GAVELLA AND VIOLIĆ

Božidar Violić is Branko Gavella’s student and a member of the Zagreb ‘cartel’ of directors which includes him, Georgij Paro, Dino Radojević and Kosta Spaić. I have used Violić’s books Faces and Shadows and Apology as the basis for the understanding of the relation between Violić and Gavella. These books offer carefully chosen intimate pieces of writing which depict »similar fates« from Violić’s private and public vault. The starting point of Violić’s work as a director is Gavella’s insistence on the role and importance of stage speech, i.e. »the tone method« and »the spoken melody«. Violić writes that according to Gavella, the analyses of speech create relations between individuals and that only defined relations can determine the actions as well as the spatial framework of those individuals. Once accomplished, the purpose of the whole performance is to make the word sound as clear as possible in all its dramatic and poetic glory. Violić has staged Gavella’s »idea of words« by combining literature and spoken words