Author: Zuzanna Berendt.

Review of Girls, a performance by Tjaša Črnigoj and the Igralke Collective, presented at the Drugajanje Festival on 10 November 2025.

In one of the opening scenes, the performers of the Igralke collective explain that “cure” – the Croatian word for “girls” comes from a verb meaning “to leak” — a verbal symptom of cultural mechanism of reducing women to their biology, which for centuries served to keep them in a position of subordination and, consequently, to limit their rights as well as their political and social agency. It so happens that the Polish word closely related to the Croatian one is “córka” — a daughter. While watching the show these three words — daughter, girl, to leak — got strangely intertwined for me. They began to pulse with a faint light, as if suggesting that within the history of oppression and discrimination one can also unearth a history of emancipation and collective strength. With this feeling I left the theatre after seeing Girls.

Girls by Tjaša Črnigoj and Collective Igralke. Photo by Dražen Šokšević.

Community is a crucial category for the performance directed by Tjaša Črnigoj. Its authors — besides Črnigoj, these are Sendi Sotlar, Ana Marija Brđanović, Anja Sabol, Tijana Todorović, and Vanda Velagić — form an exceptional, intergenerational alliance. The preparation of the performance was preceded by conversations the artists had with their grandmothers and mothers. In these conversations — played back in audio form on stage — they explore themes of sexuality, desire, shame, body, and the violence experienced by girls in patriarchal societies. This violence begins in childhood with a gentle training into certain behaviours, modes of expression, and appearances, and continues into adulthood with restricting reproductive rights and publicly shaming those who dare to realise their sexuality outside a monogamous marriage.
The first community established on stage is therefore the intergenerational one. The second is the community of performers, colleagues, friends, companions — those in whose presence one need not feel ashamed, and who are willing to help carry one’s story, no matter how difficult it may be. During the performance at the Drugajanje Festival, which I had the opportunity to attend, Sendi Sotlar was replaced on stage by Klara Kovačić. As Kovačić warned us: “I will tell a story. It is not my story, but it could be mine.” 

The third community that forms during the performance is the one between performers and the audience. I was especially glad that the auditorium was dominated by teenagers — people younger than the artists on stage, but also people precisely at the age the performers were when the key events of their stories took place: the time of first loves, sexual initiations, experiments, testing boundaries, becoming independent. When I was their age, I had never seen such a performance. In fact, the first SUCH performance I have seen in my life is this one directed by Črnigoj.
The performance does not speak about women’s rights, patriarchal violence, and emancipation through abstract categories, feminist discourse, or stories about fictional heroines. It speaks about them from the perspective of embodied experience, in a direct encounter with the ones who have lived these experiences. In this context, the final scene is particularly moving: the artists present on the screen video portraits of teenage girls with whom they also conducted interviews while preparing the performance. As audience members we see their faces but we do not know which story belongs to which girl. This protects their privacy and creates a safe space for bringing their stories onto the stage. 

Girls by Tjaša Črnigoj and Collective Igralke. Photo by Dražen Šokšević.

I find this gesture exceptional also because these teenagers — young women — are not used here as objects, as an argument for why we must fight for a better future of the “children.” The girls whose faces appear on the screen are not (sic!) daughters — they are independent, self-determining subjects who, on the basis of alliance with others like them, can form a community of experience and establish communication with their older peers. 

Artistically, the women of the Igralke collective employ simple means characteristic of documentary theatre — audio recordings are interwoven with photographs projected on the back of the stage and with monologues and live-performed scenes and reconstructions of event. Yet the stage (set design by Ivan Botički and Tijana Todorović) contains many symbolic elements: a rope holding bloodstained underwear; a flag with the image of Che Guevara; heavy boots — signs of teenage rebellion, a refusal to comply with the prescribed performance of traditional femininity. The performers place numbered evidence markers next to these objects during the performance, like those used at a crime scene for photographic documentation.
The performers’ aim is therefore not merely to share a personal story but also to articulate a complaint against the culture, the state, and specific individuals who inflicted violence upon them. If any of those counted on them to endure this violence the way women are expected to endure everything — silently — they are very wrong. 

Girls by Tjaša Črnigoj and Collective Igralke. Photo by Dražen Šokšević.

On its deepest level, I understand Girls as a refusal to stay silent — in one’s own case and in a shared case, in the face of the restriction of rights, of shaming, punishing, putting women’s lives in danger. In Poland, this kind of resistance was expressed when, in 2020, thousands of women went to the streets to protest the tightening of an already extremely restrictive abortion law. In this sense, the performance makes the best possible use of the stage — it renders public what so often is pushed underground, making it possible to connect with others who, though not the same as you, may be living through the same things you are. It is for this reason that the performance not only informs about the situation of women in the region where the collective is based but also emotionally moves the audience and empowers whoever dares to oppose the systemic violence.

Zuzanna Berendt is a researcher and critic in the field of performing arts and an independent curator based in Cracow, Poland. Since 2015 she writes on theatre and choreography for the polish magazines on performing arts such as “Didaskalia”, “Dialog” and “Dwutygodnik”. She is a  cofunder of Pracownia Kuratorska collective and member of editorial board of independent magazine “Dialog Puzyny”. In 2025 she received a Critic’s Stipend in the frame of the international project Beyond Front@: Bridging Periphery and visited 24th Drugajanje Festival.  

This text was written by Zuzanna Berendt within the framework of the Beyond Front@: Bridging Periphery project.