YARD SALE: NEW FOOTFALLS... BY KACA CELAN 

chashama (2009) & DUMBO ARTS FESTIVAL (2011)

conception, direction & installation by Kaća Čelan  /  performance, sound, video edit & translation by Tajna Tanović

“Yard Sale: New Footfalls…” is a live multimedia art installation. Based on the play "New Footfalls" by Čelan it symbolizes the absurdity of "the repetition of fates" by means of two confronting monologues by the Mother and Daughter presented in solemn moments of the ritual drama. These two have been thrust into the historic-cultural background leaving the leading roles to the chronically absent "Father" and the suffering "Son". With this performance the relationship between mother and daughter is opened up like Pandora's box revealing tireless ghosts which prove that the damned female biology still contains enough metaphysics within.

"New Footfalls," inspired by Samuel Beckett's "Footfalls" and translated from the original German by Tajna Tanović, presents an exiled Mother and Daughter who take over the identity of not just Beckett's heroines but also of his complicated postmodern artistic work, the open testament containing the theological, existential, political and psychoanalytical keys to understanding. The absurd situation of the "ghosts" in Beckett's play becomes the reality of the exile… the artistic past taken over is the means to avoid the presence.

THE LAST STORY BY KACA CELAN

HERE Arts Center (2011)

Theater TAS presents the American premiere of The Last Story, written and directed by celebrated playwright Kaća Čelan. In this award-winning drama about the “last” Adam and Eve, Čelan illustrates the never-ending and unavailing quest for paradisiacal harmony between a man and a woman.

In a powerful verbal war between The Woman (Tajna Tanović) and The Man (Scott Wallace)—a couple on the verge of a break-up—phrases filled with heavy emotion explode while a striking parable of the battle of the sexes develops. Both, fighting like a lion and lioness, are caught in a cage called marriage. The Last Story is a postmodern European version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”. 

“The Last Story is the first play I’ve written while in exile in Germany,” says Čelan. “While others were writing about the war in former Yugoslavia, I was writing about the war of the sexes. Having lost my home, family and friends, I was only left to the company of literary ancestors. Their traces are very apparent in the play: Albee’s Martha turns into Euripides’ Medea, the Man’s gigantic Ionescoesque monologue is actually a Hamlet “Mousetrap”, Beckett’s distanced longing for friendship as the highest form of love is omnipresent. The story about the archetypal misunderstanding between Adam and Eve is realistic—the way it is presented maintains a deep loyalty towards the European drama tradition with Edward Albee upfront.”