BDP Premieres Woman Ties Her Hair on August 29

A woman is born, and a woman dies. Iran or the Balkans, the cycle repeats, says director Masa Pavlovic about the play she staged herself, and with that single sentence she sketches out the entire logic of the piece before anyone has even seen it on BDP’s Summer Stage. This isn’t a promotional pitch in the usual season-announcement sense. It’s a claim that a woman’s fate is geographically neutral, and that whatever happens in Tehran comes back around in Belgrade, just under a different name.

What and When

The premiere of Woman Ties Her Hair is set for Saturday, August 29, at 8:30 p.m., on the Summer Stage of the Belgrade Drama Theater (BDP), Millennium Team Arena. A preview runs the day before, on August 28, and the first repeat performance follows just one day after the premiere, on August 30. The text is by Marija Rakocevic, the direction by Masa Pavlovic, and the play was created within BDP’s New Voices project, which the theater runs as a platform for young authorial voices. The cast includes Adriana Salahovic, Jana Nenadovic, Doroteja Vukovic, Sara Simovic, Andjela Alavirevic, Natalija Stepanovic, Aleksa Jovcic and Ivan Petrusinski.

The Starting Point Is Tehran, 2022

The title sounds like a metaphor, and it is one, but it starts from an actual event. The play draws on the killings of Mahsa Amini and Hadis Najafi in Iran in 2022, and on the Women, Life, Freedom movement that, after their deaths, brought women into the streets who, literally, tied back their hair as a gesture of defiance. Rakocevic’s text takes that image as its starting figure, and Pavlovic structures it into 13 scenes that trace the stages of a woman’s life in a patriarchal society, from birth to what the director calls dying, not necessarily in the literal sense.

What the text attempts is to avoid the easiest trap of this kind of subject: journalistic testimony about a distant injustice that leaves the audience with nothing but sympathy. Instead, according to the play’s own announcement, the thirteen scenes interrogate the roles and spaces that follow a woman through life, and bring back the question of whose women they are, as a question that doesn’t belong to Iran alone. Whether that shift from a specific historical trigger into a broader, universal statement actually works on stage is something only the performance itself will show, but the intention alone, not to settle for importing someone else’s tragedy but to place it alongside the domestic experience of patriarchy, is what sets this work apart from a plain chronicle.

Closing a Summer Full of Touring

With the premiere of Woman Ties Her Hair, the Belgrade Drama Theater rounds off its summer program, capping a fairly busy August. Over the month, the ensemble toured to the Grad Teatar festival in Budva, to the Barski Ljetopis festival in Bar, to Brijuni as part of the Ulysses program, and to the Purgatorije festival in Tivat, while the last stop before this premiere is set for August 30, when BDP performs the play The Lie at BELEF in the Sava Center. That same rhythm carries over to the Summer Stage at home, where audiences could also follow the other titles produced under the New Voices project during August, a project dedicated precisely to young artists and contemporary authorial voices. Woman Ties Her Hair is, in that sense, the closing point of the sentence, the last premiere before the season shuts down, and at the same time its most serious one.

Tickets for the play are sold through the usual outlets, and the schedule, with a preview on August 28 and a first repeat performance just one day after the premiere, gives the impression that the theater is counting on audiences wanting to see the play more than once in the same week, not just a single time.