Redatelj: Krešimir Dolenčić
Skladatelj: Stanko Juzbašić
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‘A small area of the Dubrovnik coast washed by the calm, bluish sea, growing darker in the distance. The purple edges of the picturesque Šipan Island’s cape half close the last line of the horizon, while to the left the sky spills into the open sea. Light clouds sit in the sky... The whole area is breathing with quiet and wistful breaths of our melancholic nature, when even the sky seems to be veiled with a foreboding of bad days to come.’
This is Ivo Vojnović’s introductory stage direction. In Dubrovnik, at our little Posat, where the play is staged, only the sea is left of this direction. And the people. So we started reading in rehearsals and dived into that sea and among those people from another time. And dived out into the present, quite the same. Time. The way we perceive it, that flow, that past from which we learn so little and the future in which we put too much hope, or fear it more than we should, are condensed in a single point, the equinox. The lines, the sea, the sky, the clouds and the waves all become one, desires swarm, and greed, unforgiven sins, loves too heavy, ambitions, giving in to melancholy of the inevitable end; The end of the storm, the end of characters and roles, the end of the text, the end of life, the beginning of something new. Everything is here, untouched, in this brilliant text, timelessly echoing in every rehearsal through the beautiful people with whom I set out to tie this ship. In Dubrovnik, at the Summer Festival. At the Festival where I experienced so many wondrous things.
Boys and young men leave for America or wherever, never to return. They leave to live their lives, leaving us with wistful melodies, lovely customs, unfinished ships, stories of Anica and Ivo, of sad Jele, of some captains, of blind men who see, and a storm raised by the human soul. Eager for calm, we yearn for a quiet cove of justice and love, we beg for forgiveness.
P.S. And may all this be in memory of my teacher, Joško Juvančić.
Krešimir Dolenčić
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"Cielito Lindo" is a Mexican folk song or copla popularized in 1882 by Mexican author Quirino Mendoza y Cortés [Wikipedia], also signed by and possibly attributed to C. Fernandez, Arnulfo M. Romo, A. Varela, A. de Trueba, J.M. Hadiendiz and others, although it is assumed that its actual origin goes back to 17th century Castilian stanzas which told about the adventures of mountain smugglers. It could easily have been known to Ivo Vojnović at the time he wrote his Equinox, and the stanza:
"A bird that abandons its nest,
And finds it occupied, it is well deserved. "
irresistibly evokes the character and deed of Niko Marinović.
