“Flower Sajza” at The National Experimental Theater of Tirana- Kosovo Albania Theatre Showcase

In Flower Sajza, directed by Endri Çela at the National Experimental Theater of Tirana, two women stand on the stage facing the main body of the audience. They are behind a fence of barbed wire, stuck to which are old letters and paper airplanes. We are in a prison camp.

Audience members also sit onstage on either side of the women, the actors Rajmonda Bulku and Adriana Tolka. Between the onstage audience and in front of Rajmonda and Tolka, a mountain of earth and some distressed branches. At the back, a projector screen. The lights go down. And for a moment, nothing stirs. Everything seems to be waiting.

This is an apt metaphor for a documentary theatre piece about a country whose government makes little effort to face up to one of the most distressing periods during its dictatorship under Enver Hoxha, when thousands of Albanian citizens were thrown into camps such as Tepelena for speaking out against the country’s regime or for being associated with those that did. More than 6,000 Albanians lost their live due to the torture and inhumane conditions in the camps, including children and infants. Though the communist regime that facilitated the camps ended in 1991, families are still searching for answers and the whereabouts of the remains of their loved ones. It also continues to be the case that Albanians still don’t know that Tepelena, the most notorious of camps, reserved for families, women, and children, even existed.

Therefore, it is left to plays such as these to remind and sometimes inform Albanians of this terrible period and what happened to the thousands of citizens whose lives were so cruelly cut short.

In “Staging  the ‘document’ at the Avignon Festival” Mona Mehri writes that “Documentary theater goes beyond the documentation: it’s about questioning the meaning and significance of truth and information.”  Çela’s production examines the significance of truth and information in multifaceted ways.

Bulku and Tolka give voice to the victims of the camps Klora Mirakaj and Asije Habili. They look neither left nor right and stare down the microphones. As actors, they are careful not to imbue their material with characterization. Other testimonies and monologues are derived from the work Voices of Memory, published by the Institute of Studies of Crimes and Consequences of Communism in Albania and from the work and testimony of Kastriot Dervishi and Fatbardha Saraçi. Behind the actors, archive footage from the camps is projected. At the end of this documentary, a survivor from the camps, Simon Mirakaj, steps onto the stage and speaks to the audience directly.

The final facet that lifts the show from being more than a historical document to something that has direct relevance to modern Albanian life is the use of Albanian writer Agron Tufa’s short story Lule Sajza, which gives the production its title. Sajza is a young girl in one of the camps and she asks her mother what will happen to her when she dies. To help her child feel better, the mother answers that a flower will bloom bearing her name. But when Sajza dies she is not given a proper burial or returned to her family, as often happened in the camps, and is exhumed more than once. Thus Sajza’s spirit wanders the earth. Onstage, Sajza is represented by the adult actress Valentina Myteveli and she keeps rising from the mountain of earth in movements that strongly echo the young woman in Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring – although it is a reversal almost, of that conceit – Sajza is not dancing to die, she is dancing to live again so that she can be properly buried.

This fictional element of this documentary production works on several levels – it helps the show become a living monument or museum of this terrible and important part of Albania’s past. It also explores how such events, suffered by a society, will impact it. Çela tells me that bodies were commonly exhumed twice and had three burials in all. So onstage, he decided that Sajza should exhume a third time as “it would be a crime if it were not done, if our memories and past are forever buried.” A clear link is made between the unacknowledged trauma of the past and the impact that this can have on a country’s collective psyche and sense of identity. And the belief that this national tragedy and society’s reluctance to face up to it affects everyone is made clear by Bego Nanaj’s set design – where possible, audiences of no more than 80 all sit on the stage together with the actors – enclosed by the wire.

This is a tragedy that has and still affects all Albanian citizens, and the more it is buried and hidden away, the more harm it will continue to inflict on generations to come. And the more need there will be for shows like this.

Flower Sajza was at The National Experimental Theater of Tirana during the Kosovo Albania Theatre Showcase.