Timarov: JDP Actors' Protest Isn't About Student IDs
Ahead of JDP's 78th season opener, actors staged a protest outside the theatre saying their fight continues. A day later, Srdjan Timarov denied reports that student ID cards were banned.
A large group of actors gathered outside the entrance to the Yugoslav Drama Theatre (JDP) last night, just before the curtain rose on Richard II. They carried a banner with a line of verse about a man who rises with a wooden sword against armies of steel, a message actor Dragan Micanovic delivered to reporters on behalf of the ensemble: the fight for culture and art in this country doesn’t end just because a new season has begun.
Where exactly that line comes from is disputed. Danas and N1 attribute it to Ljubomir Simovic’s poem The Wooden Sword, whose text reads I will rise, trampled, broken, oppressed, against steel armies with a wooden sword. The portal Nova.rs traces the same line to the same author’s play The Traveling Theatre of Sopalovic and records it in a slightly different form, with the word crushed where the other outlets have broken. Whichever source has it right, the message the banner carried stays the same: ahead of its 78th season, JDP is presenting itself as a place of resistance, not as an institution quietly opening its program and moving on.
Micanovic addressed the crowd on behalf of the whole ensemble and said everyone is welcome at the theatre, but that the fight, as he put it, is still being fought. Nova.rs carries the same statement in a somewhat fuller version, adding that the message was aimed specifically at the audience arriving for the new season, while the core of it, a call to keep fighting for culture and art in this country, matches across every version.
The protest came just hours after the portal Masina reported that actors had allegedly been banned from showing their student ID cards at the end of performances, as had become customary. The gesture has been a fixture at JDP ever since a canopy collapsed at the Novi Sad railway station on November 1, 2024, and part of the ensemble has used it since then to remind audiences of that issue at the close of every show.
A day later, in an interview with Danas, actor Srdjan Timarov denied that claim outright.
It isn’t true that any bans exist, as some media reported about our performance yesterday outside the Yugoslav Drama Theatre.
According to him, student ID cards weren’t mentioned at all during the protest itself, nor was there any decision to stop showing them after performances. The point of gathering outside the theatre, Timarov said, was something different from what had since been attributed to it.
We came to greet the audience at the start of the season, to say that everyone is welcome, and that we’re aware our fight continues and that we haven’t forgotten what lies ahead of us.
What that sentence leaves unsaid, what exactly this fight is and what it stands against, is something Timarov spells out further into the conversation, and it’s there that his answer stops being just a denial and becomes the closest anyone from JDP has come lately to describing how the ensemble sees its own position.
We’re also pointing to our own problems, which we haven’t forgotten even though it was the break, and we aren’t influencing anyone’s choices. When I say problems, I mean problems in society and culture too, and the responsibility toward what awaits us in the coming month. The fact that performances are starting and the program is running doesn’t mean part of the ensemble isn’t aware that a lot more fighting for a better society and a normal life still lies ahead of us.
The statement doesn’t name any specific ban or the institution it might be directed at, but it places the banner and all its pathos in a wider frame, one in which JDP doesn’t separate its artistic program from what happens outside its walls. In that frame, the denial itself takes on a different meaning. It isn’t just a correction of one inaccurate report about student ID cards, but a sign that the institution, even after the summer break, still holds that artistic freedom and institutional criticism go hand in hand, even when that criticism, as here, is never addressed to anyone by name.
While the season opening is underway, rehearsals also began in September for the one woman show MaMa, based on Maga Magazinovic’s autobiography My Life, published by Clio. Unlike the banner and the denial that followed it, that news hasn’t stirred any controversy, just an announcement that the 78th season’s program, whatever its political frame, is moving forward.
