About the play
“From fragments of history, local legends, and collective memory, Ljubomir Đurković does not reconstruct the past, but rather creates a space between what once was and what might have been. Budva in Chiara Zorzi is not a historical fact, but a stage of imagined memories – a city on the edge of the sea and of storytelling, at the crossroads of cultures, religions, and political influences, a city in which identity is not inherited but must be constantly re-created.
Written for the Between the Churches Stage, this work evokes possible beginnings of theatrical life in Budva, but far more than that, it explores a city’s need to see itself, recognize itself, and tell its own story. At the intersection of East and West, between false Venetian splendor and charming local stubbornness, between freedom and control, a space emerges in which history turns into myth, and myth into reality.
Into this space returns Chiara Zorzi.
She comes from the world of Venice, carrying with her the scent of distant harbors, the languages of other shores, and the belief that art can open a window where there are only walls. But her arrival is not merely the return of a woman to her native city. She arrives as unrest, as a question, as an excess of light in a space accustomed to half-darkness.
Through her character, theater enters the city.
And the city defends itself.
Because any community that has long lived by its own rules will first perceive art as a threat – not because it offers answers, but because it raises questions. Thus, in Đurković’s world, the conflict is not only between people, but between freedom and fear, between the desire for change and the desire for things to remain the same.
In our performance, Budva becomes a city of masks.
A city in which everyone plays a pre-assigned role. The authorities preserve order. Merchants preserve profit.
The people preserve habits. Artists preserve the illusion that change is possible.
Beneath it all lies a mask.
Not as decoration, but as a means of survival.
The performance unfolds like a carnival that slowly reveals its other face. At first filled with Mediterranean playfulness, music, dance, and seduction, the world of masquerade gradually turns into a space of threat and unease. Masks no longer conceal desire, but fear. They no longer conceal faces, but responsibility.
It is then that betrayal becomes the central theme of the story.
Not as an individual act, but as a condition of the community. The city betrays art the moment it recognizes it as dangerous. Love gives way to fear. Friendships break under the weight of interest. And theater remains suspended between the hope that it can change the world and the awareness that it can, at best, illuminate it for only a moment.
Thus, Chiara Zorzi is far more than a story about one woman and one time. It is a drama about a city searching for its own face, a city dreaming of independence, but also about a society hiding behind masks, and about art that persistently seeks a space of freedom.
And the question that lingers above the stage belongs equally to them and to us:
What remains of a human being when they remove the final mask – or when they realize it has already become their face?”

Željka Udovičić Pleština