© Marko Stojanović
Workshop
The Language of Silence Gentleness as a Method
Running time: 3 hours
Free workshop for a maximum of 12 participants. To apply, please fill in the registration form by 12.00 pm of March 22, 2026.
This workshop is rooted in the artistic and pedagogical practice of theater director Tara Manić and is closely connected to her award-winning production How I Learned to Drive, which engages with extremely difficult subjects – sexual violence, trauma, abuse of power, and pedophilia – through a precise, restrained, and ethically attentive theatrical language. The workshop explores how theater can work with harsh and painful material without reproducing violence, sensationalism, retraumatisation, or harm. It focuses on artistic form as a tool of care, distance, and responsibility toward both performers and audiences. Rather than prioritizing results, the workshop emphasizes process, ethics, and artistic decision-making, and is aimed at people who are interested in exploring themes related to women’s experiences, embodiment, vulnerability and trauma in contemporary performance practice.
How can art give form to what is delicate, complex, or unspeakable without betraying it? The workshop series The Language of Silence, in collaboration with Fondazione Feltrinelli, emerges from this question. Silence is not absence or emptiness: it is a language that listens, receives, and prepares the ground for creation. The series of workshops invites participants to discover silence as a companion in research, exploring different yet deeply connected ways of approaching vulnerability, trauma, memory, and the unconscious. In a time marked by conflicts, media noise, and emergencies that seem to leave no room for listening, silence can become a political space and a practice of resistance. Not as an escape, but as a possibility that allows fragility, trauma, memory, and the unconscious to emerge and find a space for attention and care. In this direction, through dramaturgical writing and choreographic movement, the two workshops invite participants to discover silence as a grammar that unites body and word in order to generate a more essential and more truthful way of creating and telling stories.
Tara Manić (1994) is a theater director and assistant professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. Her work engages with socially sensitive and ethically attentive theatrical practices. In 2024, she earned her doctorate from the same faculty by directing The Library of All Senses, a documentary performance about the perception of theater by blind and partially sighted people. She has directed numerous award-winning productions, including How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel, which toured festivals in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Lithuania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Albania, Bulgaria, and Serbia, receiving over ten awards for best direction and best performance. Her latest production, created at Theater Osnabrück in Germany, is based on a remix of the novel Going Out by Barbi Marković. Tara has participated in international residencies and workshops, including La Colline theatre in Paris and the Avignon Festival, and has received numerous professional recognitions, including the Silver Medal of the University of Arts and the Neda Depolo First Prize from Radio Belgrade. She lives and works in Belgrade.
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Info
The workshop will be conducted in English
The workshop is open to people engaged in artistic practices who are interested in exploring themes related to women’s experiences, embodiment, vulnerability and trauma. We particularly welcome professionals, artists and students from different disciplines – including theater, dance, performance, visual arts, film, and related fields – as well as those interested in socially responsive artistic practices.
Credits
In collaboration with: Fondazione Feltrinelli
