I Hold On To The Beautiful Side Of Theatre

Interview with theatre director Tamara Stojanoska, Skopje/Prilep, R.N. Macedonia. Interviewer Ivanka Apostolova Baskar

Tamara Stojanoska (theatre director) was born year 1997, in Prilep, North Macedonia. In 2018, she began a second degree in Theatre Directing at the University “Europa Prima,” Skopje, class of Prof. Dejan Projkovski. As a professional director, she has staged seven plays and one concert. Her works include Gretchen (2022), Blasted (2022), Candy (2022), the monodrama The Penguin (2023), the children’s concert The Zoo Called Earth (2023), Good People (2023), Hinkemann by Ernst Toller, co-production with Young Open Theatre and Golden Yelets Theatre, (2024), and The Clean House (2025) at the National Theatre “Vojdan Chernodrinski” in Prilep. Her productions have received six international theatre festival awards, including national award Risto Shishkov (2024), Nišville (2024), MOT (2023), Art Trema Fest (Serbia), Ruma, and International duodrama festival Branko Gjorgcev in Negotino. In 2025, she was a finalist and won both the main award and the audience award at the “Slavi Shkarov” Young Director Competition in Ruse, Bulgaria.

Ivanka Apostolova Baskar: You live and work in Macedonia as a young woman director. What advantages and disadvantages, challenges and obstacles  do you face in the domestic theatrical system?

Tamara Stojanoska: Being a young director in Macedonia means constantly moving between a small spark of opportunity and struggle. Fortunately, even as a student, I had the chance to be part of the independent Theatre “Golden Yelets” in Skopje, first as just an eyewitness, then as an assistant director, and later as the creator of my own projects. That experience gave me the space to grow and to work actively. The independent scene offers visibility and experimentation, but only if you fully invest yourself and see theatre not as a financial opportunity, but as a genuine need to create. The challenges are many: limited resources, closed institutions, nepotism, political intrigues, cliques, and insufficient technical support. All of these demands twice as much perseverance. Like many artists in this country, I often face closed doors, but I hold on to the beautiful side of theatre. The inner drive to create and the belief that stories must be told help me overcome the obstacles.

IAB: What are the similarities and differences in directing and working, creating for and in an independent theater like Golden Yelets Theatre/Zlaten Elec, compared to the National Institutional Theater in Prilep?

TS: The biggest difference is that in Theatre “Golden Yelets” and the independent scene, I have complete freedom. There are no administrative barriers, and the space to create is always open for anyone who has the drive. That freedom, especially in choosing texts and themes, gives an incomparable creative energy. In contrast, in a national theatre it is often harder to initiate or negotiate a project, as decisions depend on many other factors. But what is interesting about institutional theatres is the chance to collaborate with actors who have spent their whole lives inside that system, carrying a different experience. Independent projects, on the other hand, often bring together freelancers, younger actors, or artists still searching for their place. Each context brings a different energy, and for me the challenge and the joy is to adapt my process to it. The main similarity is in how I approach the work itself. What matters most to me, whether in an independent or institutional setting is to remain open and to preserve my artistic spirit. I feel that the essence of directing is building trust and a shared sense of purpose with the actors. No matter the circumstances or the level of financial support, the most important part is the work we do together, and the way an idea that first lives only in my head slowly becomes a living story we share with an audience.

At the “Slavi Shkarov” Young Director Competition in Ruse, Bulgaria. Photo Credit Yavor Michev.

IAB: What were the motives for directing specific dramatic texts such as The Clean House, Hinkemann, Candy, Good People, Blasted, The Penguin? And what are the results and your experiences, observations, conclusions after these stagings?

TS: In order to create, I need to establish a deep connection with the themes I am working on. The impulse to stage a particular dramatic text always comes from my personal life, from questions that trouble, challenge, or provoke me, but also from broader social issues that I feel must be addressed. I believe theatre has the power to open dialogue, to raise its voice, and to offer a vision of a better tomorrow. In all my productions, I am drawn to socially engaged topics and those connected to the human soul, mental health, the struggle of the individual against the system, human fragility, and resilience. While working on these texts, I filter my own emotions and experiences, but I also constantly discover new perspectives about the world we live in. Hinkemann was especially important for me. With that project, I felt I could say everything I would want to tell the politicians of the world, and to those who discriminate or choose to stay blind while suffering and war surrounds us. This work that we do, for me is both a process of exploration and a process of healing. I always hope that through art I can help at least one person in the audience, just as art helps me. From these stagings, I have concluded that there is a genuine hunger for honesty among our audiences, and a need for plays that do not underestimate their intelligence. I disagree with the assumption that local audiences are interested only in “light” or superficial content. On the contrary, when they are offered truthful work, they recognize it and respond deeply. This gives me hope for a theatre that is not only entertaining, but also reflective and somehow transformative.

IAB: With the play Candy, you have won a whole bunch of festival awards and official program selections such as (the Bish Award for emerging theatre makers/Festival MOT in Skopje, the Risto Shishkov Festival for Chamber Theatre in Strumica, Branko Gjorcev Award in Negotivno, the Nishvil Theatre Festival, BITEF Festival program for emerging regional theater artists…) and you have opened the door for regional collaborations, invitations, and projects? What does this new (professional) stage situation mean for a young woman director?

TS: Candy is a very important project in my life. It is a play that speaks about addiction, its consequences, and the discrimination that comes with it. The production was created in collaboration with HOPS – Healthy options project Skopje, and it was crucial for me that the audience not only experienced the story on stage, but also learned about the work of this organization, which supports people struggling with addiction in our country and truly makes a change every day. Beyond the awards and recognitions, what matters most to me is that Candy resonated with people who have gone through the struggle of addiction and came out stronger on the other side. Their response gave the work a deeper meaning and confirmed for me why we make theatre in the first place. At the same time, to my surprise, Candy did open professional doors for me and the entire team. For a young woman director, this recognition is both hopeful and humbling and it proves that socially engaged theatre can travel, connect, and create change. But it also reminds me of the responsibility to keep giving voice to stories that must be heard.

Photo Credit: Tamara Malkoska.

IAB: This year within the Competition for Young Theater Director ‘Slavi Shkarov’ 2025, organized by the Ruse Theater, Bulgaria, you won the award for best young director (in competitions with truly talented Romanian and Bulgarian young male directors). What turning point in your career and art are we talking about?

TS: The participation alone was truly a turning point for me, both in my career and in my artistic approach. The challenge of creating a short performance in just five days pushed me to trust my instincts more. When you don’t have much time, you don’t have time for fear and I needed to learn that. I had the chance to collaborate with wonderful, dedicated actors, and to meet fellow directors Rafael Bizhev and Tudor Antofie, with whom I shared incredible mutual support. Feeling the audience in Ruse respond so warmly was astonishing and they gave all three of us immense encouragement. I had never felt that way anywhere else, and it gave me a lot of hope. This experience and the award also opened the opportunity to expand the work we developed into a full-length production of Shark Heart by Emily Habeck. I find the novel very powerful, it tells of the fleeting nature of life through the story of a man who literally transforms into a great white shark. That transformation becomes a striking metaphor for illness and grief, for how pain can reshape you while you’re still trying to live fully. For me, it naturally lends itself to a poetic, symbolic, and deeply human stage experience. At its heart, it’s a love story, but also a story about how we carry loss with us.

Hinkemann, directed by Tamara Stojanoska. Photo Credit Aleksandar Ristovski.

IAB: Within the theater community in Macedonia, you with your collaborators as a young team (Golden Yelets Theatre/Zlaten Elec), you design and conduct serious summer and winter annual tours, aka promotions/distributions of your theatre performances throughout Macedonia – with regular low-budget performances, and you do this more diligently than some national theaters with unimaginably better working conditions than a group from the independent domestic theater. What is your opinion, what is your open thought on this situation – the importance of touring?

TS: From the very beginning, Theatre “Golden Yelets” Skopje has had one clear goal: not just to produce performances, but to keep them alive. It’s very sad when so much time and effort goes into making a play, and after the premiere it disappears and is never performed again. Of course, organizing events and tours as an independent theater is challenging, but if there’s real desire, there’s always a way to make it happen. The driving force behind all our tours is the actor Boban Aleksoski. Besides being an actor, he also takes on the role of organizer and producer, and without his energy and commitment many of our productions wouldn’t have had such a long life. His belief that theatre must reach smaller towns has shaped our work in many ways, because the audiences there are truly eager for theatre and celebrate every new performance. In Macedonia, smaller towns are often forgotten and technically neglected, but that has to change. Culture should exist everywhere. People deserve it, and they are interested. Some of my most beautiful performances have happened in places where there wasn’t even proper lighting for the stage. There is beauty in the messy parts of the independent scene, the chance to make something happen on your own. Even if it’s hard, and even if it takes so much from your everyday life, I feel lucky to be surrounded by people who love this profession as deeply as I do and who believe in the process of trying. At this moment, we are in the middle of the tour with Good People, which includes seven dates in Macedonia and one performance abroad at the festival Theatre Without Borders in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Last year, we had a summer tour with the play Candy and The Penguin, and the highlight of that tour was our performance at the Nishville Jazz Theater Festival. Our theater has also toured with other productions, such as The Diary of a Madman, bringing independent theater to audiences all across our country.

Candy, directed by Tamara Stojanoska. Photo Credit: Gjorgji Kostovski.

IAB: Tamara from the perspective of self-criticism, criticalness, artistic vision, and recognition and selection of themes from your relation with the current zeitgeist, what is characteristic of your directing and your theatre performances?

TS: I’m very aware that you can always give more, be clearer in the way you approach the work. For me, what matters most is that I’m always trying to learn. Chasing perfection is not what motivates me, the process of discovery is. It’s hard to analyze yourself, and I know that when you create something publicly, people will interpret it in ways you never intended. Nobody can control how the work is perceived, but if I have to explain myself, what’s important in my plays is that I always speak about a theme I feel strongly connected to, something I really need to say, something that feels urgent to me. Magical realism often appears as a natural language for me, a genre I really enjoy. I like to take reality and mix it with symbolic visual solutions, with metaphors hidden everywhere. I try to reflect the contradictions of our time, how the everyday and the surreal coexist, and how absurdity and truth often overlap. The process itself is very important to me. I like to play with improvisations and different exercises with the actors, and many times parts of those exercises, which might start just as a way to help them open up, actually end up in the final performance, and I find that really fun. I really value spontaneous, natural moments, especially the ones I didn’t plan at all. I want to believe that working with actors is at the heart of my work. I always look for a natural, truthful kind of acting, raw and alive, not over-polished. That honesty on stage is what I believe connects most with people.

IAB: By the end of the year 2025 and in the following year 2026, what awaits you, what engagements are you preparing for?

TS: By the end of this year and into 2026, I’m excited to dive into projects that are very close to my heart. In September, I’ll start working on Blue Shade by the American playwright Bryan Reynolds. Collaborating directly with the author for the first time makes this project especially meaningful for me, both creatively and in the themes we’ll explore together. After that, I’ll turn to my own original project, Baba Roga, for young audiences (and adults). Lately, I’ve been deeply interested in Slavic folklore, in magical stories from our region, and this play weaves traditional tales with memories from my grandmother, who used to tell me stories about Baba Roga. It’s a nostalgic project I’ve been dreaming about for a long time. Next year, I’m looking forward to bringing Shark Heart by Emily Habeck to the stage at the Drama Theatre in Ruse, Bulgaria.

Candy, directed by Tamara Stojanoska. Photo Credit: Stefan Samandov.

IAB: Will your future theatre directing continue in Macedonia or are your ambitions different? Or what are your future professional and existential struggles in the domestic context – which is the harshest – as soon as someone thrives, they become ‘punished’? Or prove me wrong.

TS:  I would like to have the chance to work both at home and abroad, to direct in different languages, in different countries, and to experience the culture and people wherever I create a production. I don’t limit myself, but I also don’t set aside the domestic stage, no matter its problems or politics. There is still great meaning in creating in your own language, with actors and collaborators from your home. Opportunities to work outside Macedonia have come to me naturally and unexpectedly, and that makes me happy. I never imagined I would get the chance to work in Ruse, and I’m very grateful for it. As for my future in Macedonia and the possible struggles here, I’m not afraid of what might happen. We all make our own chances and up until The Clean House in Prilep, I received no real institutional support in my overall career, only encouragement from a close circle of collaborators. From my experience, I don’t feel “punished” for working, but I also don’t feel a strong sense of support – and that’s okay. It allows me to stay independent, preserve my integrity, and find strength in building my own path.

IAB: Thank you very much, dear Tamara.  

Skopje, 2025