Laktasi opens 21st amateur theatre festival

There is a moment before every amateur premiere that professional theatre never quite reaches: that blend of stage fright and private stakes, when people who spend their days as teachers, accountants or pensioners step under the lights because they chose to, not because it is their job. Laktasi multiplies that moment six times over this week, hosting from June 22 to 28 the 21st edition of its amateur theatre festival, one of the region’s most stubborn events devoted to the kind of stagecraft people pursue out of pure need.

The festival opens with the home company, the Daske amateur theatre of Laktasi, premiering Up-Down. The text is written by Nenad Tadic and the production directed by Ognjen Todorovic, and it is a tragicomedy about the loneliness of the modern individual, a theme that on an amateur stage can ring truer than in far more expensive productions, simply because it is performed by people who know that loneliness firsthand rather than from an actors’ workshop.

Why does amateur theatre still matter?

It is easy to read amateurism as a minor league, a step toward something more serious. But circuits like the Laktasi festival exist precisely to show the opposite: that the amateur stage is an independent cultural organism, with its own canon, its own audience and its own poetics. In towns and small places where professional theatre never arrived, the amateur troupe is often the only living theatrical institution, the place where a local community looks at itself in a mirror it holds up on its own.

The six plays in the competition come from three settings, Republika Srpska, Serbia and Slovenia, which gives this year’s edition a genuine regional arc. Companies from Bijeljina, Banjaluka, Celje, Novi Sad and Prnjavor will perform, alongside the hosts from Laktasi. That spread is no accident: in the post-Yugoslav context, amateur festivals have remained one of the few cultural circuits that still cross borders naturally, without grand politics and without large budgets, running on enthusiasm and friendships that have lasted for decades.

What does a week in Laktasi bring?

Seven days of programme means a dense rhythm: one play each evening, with conversations and meetings in between, plus the part of such festivals that happens off stage, in the foyer and after the show, where the festival community is actually formed. A selection of six titles is narrow enough for the jury and the audience to follow each play closely, yet varied enough to cover different directorial poetics, from a piece about contemporary loneliness to whatever the visiting troupes bring from their own settings.

For Laktasi, a small place that this festival has turned into a recognisable point on the regional theatre map, the 21st edition is also a confirmation of continuity. Events that endure for two decades do not live off a single good year, but off the audience’s habit of returning and the troupes’ habit of coming back. And the question such a festival raises stays open for spectators too: when did you last watch a play performed by your neighbours rather than professionals, and did you give it the same chance?