Theatre play “Just voice” contemporary music drama

“Just voice” is a story about a famous actress that loses her confidence when abandoned by her much younger partner, a ballet dancer whose career she helped launch. She is alone and locked in her apartment which does not feel like a home, with the company of the weird spider Tarantula left behind by her former partner. The search for new forms in musical theatre for me as a stage director and composer has always been of extreme significance, almost equally important as the search for new authors that explore outside of the standard form of Talk theatre and find their way in Music theatre- as this is a form that requires a special approach and style of writing. I had the privilege to meet the young and talented Nina Plavanjac who has written the wonderful words, sentences, and pages of this contemporary story. Her style is dramatic on the surface, but underneath it is the music that leads the story telling. The nameless actress in the story is alone, she needs a voice, just a voice, because the silence can be deafening, so the voice creates the dramatic and emotional apocalypse, but it also is a wake-up call and a door towards a new life. The play starts as a monodrama but soon becomes a communication music duo for two voices changing the styles of performance from drama, to musical to contemporary opera. This story of two partners that communicate just with their voices, without any physical contact, without any real image of each other- opens a new chapter in theatre with the use of the oldest instrument in the world- the human voice. Marjan Necak   Marijan Necak was born in Bitola and studied double bass and singing before graduating from the department of composition for film and theatre at the University for applied arts ESRA Paris-Skopje-New York. At the National theatre in Bitola he works as a composer, and he has been teaching song interpretation at the Faculty for Drama in Skopje. Since 2013 he also works as a director and set designer. He has written music for theatre, opera and ballet, musicals, film and tv series and his recognizable style is a blend of electronic music and Balkan folklore. He has signed over 250 performances, of which 30 are for children. Necak has collaborated with most theatres in the Balkan countries and has also worked in other European countries.  He is the founder of Moving Music Theatre (MMT) in 2015 and some of his directing works include: “Esenin” (National theatre Bitola), “The diary of a madman” (MMT), The little wire girl (National theatre Ljubljana), and has written original scores for “The lady of the camellias”, “The Glembays”, “The Bound Galileo” for HNK Rijeka, “Migrants”, “Black plague came”, “A Travnik chronicle” (National Theatre Bitola), Moulin Rouge (ZKM Zagreb), “Tito- bones in the stone” (coproduction Zagreb/ Florence/Hamburg), “Antica” (National theatre Prilep), “Macedonian bloody wedding” (Drama theatre Skopje), “The Merchant of Venice” (HNK Split) and many more     Stage director, composer, set and lights designer: Marjan Necak Translation of the text: Zvezdana Angelovska Costume design: Natasha Filipovic-Pavlicic   Roles: Her: Zvezdana Angelovska Him: Nikola Ristanovski Ballet dancer: Miroslav Mitrashinovic   Total running time 78 mins. The performance is not suitable for audience younger than 18.