‘One day they will listen to me, a woman’
Before diving into summer, let me announce this new exciting collaboration as a dramaturg with Sanja Mitrović and Stand Up Tall Productions for their creation Demeter Calling. Co-produced with the Royal Flemish Theatre (KVS), it will premiere on the 14th of October 2021, with further dates in Brussels, a Belgian tour in October and November, and an international tour to follow.
Demeter Calling is a concert performance in which an all-female cast mobilises the high energy and sensuality of the singing body to draw attention to the gap between the lives of women as prescribed by others and the lives they demand for themselves.
Stories of women from different parts of the world are turned into songs that question the notion of motherhood as the sole focus of female identity. The performers from diverse backgrounds, including Mitrović herself, act as mediums attuning to and channeling voices of sisters dispersed across the gulfs of geography, ethnicity and culture. In the liminal space between a world which has already ended and another yet to begin, they are an unlikely girl band celebrating female strength, resilience, determination, and guts to speak – and sing – one’s own pain.
New original music by Belgrade-based composer Marija Balubdžić binds together a multitude of individual perspectives. Taking as inspiration music from various Balkan regions, she leaps off the signature elements of such traditional styles to forge them into slivers of glistening electronic avant-pop, broadcast from somewhere decidedly off the radar, otherworldly and resistant to categorisation.
Through the form of performative practice as communal and immediate as a music concert, Demeter Calling summons up the corporeal, the sensual and the affective, foregrounding nuances of the relationship between mother and child, and, in a wider sense, the perils of female survival.
For further information and advance tickets visit KVS website.
You can watch a preliminary teaser here, with further updates following from September.
