The Second Act Giovanni: Leporello, Leporello!... Signore? (recitative secco)

The Second Act Giovanni: Leporello, Leporello!... Signore? (recitative secco)
Don Giovanni is thinking up new conquests. He exchanges clothes with Leporello and they venture a new action.


Bojana Cvejić directed and showed Mozart’s Don Giovanni at this year’s Bitef and, calling it a composition of body, sound, light and movement, she intentionally made a distance from opera – the classical product of bourgeoisie. As if she used the very definition to point out to the contents which were neglected by the old opera in favour of voice spectacle yet which are recognized by the new opera as the crucial way to make its concept relevant in the contemporary society. Despite the opera being present all along, it lightly moved around the Belgrade fair hall. It was as seductive as Don Giovanni. It toyed with our expectations, it made us chase it, search for it and recognize it in the most varied modes of its existence.

But why did we want it so much? If we could dissect the desire/opera we could obtain information about its new body. We would see the opera flowing through the vein of the audience and revitalizing it; we would see the light impulses change the perception of the space it moves through… we would see its architected structure made possible due to the specific space treatment. We would detect its parasite dependence on the elements of the reality. Furthermore, we would notice a gap existence, a scare of a subject, of the other, shown through orchestra division and the very scenes. We would see that the opera speaks a false language but that, during the process of interpreting, it visually shows ideological influences subconsciously brought in by opera. Actually, we would notice many mechanisms disturbing and transforming the old body of an opera into a new age product. But we would still not discover what is it that it contains that we can never get enough of…

In the course of XX century, many authors were systematically trying to ‘kill’ opera but never managed. Unlike those, Bojana Cvejić gave it a new figure which she put into new clothes, shaped it with demanding physical practices and left it somewhere between reality and fiction. Thus she opened new possibilities of interpreting it and offered an unforgettable opera experience to the audience. She let them get under the skin of the opera and discover the making of unyielding life forms out of the well-fit mechanisms for meanings’ creation.

Jovana Dukić