The authorial project “Purple” engages with our conservatism and narrow-mindedness, hidden behind the best of intentions, a great deal of worry, and even more love. The performance text grew out of actors’ improvisations in which we explored the boundaries between understanding and assumption, care and suffocation, sincerity and cruelty, love and selfishness, tradition and primitiveness…

The production follows the gathering of a diverse bourgeois family in which everyone knows what is best for their loved ones – they are painfully honest with each other, offering advice and help even when no one has asked for it – all in the name of everyone’s happiness. Their happiness is disrupted by the arrival of the colour purple, and with it an unsettling question of freedom. What are the limits of another person’s freedom that we are willing to cross as individuals? What limits has our patriarchal society already long since crossed? Do we accept another’s happiness only if it meets our own criteria? Where exactly does our hypocrisy lie? Are we on the path to an ordered society or a tribal community? During the creative process we explored boundaries within both content and form. The result is a story about a woman we think we know. About the thin line between her freedom and our fascism.

— Emina Omerović