On Space and Audience at the Kosovo Albania Theatre Showcase 2024

I don’t go to many festivals, nor do I review even half as much as I used to. But when I do go, shadows of the shows remain imprinted in my memory months, years later: a word said a particular way, a light slanting through an open door, the way a particular actor stands gazing out from the stage at the audience as the curtain rises. I am left with an enduring impression of the spaces, how they felt, and the people—the audience and any ushers, bodies squashed together, ambling up or down or across to seats. I like getting into the theatre before everyone else, and I mostly achieve that, just to soak up the atmosphere, take in what’s on the stage (or not) in more detail, and get myself ready in a kind of speculative silence. Sometimes, I even draw diagrams, not to refer to later, but because there is something in this creative act which sets a response off in myself, which draws an invisible thread of connection between me and the show.

And I am still thinking about space and the audience of four shows from the Kosovo Albania Theatre Showcase, an annual theatrical event run by Qendra Multimedia, an independent theatre company in Prishtina, Kosovo, which stages some of the best independent work from across the Balkans. Last October, in Tirana, Albania, instead of Kosovo’s capital, Prishtina, amongst the shows the festival was showcasing were: Flower Sajza, a documentary piece about the internment camps in Albania and the more than six thousand people who lost their lives during Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship; Six Against Turkey, a surreal dark comedy inspired by Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes, which explores the 2016 attempted coup against Turkish dictator President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the six teachers who were extradited from Kosovo in response; The Internationals, which eviscerates how states are created by western governments playing games with people's pleas for sovereignty; and How I Learned to Drive, which is about a different kind of tyranny altogether—child sex abuse—which, when confronted with the abuser’s story, reminds us to try to connect with our humanity all the same.

All four shows deal with betrayal, corruption, loss, and a reckless disregard for life on a massive scale, on both international and personal levels. It might be the year for it—when I saw these shows, Donald Trump had not yet been reelected, his plan to ignite a global trade war as yet invisible, Elon Musk was a shadowy player, a devil wearing a hero’s cape, but seemingly far more on the political sidelines, and the fear of the far-right activist Stephen Yaxley Lennon being supported by the likes of Musk and his attendant dollars was certainly not in my head (though I am now certain I was not paying enough attention). The protests in Serbia against the government’s corruption were but a grumble, and the undemocratic imprisonment of a rival mayor in Türkiye and the subsequent violent crackdown on protestors was a threat simmering away for years—but only that. Now, things look starkly different. Shows about past events are just as relevant to the future: Albanians still suffer the horror of not knowing where their loved ones lie buried, there have been demonstrations in Kosovo and Türkiye over Six Against Turkey, and to put it simply and obviously, countries still play with their people and those of other countries, and older men still molest children. But I am not writing about these shows to discuss their content so much as the way the shows used space to reach out to an audience:

How has the space been used?

Upon entry to the National Experimental Theater of Tirana, where Flower Sajza was being performed, the audience members were met by barbed wire at the very edge of the stage. Hooked into it were paper airplanes (as if made by children) and other bits of card. On the stage were rows of seats to the side and facing each other. Audience members such as myself who needed English surtitles were directed to the main seating area in the auditorium, and Albanians and other audience members took seats on the stage. The audience was separated into two.

For the rest of us, I surmised, our role was to perhaps witness this—and to witness any healing.

For me, this staging is a primary take away from the show. This is not to denigrate the rest of it, which, in a review for the Theatre Times, I wrote was “a living monument or museum of this terrible and important part of Albania’s past.” It explored how such events will impact society through testimonies, archival footage, and experimental dance from the mother/child character, Sajza, who represented women and families in Albania who cannot properly bury their loved ones and who was based on Albanian writer Agron Tufa’s short story “Lule Sajza.” The director of the show, Endri Çela, told me that bodies that were found from the internment camps were commonly exhumed twice and had three burials in all. So he decided that Sajza should exhume a third time onstage as “it would be a crime if it were not done, if our memories and past are forever buried.”

I thought at first that Çela had designed the separation of the mostly non-Albanian audience watching the show from behind a barbed wire from the Albanian one onstage. I began to think about Western audiences from the United Kingdom, the United States, and other countries observing the traumas of the Balkan people. The show worked on at least two levels: for the Balkan communities watching the show, it was a living document of pain and suffering and was keeping alive the need for the Albanian government to take responsibility for the atrocities that are part of the collective trauma of its people. It was a real, lived experience. For the rest of us, I surmised, our role was to perhaps witness this—and to witness any healing.

But it turns out that the arrangement of the audience for this performance was unique. Çela later told me that they try to put the whole audience on the stage enclosed by the wire, even, I might peruse, trapped by it. Would the show have impacted me less if I was able to be onstage (complete with surtitles) and enclosed in the camp with the actors? No, it would have had a different impact, not less of one.

I am not a stranger to the work of Kosovo playwright Jeton Neziraj and director Blerta Neziraj, a married couple who form Qendra Multimedia (who also organize the festival). There are certain tropes to look out for: Blerta’s often surreal and comical imagery (Jeton rarely ever writes stage directions or gives a visual sense of the staging ), scenes that are played deliberately long to get points across, and dark comic moments often at the end of the show, where, as it was in Six Against Turkey, giant octopuses grab what they can with their outstretched tendrils and suckers—a comment on commodification and corruption. The use of space, however, is often quite conforming, with audiences facing the playing area. Six Against Turkey, though, did break out from these special norms in a scene that changed the playing space and spoke directly to audience members. In this scene, the cast stepped back from their roles and discussed how two Turkish actors had to drop out of the show because they, very rightly, feared persecution from the Turkish authorities for being part of the production.

For me, the scene linked the audience to the show, the actors, and those actors who couldn’t be there. It made the connection between the imaginary events on stage and the reality from which the play derived. My consciousness and sense of collective identity was also further developed and expanded because I was made aware of the struggles that the cast and creative team went through to produce the show. I imagine this was the same for the rest of audience. This little scene offered something more practical that the audience could latch onto. What's more, it was an enactment. Because of this reach out to the audience, Six Against Turkey is, for me, one the Nezirajs’ most mature works.

Were we, as audience members watching on, being manipulated to watch in this way by the director, also pretentious?

The acknowledgement of the audience (and therefore the treatment of the space it sits in) is also what made Aktina Stathaki’s interpretation of Jeton Neziraj’s The Internationals so memorable. Stathaki brought her Greek production readymade from its premiere in Athens, where it played successfully to Albanian Greeks who, she told me, felt that they were being seen and acknowledged in their adopted Greece for the first time. The problem was that she could not visit the festival space beforehand and could only look around virtually—and the space, Tulla Centre, was a kind of garage music bar that played and sold LPs to a young crowd, with some spaces for exhibitions. Tucked up some stairs in an old part in Tirana, it felt like the place should, quite literally, be underground—it seemed to be part of the subcultural belly of Tirana.

So the show had to adapt in a few days. As the play itself is a series of elliptical scenes focusing on the big actors in the days before and during Kosovo’s fight for independence, there was not a through narrative that could help with the staging. Stathaki’s cast of three played all the roles, from Bill Clinton to Mother Theresa to performance artist Marina Abramović and her ex-lover Ulay. Stathaki directed the audience to feel or think things at certain times by physically leading them into different rooms to experience different scenes of the play. For The Internationals this came in a performance art scene between Abramović and Ulay. The audience was led from their seats in a cabaret space to an attached whitewashed room, which was curtained off. There, Abramović and Ulay played out a scene which was ostensibly about performance art. As they argued, stretching hands to each other dramatically over a table, we were asked to consider whether what they were doing was pretentious. Were we, as audience members watching on, being manipulated to watch in this way by the director, also pretentious? We were then led back into the cabaret space and saw another actress playing a German lady crying over a real loss she has experienced, which, being contrasted with the scene before, led the audience to think about accountability. 

Serbian theatre company Heartefact, which regularly brings work to the Kosovo Theatre Showcase, are masters at putting their audiences right in the show, almost center stage. All of their shows that I have are acting masterclasses—the actors’ facial expressions are so minute and detailed that the performances could quite easily work on camera. Their show How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel was at the Tulla Centre in the exact same space that Abramović and Ulay played out their little scene in The Internationals. But the playing space could not have felt more different—the relaxed and cabaret-like vibe of The Internationals was replaced with the feeling one gets from a courtroom about to witness an event of importance and weight, and audience members sat on uncomfortable wooden seats roughly pushed up against each other around a tight playing space.

Now, How I Learned to Drive is an uncomfortable and provocative play to watch at the best of times, dealing, as it does, with child molestation and abuse. It is narrated in reverse, beginning when the victim of the abuse is an adult and ending the first time she is abused. It explores the ability of an abused child to establish effective boundaries as they get older, amongst other things, and invites audiences to have empathy for the abuser as well as the victim.

In this production, being forced to watch this uncomfortable material bunched up together in close proximity to other audience members was difficult, too. The experience was rather like being part of an unwilling but rapt church congregation, or people experiencing a rather traumatic trial in a court room. There were many women in the audience—of all ages—some of whom were crying. If those people had been further away, in a more conventional space, I might not have witnessed this and therefore might not have learned something about them or had the chance to share (and thereby silently support) their experience of the show or communicate my own experience to others.

Of course, how we respond to plays is a private act. No one can ever see inside another and understand totally what is being felt or feel in the exact same way. But in a theatre especially, if the audience sits opposite each other so close that they can reach out and touch, then the experience is less private, less individual, more ritualistic, and more communal. The usual boundaries that are implied by distance and a traditional seating plan are challenged and crossed over. Staging the show this way gets across the idea that “the impact of trauma and memory is more pertinent now than it was” (as Paula Vogel talks about in a an article on revisiting the play) and probably enhances a sense of shared responsibility and the potential that what happens in the play could happen to anyone. But the staging, the seating of the audience, and even the decision to play in complete daylight also allowed me to feel as if I was experiencing the show alongside my audience peers. And there is something very powerful about that.

Audiences may sometimes take for granted how they are seated in relation to one another and the playing space, but in reality the theatremakers usually have put lot of thought into it. In the aforementioned plays especially, space and the way the audience was seated affected the psychological impact of the shows and the messages they were trying to get across. It is often said, of films at least, that once you get the casting right, you are halfway there to making a good movie. I’d say the same of the playing space and seating of the audience in theatre. All four of these shows deal with historical trauma in one way or another, as well as the ways such traumas are still alive in the global consciousness today. The staging of the shows and how the audiences are seated around them, are a big part of that.