Project `Dog Day Afternoon` is a continuation of the platform which supports projects of younger generations of authors by Artistic Organization TeatruM. This platform received the biggest recognition in 2022. winning the main award on one of the biggest European Theatre festivals - Marulićevi Days for the monoplay `Little Miracles/Mala Čuda` author; Sanja Milardović, who has been developing her authorial style through this platform for several years.
`Dog Day Afternoon` is a one-actor play performed by Petar Cvirn, who embodies several dimensions of the mind and the bodz. It tells the story of a man who, due to a series of unfortunate circumstances, finds himself on a deserted island that represents both literal and metaphysical place. `Dog Day Afternoon` is a non-classical dramatic performance.
This project marks the reunion and collaboration of director Dora Ruždjak Podolski/ Head of the oldest European summer art festival-Dubrovačke ljetne igre and renowned actor Petar Cvirn after more than ten years. *Showcase performances- End of November 2023. at the Dance Center Tala/ TALA PLE(j)S & Teatar Exit in Zagreb, Croatia.
The need of both authors to create a new theatrical, authentic language and world for this story organically arose after dozens of established projects in their previous work. They now seek a new approach to staging a story.
The play is conceived as a palette of several different media, including classical acting expression, eclectic choreography, audio imagery created through the performer's voice, video projections, and a complex set design structure built from a series of micro-elements that form a cohesive whole. It is aesthetically rich, presenting a fireworks display of miniature stage solutions suitable for both traditional theater venues and outdoor ambient spaces.
In `Dog Day Afternoon`, we encounter our protagonist confronted with the fact that he has been abandoned on a deserted island for 75 days. Despairation, as the average viewer might expect at first, is obstructed by a constructed world born from imagination and from denial about the reality of the problem he finds himself in. Our protagonist refuses to face the real world and the fact that he is alone, abandoned, and confronted with himself on the deserted island. Therefore, using various acting-performing tools, he tries to escape and flee from the problems he faces every second, creating an imaginary world. The question is whether this kind of escape can actually distance him from the circumstances in which the character finds himself or whether today's individuals can escape into their own individual intimate worlds.
The interweaving of situations in which the protagonist struggles within the reality he is in and his fantasies, combined with serious introspective monologues, forms the fabric of this play with bittersweet content.
The parallel lines followed by the story of `Dog Day Afternoon` relate to the time we live in, where the modern individual is increasingly `plugged in` to the virtual world in which they exist, isolated from real life without the perspective to realize and understand that they are creating self-isolation. It is not a literal portrayal, but it echoes the situation in which the protagonist of this play finds himself.
The director herself is present through the voice of a kind of `God` addressing our protagonist, thus opening a dimension in which the authors question to what extent we are truly creators of our realities and how much the question of individual choice is hindered in the age we live in.
`Alone or not` / `Individual or collective` are the questions posed by the play, questions that confront us with the fact that we live in a time where it seems as though they want to systematize us to be part of a whole without the true possibility of individualizing ourselves.
