The Sarajevo Arts Festival In Ann Arbor Artists Under Siege

The only color adorning the empty, mortar-pocked streets of Sarajevo these days are large patches of blood stains. Sarajevans call these blooms on the concrete Sarajevo's roses. That tells you something of the city's personality--sardonically lyrical.

This month, March 27, Ann Arborites will get a first-hand glimpse of the Sarajevan culture that can deliver deathly metaphors with such deadpan panache. Two artists from Sarajevo--Suada Kapic, a producer, and Dragan Pavic, an actor - are coming to Ann Arbor, along with a book, "The Survival Guide to Sarajevo," and the documentary film "Sarajevo Ground Zero," both products of the war. These events collectively are being titied, with no small degree of irony , "Artists Under Siege - Sarajevo Arts Festival in Ann Arbor."

The Festival is the brainchild of Ann Arborite Nada Rakic, who was herself, until four years ago, a citizen of Sarajevo. "It's very much like a joke a Sarajevan would tell these days," she says, explaining the "Sarajevo Arts Festival" part of the title. "A joke something like, 'What do you call two artists, a book and a film?' "A Sarajevo Arts Festival."

The festival has actually grown into a large, many-tentacled project, with the Performance Network acting as the main sponsor. In addition to bringing Sarajevan war art to Ann Arbor (and Detroit - similar events are being scheduled at WSU and the Pontiac Strand Theatre), the other main aim of the festival is to unite Ann Arbor artists to send back a statement of support to artists in Sarajevo, via a video, and a letter, now in production.

Rakic, 42, was herself a member of the Sarajevo arts community until moving to Ann Arbor four years ago when she married Bob Whallon, a U-M archaeologist she met when he was working there. In the pre-war days, she (a dramaturge and television producer), Suada Kapic, Dragon Pavic, and a few other former Yugoslavian cultural luminaries, such as film producer Ademir Kenovic, were at the forefront of a vibrant arts scene (picture the cafe crowd portrayed in Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and you get the idea). "We all knew each other. We all studied together, we were of a generation," says Rakic.

Before the war, Suada Kapic, in particular, was one of Yugoslavia's most famous counterculture artists. Kenovic was directing feature-length films. Rakic and Pavic were powerful, high-profile figures in the national theatre.

The Sarajevo Arts Festival in Ann Arbor was born when Rakic set up a speaking engagement at the U-M for Kapic, now based in New York. Kapic, the founder of a production company called FAMA, had spent the first year of the Sarajevo siege mounting quirky exhibitions throughout Sarajevo, mirroring the war through art. One exhibition, called "Stoves of Love," featured the stoves Sarajevans had fashioned out of scrap metal to heat their homes when the gas and oil supplies ran out. Kapic left Sarajevo last April with Joan Baez, who had given a con-(CONTINUED ON PAGE 6)