I AM 1984 , the last production of the combined operations (coproduced by the ZKM theatre, Zagreb), written and directed by Giuseppe Chico and Barbara Matijevic, is a piece that combines, with a lot of humour, a choreography of text and drawing.
By juxtaposing and multiplying different layers of the historic narrative, ranging from the personal history (that of Barbara Matijevic, the performer of the piece, who appears in the narrative as B. M.), the national history (in 1984, it is the communist history of Yugoslavia), and up to the world history, with the focus on the history of the mass media, the computers and the telecommunication, the piece is structured as a lecture accompanied by drawings and figures on a whiteboard.
In such a reduced space of the stage, the attention of the audience is entirely focused on the vocal choreography, which is occasionally transformed into drawings resembling financial and stock market figures.
In 1984, B. M. is six years old, she wants to become a ballerina and to live inside the TV set; 24 years later we see her on the stage of the ZKM theatre: she is remembering the Olympic Games, the day she passed the oath to become Tito’s pioneer, the first video games, the Pac Man… Relating the events through unstable causal relations, B. M. sets up an auto referential frame in which the details of the global and personal history correspond to her memory, whose structures flow between fiction and faction.
By choosing this performative strategy, the authors question the veracity and the facticity of memory, showing at the same time the mechanisms through which ideology and rhetoric become constitutive in the formation not only of the collective memory, but also of the personal one.
The gaps that are created through the possibility to coherently dissociate what is true from what is imagined or reconstructed a posteriori, create open interpretative fields that everyone can fill in with their own memory.
The over-production of events and historical facts brings focus on redundancy as one of the basic principles of the capitalist rhetoric that seduces through an endless circulation of images and objects.
The double performative set up of text and drawing results with a complex theatrical creation in which B. M., following the Brechtian paradigm of the distanced and engaged performer who never entirely identifies with her role, articulates a series of questions of vital importance for the survival of individuals in a time when his or her’s individuality is repressed by increasingly aggressive means, reducing them to consumers of a certain brand.
Even though B.M is often very comical, she produces at the same time a tragic effect of a totalitarian performance. To today’s people, imprisoned in numerous systems and structures, lost in the multitude of important and insignificant information, the authors seem to offer two possibilities to escape the panoptical embrace of the Big Brother and his branded artificial limbs: the creative force of humour and imagination.

Andrej Mircev