At its beginnings and for decades afterwards, Serbian theatre, praiseworthy exceptions apart, has been distinguished by its actors and subsequently its theatre stars, while the media favoured names have become the theatre directors. The end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century brought a new wave that marks the Serbian theatre today: new playwrights. It began with Biljana Srbljanović, and after her followed Milena Marković, Uglješa Šajtinac, Marija Karaklajić… to mention only a few. Fortunately, this wasn’t just a short-lived bright moment of Serbia’s drama scene but has become an established trend producing a next generation of talented and successful playwrights such as Maja Pelević, Filip Vujošević, Milan Marković and, especially, our collocutor Milena Minja Bogavac.
 Playwright and poetess Milena Minja Bogavac (1982) is the winner of the "Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz" 2008 Award for Drama Opus, which she received the same week as she received the "Duško Radović Theatre" Award. The jury’s decision to award the opus of Milena Bogavac points to the fact that "she has manifestly singled herself out through her rich sensibility that mirrors the spirit of the times and through her genuine wish to use radical expressions that reflect the spirit of contemporary theatre". The jury also pointed out that this young author, in her dramas North Force, The Red, Dear Dad, Gamma Cas and others has succeeded in introducing herself as Serbia’s most abstract and most direct, most elitist, as well the most engaged modern playwright.
Milena Bogavac is also a holder of several other awards and her dramas have been rendered into a number of languages, included into anthologies and performed at festivals in Avignon, London and New York.
- What are the themes that interest young Serbian playwrights today and what are its main characteristics?
- I believe that young Serbian drama owes its success to fresh and original topics that young authors are dealing with in theatre. All this is in direct connection with the social situation in which our young authors have been maturing. The dramatic historical period in which we live is the source of a series of dramatic themes because it has produced a new social strata and marginal groups, which for the first time are finding a place in the works of young Serbian authors. The intelligentsia is in emigration, the middle class has vanished, wars, sanctions, inflation, martial law, flourishing crime, a transitional expansion of consumerism and a lack of system of values – all these have provided themes for the new Serbian drama, which theatre magazines from abroad also dub the "new Balkan tragedy". This environment has not only determined the themes of our plays but has, which is important to say, contributed in great measure that young authors have developed a specific feeling of the world. In the works of new Serbian authors, the world is an unsafe place, filled with doubts regarding all human and civilisational values. This is, as it seems, an important characteristic of our new plays.
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- You said that you abandoned the rules of drama writing that you learned at your faculty. Does that mean that the "new rules of the game" are being introduced into writing plays or is abandoning the rules a good way to return to them again?
- I think that art is a realm in which the most important rule is to disobey all rules. The Faculty of Drama Arts is a good school, but its diploma doesn’t mean that you are a writer. This you can become one only if you look boldly into the self and the world around you. I observe the world and I see that all the rules in it have changed. In this sense I don’t think that drama should hold on to traditional patterns. Of course, a well told story is something that is recognised and it is a form that will never go out of fashion. To me, however, in this phase of maturing as a writer, I feel more inspired to attempt to write different, odd experimental plays. I sense art as an exploration and the search for new forms rather than as a game on safe terrain.
- What, in your opinion, characterises your dramatic poetics?
 Contemporaneity. Engagement. A daring sincerity or a sincere daring. A tendency towards a new language and the use of slang. In my plays the influence of hip-hop culture and of the daily-political situation is evident. I think that it is too early to speak about general characteristics of my dramatic poetics because after ten years of experience in professional theatre I am still a "young writer", an author who is developing and searching for her own expression. For several years I was writing to my generation; urban dramas in the key of poetical realism. My characters were mostly young people searching for identity within a specific social context. This is the phase I have outgrown and after ten dramas I have nothing more to say about these problems. I am still interested in searching for identity but not in relation to society but in relation to Eternity.
- Do you feel it is your responsibility to leave to the next generations a picture of today’s time?
- Absolutely. Theatre is a passing art. A play is performed and then it is gone … but texts are what remain forever. They are here to provide information about the world after fifty years, but also information about the life of theatre in that world. I am a child of two journalists and I think that I learned from them how important it is to be up to date, to think and write about a given time. As a writer I have a panic need to save from oblivion the experiences I have been passing through. This is at the same time the highest responsibility I feel before a keyboard, regardless if I write a play, a song, a column or a text for a blog. I perceive writing as here and now, conserved into a solid wrapping for tomorrow.
 - What is the Drama Mental Studio (DMS), which you founded with your sister, theatre director Jelena Bogavac, about?
- DMS is an independent alternative troupe whose collaborative team includes, besides Jelena and myself, Igor Marković – Cutout MC, an audio-visual artist. Together with many our colleagues we have since 1999 produced more than 50 theatrical performances, multimedia events, performances and actions and also several festivals. When they ask us to define what we do, we say that we "explore archetypical contents in modern society". This is a broad definition so we use it as a phrase that covers everything that we actually do. And what is it that we do? In fact, we have real fun! We make contemporary theatre, we invent new genres, we write and perform slam poetry, we record hip-hop music, we organise public discussions, edit publications and sites…
- We have read that you are "the best Serbian slam poetess"?
- It is easy for me to be the best Serbian poetess considering that nobody else in Serbia is seriously involved in this discipline. Slam is the youngest, recently come-of-age poetic genre that demands from an author to possess a certain acting skill. It is an urban, engaged, cynical, raunchy poetry written to be performed live, in clubs or in streets. As a para-poetical and a paratheatrical form, slam is a borderline art that sublimates all my interests: poetry and theatre. Considering that I never perform poems without music matrixe,s my slam is also a para-musical event as well. I have had more than 100 performances so far, throughout the Balkans.
- What are you currently doing?
- I have just returned from Novi Sad where with my colleagues from the group New Drama I held a workshop on the development of drama text, at the Sterijino Pozorje Theatre. I hadn’t time to unpack and I am already bound for Germany where I am working on the project called Interspace. This is an international collaboration of our FIST and the festival organised by the Hildesheim University. The creative team in Interspace includes 12 young authors: six from Germany and six from Serbia. I like the creative process we have ventured on before all because I work with very talented young artists. At the same time I have to begin working on two productions of my plays. First the Zrenjanin National Theatre is going to stage Gamma Cas and several days after that begins the rehearsal of a hip-hop musical for children I wrote after the motifs "Pippi Longstocking" for the Boško Buha Theatre. | 
