenian, Croation, Serbian, and Montenegran, and Macedonian) fabrics hanging from the rafters. They served amazing food, all tapas-style, with schnapps and wine; a much easier and better combination than you might imagine, the way they do it here, sweet and intoxicating but not overpowering or hangover-inspiring. Whether through my hunger or just the merits of the food alone, g*d it was good.
Finally to my apartment. I had expected a home-stay situation, but a friend of the school keeps a rental apartment, and I was lucky enough to score a place in it with two other students. A 5-minute walk from the school and in the center of everything, I am grateful not to have to negotiate the (quick and well-run but) always cram-packed trams and busses every day.

My apartment. I sleep in the living room.
The next day, the 6th International School of DAH Teatar opened for class. The schedule is similar every day: we arrive, stretch, find our "central line", practice Chi-Gong, and train with the "3 Steps"- about an hour of moving to a 1-2-3 beat. It's amazingly difficult and athletic, but teaches you so many ways of moving. Dijana Milosevic, one of DAH's directors, says "Anything can be your ally or your obstacle, but still you must perform with it." So far I have dealt with 85 degree heat (no A/C here), blisters, and blisters on my blisters over just the general muscle soreness and fatigue; one week out, I'm happy to report I'm over it--I have pushed through to the other side, and my feet are mostly healed!
After 3 Steps we do vocal training for about an hour and a half. As an American, my voice lives mostly in my throat and nose, sometimes my chest. Sanja is teaching me to find a voice low in my stomach, a frustrating process, but powerful and vital to me not only as an actor but as a person who is always striving to "find my voice" in every aspect of the term. To round out the day, we work on creating precise physical scores (almost like dance, but expressive in a way that works for theater) and blindfolded movement training, used by Jrszy Grotowski, to help build spatial awareness.

Okay, so that's all very detailed and academic, but what does it have to do with the deeply moving political theater these artists make? On the first day, Dijana Milosevic gave her lecture "The Role of the Artist in the Dark Times" in which she described DAH's 16-year history, beginning with the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and through the U.S.-led NATO bombings in 1991. Through the political loss of her homeland, through the following social unrest, to even working in a building targeted by the bombers (the school in which the theater is located had government antennae on the roof), Dijana, Maya, Sanja and colleagues came together every day to do this specific training in the service of their work.
"Many days, the training was stronger than we were. Leaving our kids and our partners while air raid sirens sounded to spend 6 hours making art does not seem logical, and even we did not think we could do it. But we came together and made space for the discipline, and the art itself that we began making became a focus and a shelter."

Dijana quoted Bertold Brecht who asked "Will there be singing in the dark times? Yes there will be singing, about the dark times." Brecht's singing became the group's first public show, which they performed environmentally around the central square of Belgrade, black angels with wire wings speaking for the first time out loud the questions and resentments of a country at war. The video footage is incredible: stunned crowds following, children enthralled by the spectacle and grown men crossing themselves at the sight. Usually, when I see environmental political theater, it's agit-prop--effigies of Presidents or activists singing clever slogans instead of shouting them--and usually when I see this street theater I am one of "the choir" of people paying attention while everybody else studiously ignores it.
(I feel a huge split in U.S. activist culture where performance must be agit-prop activist or else it is considered "unuseful" to--or just generally not considered at all in--the aims of whatever agenda we have. In this way I feel outside of my own activism, having to steal people away, unde the guise of "entertainment" to my performance space to try and make a real political connection outside of the arena of "real politics.")
Dijana credits the artistic discipline of her actors for their popular audience's response: Eg, they paid attention. It affected them. They gave voice to the thoughts that were being studiously silenced by government and society alike. Because the work was not agit-prop in content, and because the actors created such deeply personal stories with their movement and text, the work worked. They didn't tell the audience what or how to think: they let the audience think and feel with them, bringing them into the art. DAH took their theater back into the theater and created more shows, as an ensemble and as individuals, that touches audiences world-wide in the same way.

This is what I am learning: the nuts and bolts of making work that engages society through deeply personal understandings. I find myself finally in a community who understands by experience just how significantly this kind of art can change people. It feels amazing to have this as our starting point; in the next two weeks this will only take deeper, smarter hold, and I can bring it back to my community -- Y'all--because you helped me.

Views of the Sava River and Kalemegdan, an ancient Roman outpost at the confluence of the Save and Danube, now a realxed and fun nightclub.

A boutique with a sense of humor
in this formerly Communist country....