The Bitola National Theater entered the new season with the motto "The theater is yours again", and the first challenge faced by the team and the management of the theater is the celebration of the great 80th anniversary.

Bitola National Theater these days is celebrating 80 years since the first performance on its stage. The great jubilee is a challenge to maintain the tradition established by previous generations, but also an opportunity to show the current ensemble of the theater in the best light.

The concept and organization of the anniversary celebration is managed by Vasko Mavrovski, acting. director of the NU National Theater Bitola.

With what program will the great jubilee be marked?

- On November 14, the NU National Theater of Bitola celebrates 80 years since the first performance in the Macedonian language in free Bitola, the one-act play "Gjore Magarevski" based on a text by Vlado Maleski, which laid the foundations of this oldest theater in Macedonia. In honor of this great jubilee, colleagues from the Macedonian National Theater, Drama Theater Skopje and "Giant" Theater from Veles are hosting us with their performances.

In addition to the guest appearances, we are also preparing a new premiere "Gjore Magarevski - 80 years after", and the monograph "80 years NU National Theater Bitola" is in the final stage. We are also preparing an exhibition of posters and photographs by our retired sound master, photographer, graphic artist, the only Macedonian author who received an award for best music at the "Steriino pozorje" festival, Hristo Bojadziev, and at the same time we are working on improving the working conditions with small reconstructions of the rooms throughout the theater.

The preparation of a permanent display of all the awards and recognitions received by the National Theater from Bitola, which will be placed in the lobby in front of the great hall, is in the final stage.

The main celebration is announced for November 14, when the premiere of the play "Gjore Magarevski – 80 years later" should take place. What is it about?

- For me, as the head of this institution, it was a real challenge to go back in history and after 80 years to stage again the play with which this theater started its work. It is fascinating that the founders of this theater only ten days after the liberation decided to make a play and, as they say in their memoirs, it was not a question of a work of art with high artistic qualities, but with the raising of the curtain and the standing ovation of the audience. the era of the new free theater began, in which Macedonian language was spoken.

The themes of duplicity, betrayal, false patriotism, which the play deals with, unfortunately, are still relevant today, perhaps more than ever, and this was probably decisive in the choice of the text. The play is directed by the three employed directors at NTB, each with their own version and reading of this one-act play, and all three plays are connected by a similar story, the work of our playwright Biljana Krajchevska. The entire NTB ensemble and the two retired actors Sonja Mihajlova and Petar Mirchevski play in the play. I think the audience will have the opportunity to enjoy a modern spectacle intertwined with a lot of history and modern theatrical solutions.

Throughout history, the Bitola Theater with its acting and artistic team has left a strong mark on the theater life in Macedonia. How does the current generation in the theater continue the footsteps of their predecessors?

- NTB has always been a shining example of how a successful theater institution should function. With more than 300 personal and collective awards and recognitions, the past generations, especially in the 90s, reached the top and we are all tasked to continue that success story.

It is very ungrateful to make comparisons, but I personally think that this new generation has great potential to produce representative performances and I think that success and a bombastic return to the top will happen to us when the right people are in the right place at the right time, and it will probably depend mostly on the work of the management team and the artistic council. I believe in better times for the theater, in general, and I believe that the NTB team will deliver serious results in the future.

With what motto do you conceptualize the work of the Bitola Theater after assuming the management position?

- As a "theatre child", who grew up in the Bitola Theater alongside my grandfather Petar Stojkovski Babec from 1986, and as a culture manager for the last 15 years with my "Babec Theater" and the "Bitolino" festival, I have an insight into the development and problems with the theater faces. When I received the task of managing this institution, the first thing I faced was the statistics and the attendance figures, which in the 90s were 560.000, and in the last 10 years have decreased to 130.000 spectators.

These overwhelming figures somehow naturally determined the direction in which NTB will move in the future, which is a complete change of the repertoire policy and the return of the audience to the halls of the theater. My motto is "The theater is yours again", the theater again with plays for children and teenagers, a theater in which Macedonian directors and playwrights will create, a theater with plays from Macedonian folk drama, comedies, world classics, etc., i.e. a repertoire for everyone "from 7 up to 77 years old" (this phrase was written on NTB posters in the past).

It will be a difficult and painstaking process to bring back the audience that has already been betrayed, but I believe that we all have a duty to put our best effort into making NTB once again a place where people from Bitola will be happy to come, because without the audience we wouldn't be where we are today. what we are.

In Bitola, there is a refined and dedicated theater audience, which knows how to recognize the quality of acting performances. What is the mutual communication between the theater and the audience?

- In Bitola, it is very difficult to "sell" a theater that does not meet high artistic qualities, it is very difficult to create art that is understandable and manageable only for a small group of theater lovers. Ignoring the demands of the audience to produce a certain type of performances and forcing a repertoire that only contains some new and incomprehensible theatrical forms, which aggressively propagate one's political agendas in Bitola, led to a complete loss of communication with the audience.

The process of realizing the new vision of the theater for the future "The theater is yours again" will be based on the return of communication with the audience and the return of the people's theater, because we are, above all, a people's theater and not a theater that belongs to some kind of quasi-elite.

During this period, the Bitola Theater had several guest appearances, premieres, but other theaters also visited its stage. How important is cooperation with other theaters and festivals in the development of the theater company?

- Cooperation with theaters from Macedonia and the world is one of the most important links for the correct and rapid development of NTB. Fortunately for us, the doors are open everywhere and we have the opportunity to communicate directly with our colleagues who, like us, have dedicated their lives to the theater.

In the future, we want to turn these guest appearances into collaborations and realization of new joint projects with theaters and creative teams that will bring freshness to our ensemble. We are open for cooperation and for the future we are announcing several such projects, which will be based on the diffusion of creatives and which will be realized with Macedonian theater companies.

(The interview was published in "Cultural Press" number 255, in the printed edition of the newspaper "Sloboden Pechat" on 9-10.11.2024)