On Goran Stefanovski’s “Black Hole”; directed by Sašo Milenkovski
Loss and paranoid behavior with two accidental one-night stand lovers. They speak of their unhappy circular life in small verbal pieces only. They can not find the right answers, and in the perverse sub-sexual situation, they don’t even need it. In the senselessness of the genital releif, their chat is unconnected, broken and unobliging. This is also in their background, in the remaining part of the several floor high stage, filled with static figures of people – all lost in their unfulfilled desires. The alienation is seen in their actions. Siljan (Senko Velinov) is almost all the time turned with his back when he speaks to the eighteen year old Svetle (Biljana Beličanec). Their sex is a virtual game – sex of bodies without touch, that is, senseless sex of two quite unfound people, and only the low instincts simulate parallel actions. The complete story is also put in a common inter-song: why should I love, why should I lose myself – the road to the black hole. The stage sets are a matching part of the complete story: at several levels, through several generations, of different stories, while the story is indeed only one. The opposite of what it is now, opposed to what it wants to be, and the desires are at times unknown. On the blue sheets one seeks for: divinity, purity, depth. Intimacy is lost, mostly in the unfound identity.
Siljan with his other lover Sanja (Iskra Veterova) is in the stage part that is a luxuriously designed studio. A disoriented discussion on quasi-politics and quasi-art, banalities. This atmosphere is fully shown in the acting of Veterova: impudence in her movements and words, her body movements give birth to a spongy senses uneasiness.
In the small apartment (centrally positioned stage part) Cveta (Petruševska Trenkovski) with the father (Pero Arsovski). Their conversation completely elaborates the reason and consequence of the paranoid, wandering life of her husband Siljan – sacked from his job. In the name of Cveta and in her quest for purity, we see traces of our historical, anthological Cveta from “Macedonian Bloody Wedding”. But, in order to be different and shown with cynicism, she is shed to pieces, so real in our everyday life: the lost Cveta, powerless and unprotected; the one who yearns for at least one night out with her husband, with kebabs and onion. Everybody talks about insignificant, petty moments, and they really show their source of loss in the labyrinth which (even today!) lasts. The father is a character – trace of historic events where he had lived all of his life, the ones that he yearns for and which had passed, His replica as a small detail reminds us of modern humanity, but it is also a small call for the needed catharsis: “you should donate blood… the body is purified. The poison come out of it”. His views and actions are melancholic and static. His present (actually with everybody) is in the past, with many small fireflies turned towards the future. The past is more present, it is already being forgotten, and the reality is therefore fragmented. In this paranoid no-way-out, to contribute to an even bigger absurd (which has been long accepted as normal with us) the reasons are in themselves, in their colleagues, in their neighbors, Ana and Pero. Ana (Danica Georgieva) the neighbor and lover of Siljan and Pero, “colleague” of Siljan who has no fault in Siljan being kicked out of work. At the moments that are the most painful, Siljan has Zuco’s replicas because of his absentmindedness and schizophrenia; and movements that simulate the beating of a lost heart, animal cries and calls.
Siljan and Magda (Dzvezda Angelovska). This scene is a sublimate of yearning and memories. Magda has traces of Magda from “Branch in the Wind” of Cašule and “if her husband sees her, he will kill her”. But this is another Magda, different than the one when both of them were pure and romantically in love. Now they only want to remember it, but they are not able to do so. Only a tasteless rhetoric and wasted chat, to run somewhere, to get lost somewhere completely. Siljan says: “there I will be no more. No name, past, future. No tradition. No morality. I don’t owe anything to anyone. I don’t wait for anything. I simply am.” What cynicism coming from a man who is no longer a man; a man without identity.
Siljan in a hotel room where his Mother (Meri Boškova) comes/appears. She comes from the subconscious paranoia of Siljan. He does not even know whether he looks for himself, and he is somewhere to Cepenkov’s story of Siljan (the one about Sive and Cule), which is intertextually present via the speech, a precise Cepenkov dialogue and via the movements that are traditional, static and motherly bitter. This displaced presence transpires again into Siljan’s drastic paranoia, until he is killed/lost, when it is not even in front of the dead bed of his wife, but in Sive’s story: somewhere far away, yearning for home, yearning for himself.
This frame of more fragmented stories is made with additional disorientation and paranoia to show the saturation of the everyday burden – “Black Hole” of Milenkovski. The text is the same, and the acting continues the thematic scattering. A game of simulations, unmotivated, and deeply subconscious gestures and animal gags in the lost figure of man. Music is more obvious when it reaches out with the intention of the director, when the refrain of the song of all voices repeats: why should I love, why should I lose myself. Milenkovski’s “Black Hole” gave the answer to our status quo situation, in each segment that is treated in the post-modern dramaturgy of Goran Stefanovski interwoven with the current realistic existence.