After a successful US tour, Balkan Bordello produced by the prestigious New York Theater La MaMa (USA) in association with Qendra Multimedia (Kosovo), Atelje 212 (Serbia) and My Balkans (USA/Serbia), returns to the region with a tour in some of the most renowned summer festivals.

• August 8 at Nisville Jazz Teatar Festival in Nis (Serbia)
• August 10 at Ohrid Summer Festival in Ohrid (North Macedonia)
• August 12 at KotorArt International Festival in Kotor (Montenegro)
• August 13  at Wild Beauty Art Festival in Zabljak (Montenegro)

Balkan Bordello premiered in Prishtina on November 2, 2021 and continued with a tour in Kosovo, Albania and Serbia. In March 2022, the American premiere at New York’s La MaMa was followed by ten shows and attracted the attention of European and American critique. 

Balkan Bordello: The Saga of a Balkan Family is based on Aeschylus’ trilogy The Oresteia. As an avatar of the modern world, Agamemnon returns triumphant from the battlefield, having reduced the enemy city to ashes. But the fever and enthusiasm that come from inglorious victories are blood animals—they feed and live on blood. When he returns home, death awaits powerful Agamemnon. He is killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, the oppressed woman who, by killing her husband, seeks to find freedom. Together with Egist, a hypocritical poet, Clytemnestra wants to start a new life, without fearing she will be raped and humiliated by her husband. 

This is the bedrock of this play, which, with black humor, touches on the very fabric of the Balkan temperament, traces the morbidity of the human soul and highlights the stupidity and naiveté of an era being built on the foundations of violence, intolerance and hatred. The characters surrender to fate and nearly unconsciously fall into the trap of discontent and destruction. It’s this vein of destruction that seduces as death seduces life. Balkan Bordello is a play about traumatized societies that eat themselves. It confronts us with war as a machinery of destruction where life and normalcy capitulate in the face of humans’ infidelities and evils.

By: Jeton Neziraj; Directed by: Blerta Neziraj

With: Svetozar Cvetković, George Drance, Eugene the Poogene, Valois Mickens, Ema Andrea, Adrian Morina,  Mattie Barber-Bockelman, Ivan Mihailović, Matt Nasser, Verona Koxha