The project author: POD Theatre

Cast:
Maid – Branka Bajić
First Miss – Tatjana Stefanović
Second Miss – Nataša Nikolić
Mister – Dragan Simeunović

Directed and dramatised by: Tatjana Pajović and Jelena Vuksanović

The duration of the play is 75 minutes.

In the play ‘Audition for Paradise’ three people of different ‘destinies’ meet, finally, in only one they share: in death. In a strange space, on a ‘crossing’ between the two worlds, desires, dreams, ideals, hopes, values, conflicts… do they still stir us? 
Using the ‘marvellous in things’, inspired by Márquez, Dostoyevsky and Sartre, using the past in present, temporal leaps of the plot forward and backwards, the authors attempt to merge different dimensions of reality - the one we live in and the one we only maybe assume - to by language and movement simply debunk, but also wittily and poetically mystify the reality. Maintaining a constant question: what is Reality actually? 

THEATRE OF REFLECTION AND NEGATION
The play ‘Audition for Paradise’ is a successful attempt to, in our age of an expansion and even domination of the so called media culture and omnipresence of the games of its surfaces, return to contemporary theatre its meaning in the metaphysical sense of the word, enabling the stage to become, with each performance, a medium for acting, picture, voice, light and movement as well as thought itself, and its typical civilisation collapses and unpredictable, yet indicated currents of flow. Thus a ‘performance of thought’ on stage becomes exciting not only due to the literary stimuli offered by the carefully selected and dramaturgically skilfully linked texts by Márquez, Dostoyevsky and Sartre, but it is given a dimension of a kind of scenic inquisitiveness, which as its reflexive-sensitive counterpart, and simultaneously part of the play, assumes a presence of a reflective and emotionally engaged spectator.    
Ultimate, universal topics of death, love, meaning, etc. based on the outcomes of ‘classicism’ – magic realism and fantastic fiction, dark, delirious psychology and philosophy of existentialism, here are intertwined with the lives of individuals who, like some kind of medieval allegorical figures, adequately stage them – not without a reflection in the movements of sprit, and ludic directing-choreographic solutions, as well as a certain elusive charm, which are generally not inherent in these ‘heavy’ and ‘sombre’ topics themselves. So, how to transform the thought and perplexity about the key phenomena of life and death, the ‘statics’ and ‘weight’ of confronting oneself and one’s own past acts, in the dangerous interspace which sets a boundary between dream and death, love and fear, guilt and memory, darkness and future, into a bearable stage play and not shatter the illusion, either by straying into claustrophobia, despair or anxiety, or cliche passages which use easy, humorous ‘solutions’ of everyday problems.           
‘Audition for Paradise’ suggests an authentic stage power of each of the raised questions; it is already a negation in itself, a subversion and heresy of theatre nowadays, for it favours thinking over obsessed accumulation of images and stage frivolity, and returns theatre to its original substance – mystery of a dialogue with oneself and the other in oneself, as well as projecting oneself in the other, resulting in an endless murmur of questions on ultimate matters.
Divna Vuksanović

The ‘Project Objective Drama’ Theatre was founded in January 2000 by Tatjana Pajović, an actress, after more than 15 year of her professional engagement in contemporary theatre. It is a direct result of the actress’s long-term cooperation with the ‘Mirrors and Memories’ Theatre from Milan (Italy) and her participation in their exploration process.