Kontaminacija Kolyada (Contamination Kolyada): Laboratory of Contaminated Creators
Twelve young people tell us a theatre story that is absolutely theirs in a joint project that shows their absolute truth: they play true characters of marginal people in this time. Following the idea of professor Vladimir Milčin, they named it Kontaminacija Kolyada (Contamination Kolyada). Although this is formally the final exam of acting of the students of the final year at the Faculty of Drama Arts in Skopje in the class of professor Milčin, the play was supposed to have its stage life outside the university. In September it was played at the Children’s Theatre Centre in Skopje, as a project that was supposed to open a new process: Faculty of Drama Arts and CTC as partners in creating theatre production that would be a challenge for the artists and the audience as well. But the money had its toll: it is found nowhere, or nobody wants it. A good idea for cooperation of the two institutions, one of them educational and the other one artistic, and both have the same aim – to create following the principle of workshop-lab, but it did not work out, or not for now, although it is expected that it participates at student or similar events.
Why is Kontaminacija Kolyada a significant project? First: because its creators play the situation of the young people lost in transition here or anywhere. Second: because they play the characters created by Nikolay Kolyada (1957, Russia), one of the most provocative and most staged contemporary playwrights, who managed to sharply and shrewdly present the cruel topic of man from urban periphery – the man of the periphery of life. Third: professor and director Vladimir Milčin knows and loves the dramatic manuscript of Kolyada (he has staged the plays Murlin Murlo and Zemjomer at professional theatres), and Kontaminacija Kolyada is created from characters and scenes from the plays Murlin Murlo, Zemjomer, Hen and Fiery Polonaise, according to his students. Fourth: it is made following the lab principles, where everybody enters together and everybody puts in their maximum.
This is a complex play (which is not the case with the final exams), because it also includes Marjan Nekak, author of the music; Marija Papučevska, author of the costumes, and Krste S. Džidrov, author of the stage setting.
The twelve actors who are contaminated heroes and create the story on stage as a tragic-comedy are: Maja Nastevska, Jasmina Micovska, Daniela Stojanovska, Blagica Trpkovska, Neda Nikolik, Ilina Čorevska, Sonja Stamboldžiska, Slaviša Kajevski, Gorast Cvetkovski, Saško Kocev, Stojan Velkov and Nikola Projčevski. The unbearable weight of living is played as if they are wrestles in the arena in which their hands are tied behind their backs. They are the characters/losers tied between the reality and the dreams that crawl on the short distance between life and death. Regardless of what their names are or what they are, they create characters that come from nowhere, move nowhere, crawl on the roofs, dream in the color of the madness of this time, starve, and if there is anything, they eat relentlessly, disappear in the abyss of life that rolls with the speed of free fall. They build their phantasmagoria that shows the transition in which there is less and less space for man.
Professor and director Vladimir Milčin individually brings in the student actors contaminated with theatre in the “pot of his creativity”, via characters or atmosphere in which they all know what they are and where they are and everybody is recognized and participates in the collective Kontaminacija Kolyada.