Archived: Cowboys

11. SUMMER NIGHTS OF THE EXIT COWBOY THEATER

Eight people (the location is unspecified) found themselves together with one goal: to make a cowboy show.

We follow these eight characters, eight characters from the beginning, ie from the audition to the final product – the premiere. All of these actors (mostly losers) develop their life stories while working on the play, inevitably influencing each other; everyone slowly grasps the play and understands it as a struggle with themselves and at the same time looks at it as an opportunity of a lifetime. Not in an existential sense, but as your life metaphor: to win life, to be above everyday survival, ie perhaps for the first time in your life to come to an end as a winner. And victory is the show itself.

The play has the manners of the most classic musical (and it was done on purpose), and we hope that it follows (maybe even upgrades) the previous aesthetic aesthetics.

Saša Anočić, director

He is a rider with an icy look that reflects loneliness and praises the horizon, and his hat smells of sweat, blood and some whiskey. The hardened heart of this, self-evident, murderer for no reason can be warmed only by an enchanting voice full of honey and the promises of a sailing bar singer.

This is the beginning of one of thousands of similar western stories of our childhood. The story of losers in failed attempts that they are no more. A director arrives in an unnamed town, similar to Ogulin, or Bednja or Ladimirevci, who decides to return to his childhood dream of cowboys and set up a musical with local naturals. This troupe is made up of people who, like buoys, float in time and space, who, on the way from birth to adulthood, have lost every possible chance or simply overslept. It is the position from which the saga of them and their rebound into dreams begins, along with the western musical in full splendor, like an ode to a genre that celebrates the heroism of antiheroes, gunpowder, tears, harmonica and kisses in the moonlight. The possibility of roughness and the impossibility of tenderness, is the frame of the melodrama. The correctness of politically incorrect humor, avalanches of seemingly incidental bizarre bravura, are a handful in the belly of the hypocrisy of correct social etiquette, here and now.

This is the hand we know from other Exit performances, as well as the above-average acting readiness, imaginative movement and surgical precision of details in the performance which out of nothing, from the darkness of an empty stage, everything, and much more, emerges. All this, the COWBOYS inherited from EXIT, but these revolvers and poets rode a little further anyway! What we have been looking forward to has happened, because after DECADENCE, EJECTOR, SHAKEspeare on EXit, HOW DO YOU THINK I AM NOT ?! and other performances that closed the successful circle of Exit's aesthetics, the question arose – where next?

A musical, a genre that offers social euthanasia for the price of a ticket, with the sweetness of notes and a cloud of powder lulls tired citizens from work, elem, so it is exactly the OPPOSITE to all the principles of the exit conception of theater !? Riding on the sweet stereotypes of the musical genre, but armed with exit brutal directness – the COWBOYS arrive, proving once again that borders exist in order to break them. Why all this? Sit in the hall of the EXIT Theater and just watch the sun set to the West. And the harmonica calls for solitude. And you will find out the answer to that question.

Pavlica Bajsić

Performance duration: 3 hs pause

Location: EXIT Theater, Ilica 208