Learning play “New People” by Chto Delat (What is to be done?) premiered at Center for Cultural Decontamination, in Belgrade on 18th December 2016.

Performance was realized by Chto delat collective: Olga Egorova, Dmitry Vilensky, Nina Gaceva, Oksana Timofeeva  with performers/participants:  Aneta Stojnić, Kristina Drašković Bochkov, Vladimir Bjeličić , Isidora Ficić, Arion Aslani , Monika Husar  Darija Davidović, Senka Domanović,  Milan Jovanović, Olivera Milojević , Biljana Kosmogina, Lidija Antonović, Ivana Drenjanin,  Olja Nikolić Kia, Ana Stojanović and Iva Kontić

The play is constructed under the protocol of learning play and is a result of one week seminars and rehearsals with local participants and reflects their own vision of general issue of political crisis of todays and searching some ways out from the dictate of old political and aesthetic structures.

The topic of new play is the pivotal for the discussion of any possibility of the political and social change. Who are the people/we/community who will be capable of the transformation of the society? Which direction will it take place? This question was at the base of the whole revolutionary movement of XIX century – In 1863 Chernyshevsky wrote the novel “What is to be Done: Stories about New People”. Now “work on the self” became an essential task in constructing of the new turbo-consumerist subjectivity. How can we counter this development with viable model of singularities which forecast the emancipation project?

In the socialist realist “master plot,” the New Man journeys from elemental spontaneity to revolutionary consciousness under the mentorship of the party. Though fraught with contradictions, this aesthetic paradigm serves as an allegory for subjectivization. But how can we reconsider this set of ideas into completely new situation? Who are the new people/we/community?