The audience surrounded from all four sides the performance square covered with about three hundred heavy, black covered books with completely white, untouched pages. Five performers under the beam of a single light swinging from the ceiling above the audience’s heads, embody the Biblical myth about the conversion of St. Paul. On the white pages that reflect the light, just like the desert the Biblical conversion took place in, the performers present stories about lost persons who change, find themselves or remain forever lost.
FRAGILE is a play based on texts from Wittgenstein, Malevich and the Bible. The conversion myth is approached as a consequence of all-encompassing fragility and mutability of human identity. Identities in transition are portrayed through different symbolic languages in an intercultural correlation of performers with different pasts and nationalities. FRAGILE is a play with no spatial or temporal strongholds, which addresses a general human phenomenon: the lost individuals which exist independent of national borders.
Project FRAGILE premiered in Vilhelmina, a town at the Northern end of Sweden and in Stockholm, after which it toured in Norway, the Netherlands, Croatia and Yugoslavia, where it received a special audience award at the Bitef Festival in Belgrade. This performance is of great cultural and emotional importance in national terms, because this guest performance made MONTAЖ$TROJ the first group that returned to the Yugoslav (Serbian) festival after all forms of cooperation were broken ten years prior.
