FIRE-TECHNICS

An organic rally ballet VATROTEHNA performed by five young men aged 16 to 22 was MONTAЖ$TROJ’s first full-length show, named after the main sponsor – a wholesale company for firefighting, civil defense and people’s protection and industrial safety equipment. Based on the Prometheus legend, VATROTEHNA was performed in a dilapidated facility of Badel’s abandoned distillery in Zagreb. The square-like field on the concrete floor delineated by flares, around which the audience was situated, was a symbolic representation of the Caucasian rock, said to be the place where the gods punished Prometheus and bound him forever. The chorus of eagles was played by four performers who submitted their bodies to the precision and discipline of a machine. The repetitive mechanism indicated a force by which the eagles, at the gods’ command, punish Prometheus, the bearer of change. In a kind of parable, VATROTEHNA tackled the issue of the imprisonment of a Soviet theater director and revolutionary Vsevolod Emiljevič Mejerholjd, who was executed on the stone floor of a Moscow cell, as well as history as a machine, which disposes of the hero through betrayal, over and over. The wailing of hand sirens used for air raids and the instructions regarding behavior in case of danger were an ominous premonition of future events in Croatia: a period of extreme politics of force and the struggle for power.