Ekata Festival, day three: the play Prah in Krnjevo
The inaugural Ekata Festival reaches its third day with Veljko Micunovic's play Prah, starring Natasa Ninkovic and Zoran Cvijanovic on the brutalist estate near Velika Plana.
- The third day of the first Ekata Festival in Krnjevo, on June 6, brings the play Prah.
- It is directed by Veljko Micunovic and stars Natasa Ninkovic and Zoran Cvijanovic.
- The performance takes place outdoors, in the amphitheatre of the brutalist Ekata estate.
- The festival runs from June 3 to 7 and closes with a concert by Yasmin Levy.
Concrete behaves differently once the sun has set. It cools far more slowly than the air around it and keeps radiating warmth into the amphitheatre of the Ekata estate near Krnjevo, long after the audience has taken its seats for the evening performance. Into that setting, where the walls are already a finished stage design, two voices Serbian audiences know well now step.
The third day of the first Ekata Festival belongs to the theatre. The Saturday programme, June 6, is built around the play Prah, directed by Veljko Micunovic and starring Natasa Ninkovic and Zoran Cvijanovic. The piece deals with love, transience and what remains once everything else has worn away, through dialogue that can be witty and bitter-precise in the same breath. After two days given over to music, the festival opens its space to spoken theatre for the first time.
Why stage Prah on a concrete estate?
The choice of setting is not mere decor. The estate’s brutalist architecture, its bare concrete and clean lines, is rarely hospitable to sentiment, while Prah is a play concerned precisely with what time takes away. That tension between a hard space and a soft subject reads as a deliberate directorial decision rather than an accident of scheduling.
Micunovic has framed two actors who need to do very little to hold attention. Ninkovic brings precision and restraint, Cvijanovic an irony that is never cheap. In a space without a fourth wall, under an open sky, every pause carries, and every line lands with more weight than it would in a closed hall.
What makes Prah suited to such a stage is its intimacy. Two characters, one relationship, few props. The amphitheatre does not ask for spectacle, it asks for concentration, and a play of this kind gains there rather than loses.
Four evenings, four artistic languages
The Ekata Festival was not conceived as a string of unrelated events. The programme turns on the idea that a single space can host different artistic disciplines while remaining recognisable in character:
- An opening exhibition, Radomir Damnjanovic Damnjan and Gorgona: the continuity of conceptual practice
- A performance by the Belgrade Jazz Orchestra under conductor Aleksandar Bjelic, on June 4
- A piano duo of Vasil Hadzimanov and Bojan Zulfikarpasic in the amphitheatre, on June 5
- The theatre production Prah, on June 6
- A closing concert by Yasmin Levy, on June 7
The shift from jazz and a piano duet to spoken theatre is not a drop in tempo but a change of register. Where the earlier evenings asked for the ear, this one asks for attention to the word. That is a harder task for an open-air audience, yet potentially the most intimate moment of the whole festival.
Art historian Jerko Jesa Denegri described the opening as a significant event for the environment in which it takes place.
A first-rate cultural event for our environment.
If a festival’s first edition signals its ambitions, then Ekata sets the bar high from the outset, away from the major cities and the established festival routes. Will the concrete estate become a recognisable fixture on Serbia’s festival map, or remain a fine one-off episode?
