Igor Dobričić

“The Time That Remains” is the vehicle of a redemption. Inside an interval between the now of my realization of it and the now of the final annihilation actually taking place, everything that ever happened is finally brought into the presence, is made available, offered to be actualized and reconciled. My body who’s demise is suddenly made immanent and known, is for a short while, transformed into the vessel of time. The memory of the ages past is now made to be my own memory and when I speak I am giving a voice to it. I read myself as a book and what is written in this book is not only what I remember of my own existence but also full recollection of what has ever existed. And yet the instant I open the book in order to read from it, it is only that much that I ll be able to utter before the end arrives and close the book again, forever. And that’s the ultimate paradox of it all: “The Time That Remains” is what it is exactly because it is precisely limited by the moment of its own expiration. And yet, although resolutely framed by the ticking clock that with every passing second is squeezing the world toward its own predestined disappearance, “The Time That Remains” contains everything that ever has happened. This last instant contains everlasting eternity and anything that I manage to glean from it in a limited time left before the end - will be the full expression of that eternity. For example: quite unexpectedly, at the age of 17 i was admitted to the study of dramaturgy at the Belgrade Academy of Dramatic Arts. At the very beginning of my study a small blue and red book was placed on the pale surface of a desk in front of me: Aristotle’s Poetics. From then on, in the context of the school, this book will define criteria for any academically valid conversation about theatre. Yet the only passage of which i have persistent recollection of is this: “A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it.” “The Time That Remains” is a whole of my performance. A beginning of it is marked by the moment in which I realized that world will end in a 25 minutes. Everything that ever happened before the beginning, as marked by a moment of a realization about an end, will be enclosed in a middle between a beginning and an end. The book was opened and it is going be closed, now. Everything is already spoken while almost nothing is said. 

Igor Dobričić , studied dramaturgy at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, (former) Yugoslavia and attended Master of Theatre at DasArts in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He lives his life between Berlin and Amsterdam and is working internationally as a dramaturg and artistic advisor, collaborating with a number of choreographers/makers (Nicole Beutler, Keren Levi, Christina Ciupke, Alma Sodeberg, Marie Topp, Jenny Bayer, Meg Stuart, Arkadi Zaides a/o). In a role of a professor and mentor he has a long term engagement with the School for New Dance (SNDO) in Amsterdam and K3 Choreographic Center in Hamburg. From 2010 onwards he is also developing his own performative research project under the title TableTalks. During the last 7 years TableTalks is hosted and presented in a number of different cultural contexts : from Amsterdam to Stockholm, Cairo, Sao Paulo and Vienna. His long standing professional interests lie in the practice based exploration of parameters of a live event that exist in-between different fixed contexts (theatre and visual arts, professional and non professional status, individual and group work, aesthetics and ethics). , studied dramaturgy at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, (former) Yugoslavia and attended Master of Theatre at DasArts in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He lives his life between Berlin and Amsterdam and is working internationally as a dramaturg and artistic advisor, collaborating with a number of choreographers/makers (Nicole Beutler, Keren Levi, Christina Ciupke, Alma Sodeberg, Marie Topp, Jenny Bayer, Meg Stuart, Arkadi Zaides a/o). In a role of a professor and mentor he has a long term engagement with the School for New Dance (SNDO) in Amsterdam and K3 Choreographic Center in Hamburg. From 2010 onwards he is also developing his own performative research project under the title TableTalks. During the last 7 years TableTalks is hosted and presented in a number of different cultural contexts : from Amsterdam to Stockholm, Cairo, Sao Paulo and Vienna. His long standing professional interests lie in the practice based exploration of parameters of a live event that exist in-between different fixed contexts (theatre and visual arts, professional and non professional status, individual and group work, aesthetics and ethics).