Blessed Unrest of New York and Teatri Oda of
Prishtina, Kosovo will stage the first ever US-Kosovar bilingual
theater collaboration to New York City with Doruntine, written by Matt
Opatrny and Lirak Çelaj, and directed by Florent Mehmeti and Jessica
Burr. Doruntine will run for three weeks at the Interart Theatre in
Manhattan from Thursday, October 9th through Sunday, the 26th.
Blessed Unrest will be the first American
theatre company to host a Kosovar theatre company in the United
States. In May 2006, Blessed Unrest traveled to Kosovo to perform
their original play Lying, into which they integrated a bilingual
Teatri Oda actor. The success of this endeavor led the companies to
plan for a more intense collaboration in New York City.
Doruntine will be co-directed by Blessed Unrest Artistic Director
Jessica Burr and Teatri Oda Artistic Director Florent Mehmeti, and will
feature both American and Kosovar actors. The text is in English and
Albanian, written by Matt Opatrny of Blessed Unrest and Lirak Çelaj of
Teatri Oda.
The arts have the power to break down cultural
barriers, and play a critical role in establishing a country’s
identity. By coming to New York and shedding light on Kosovar and
Albanian culture, history, and language, Teatri Oda becomes a proud
cultural ambassador of the new nation which declared independence from
Serbia last February.
This project has been made possible in part by
grants from Trust for Mutual Understanding, Lower Manhattan Cultural
Council/NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Theatre Communications
Group/International Theatre Institute, The Kosovar Ministry of Culture,
The US Embassy in Kosovo, with additional funding from New York State
Council on the Arts and the generosity of individual donors.
Teatri Oda is committed to the development of
the theatrical arts, building a strong cultural foundation for coming
generations, and powerfully influencing the building of a democratic
and open Kosovo. The founding of Teatri Oda, the only independent arts
organization in a region where all arts are traditionally government
funded, was unprecedented. They are an extremely motivated and bold
group of artists making strides towards defining the future of
independent arts in the Balkans.
Blessed Unrest is committed to producing
dynamic, disciplined, and exuberant new works for the stage by training
and collaborating as an ensemble of artists, building original pieces,
and reconstructing established texts. A non-profit, experimental
theatre company, Blessed Unrest has been generating original plays
since 1999 and has performed in New York, San Francisco, and Prishtina,
Kosovo. Last season’s production of Burn, Crave, Hold received nine
Innovative Theatre Award nominations (winners to be announced September
22).
“Interacting with Kosovar artists had a profound
effect on Burr and the company members. Still recovering from its
brutal war with Serbia, Kosova is in a fragile transitional stage, a
time when theatre and art play a critical role in defining the cultural
community. ‘There was a kind of purity about it that changed the way we
work,’ she says. ‘It has to do with making something from nothing. In
this country we get cranky, we want more; we’re always looking to
increase the budget. It’s magical what can happen when you let that
go,’” comments Charlotte Sommers of the Drama Biz Magazine.
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