TriGroša / Threepenny

Threepenny is a group founded by young theatre professionals in Belgrade. It has been grounded with a mission of developing the alternative performing arts scene in Serbia through art practice. We are gathered around the ideas of artistic research and experiment, but not the ones that would lead to hermetically closing the world of arts for the “regular” audience. We wish to reach people who do no

t visit theatre often, to see what excites fresh, “innocent” audience. Art has been turned into a product valued by its price and consumed by limited elitist audience ready to pay for it. Theatre should be intimate, but not elitist. We believe that we, the young artists, should fight against the boredom and the abstruseness that seem to have become synonyms for theatre in the eyes of the modern aged audiences. We speak to our own generation, and bring theater to people who usually don’t like it. We focus on developing the imagination and freedom of expression both of the artist and the audience itself. We hope for reaching a sense of community, a unique sensational and metaphysical exchange between all present in theatrical act, for impression of shared experience – opposite to institutional form of theatre performance. Besides the spectators, we are interested in questioning the common ideas about theatrical space. Any space should be turned into a place of intimacy for uninterrupted communication flow. As a group without performing space, we need to be ready to adapt to any circumstances and adjust the current given space to our ideas. That will give a special dimension of unexpected and surprising to every performing case. In that sense, we would like to experiment with dialectical unity of matter and form, their ability to change, transform and produce new images and meanings. There is no artistic means that we prefer – we are not just turned towards new technologies, or towards digging in theatre history. That is all a question of style, and every participating person should have a possibility to create/express their own. We are rather gathered around the idea of professional art outside of the existing institutions. Although we do believe that a theater process needs an organic leader, the one who is going to pump in the energy and to create the working circumstances, our main stand is that a theatrical process should not be organized strictly hierarchical, but rather constructed organically. We advocate a democratization of art, in which nobody is going to be the holder of the greater concept, and the rest executioners/consumers of his/hers ideas.