Author: Reuben VanHoeve

I’m slowly drifting across my final weekend here. It feels like stasis, but it allows me the time to go out and do what I enjoy. Here are some pictures I’ve taken over the weekend in Pristina.

I have a strong recollection, a reclaiming of an understanding I once had of Free Society, what it meant to me, or what I perhaps desired it to mean. There is no purpose in detailing that particular misnomer here, or hereafter. What good is a qualifier of life and its defining motivators if one has no real tangible discernment of such? My travels here, my travels with the National Kosovo Ballet in particular have in their part helped supplant an image of Free Society, an image however in all of its inherent obfuscation. I know only of the universal want to ‘be’ in a place on ones own volition, to have decided for oneself that they have created the capacity therein for happiness in that particular place. To then, when these qualifiers fail, uproots oneself and go forth into the unknown extremities of the world, to seek the characteristics of place and ‘keep’ which may indeed satisfy them. That is then an intrinsic element of Free Society, placement and movement of will and person, to decide the tangible and intangible ‘what’ and ‘where’.

I’m on my way back from Bulgaria. Exhausted, mentally drained, and completely unprepared to begin the coming week. Not that I did not enjoy myself, or that there were no moments of relaxation. But for the most part I embroiled myself in my work over the weekend to the determent of my ‘time off’ as it were.

The previous day began in calm fashion. I took a walk around the countryside, looking much I assume, like a homeless person who just happens to have an expensive looking camera by his side. The skies were cloudy and grey, and there could be felt the spittings of rain protruding from it. This prompted talk amongst the dance company that, should the rain persist, the performance would have to be cancelled. My reaction to this news was surprisingly nonplussed, despite the fact that the cancellation of their performance would mean the nullification of my journeys purpose. However, the rain eventually let up, the stage was dried, and the performance began in orderly fashion. While I filmed their performance of ‘Juliet, No Romeo’, I was struck by not only the beautiful and captivating movements presented on stage, but also the political nature of the piece which was I felt, intrinsically Kosovar. It seemed almost brazen to take such a message of personal and national pain, and perform it in front of the elites of another country. But it was for this, for the sake of this inclination, that I had wanted to accompany the group to Bulgaria in the first place, to witness and record the spread of a burgeoning nations culture. In returning to my hotel, I shared a taxi with a Japanese man named Hideki. A reserved, shy man who revealed to me that he is an IT engineer working in Kosovo of all places. (On a humerus note, he also told me that he had been chased by a wild dog the day before, the same one which had chased me.) He is sharing the bus back to Pristina with us, the bus I am sitting on while writing this entry. In the end, what this weekend has shown is that while I still have much learning to do, and a lot of technical knowledge to gain, it has reconfirmed to me that this is what I want to do in my life, it is all I ever want to do. So while I am drained, physically and mentally, I am also vindicated in myself, I feel that I am doing the right thing.

I decided in my resounding unilateral stupidity to, rather than relax and stretch out this weekend in Greece, to instead follow my documentary subject to Bulgaria. It was in the A.M. of yesterday that I hopped on a bus with a group of dancers whose language I do not speak, and traveled over the course of nearly twelve hours to the town of Pravets, all the while thinking to myself “what the hell am I doing”. The journey to our destination was about as uneventful as a bus ride could be expected. I sat and recorded with my camera as discreetly as I could, while the dancers, born performers that they are, would put on a smirk and wave when they noticed me pointed their way. Surprisingly, the Serbian border was passed without issue, within half an hour in fact. It was the Bulgarian border which was to be our heel. We sat there for perhaps 2 hours, a consequence which unfortunately could not be attributed to the lines. One of the dancers said to me in jest “Hey, you wanna trade?” whilst indicating the passports we were both holding, mine Canadian, his Kosovar.

When we arrived in Pravets, I left the group at their much nicer, much more expensive hotel to head to the b&b down the road I had booked previously. The following day was one of exploring the surrounding town and countryside, as their were no time slots for the company to rehearse. I walked across country roads and through fields to reach the town proper, a place which I could describe in one word as being ‘cozy’. A landscape of schools, playgrounds, parks, and small neighborhoods surrounded me. Nothing was present which could in be described as being made for a Tourist such as myself. In a way it was almost comforting, to be in a place where no one spoke fluent english, and all of the signs were in Cyrillic. I look much like a foreigner, with my scruffy beard, my large backpack, the camera always at my side, I espouse myself as being in wholly unfamiliar territory.

After lunch I visited the resort where the company stayed, I sat by the stage where they will perform tomorrow evening and worked on some homework (you’re welcome Meredith) while sipping on my third or fourth coffee of the day. I then began to walk back to my own hotel, a short 2.5km journey. On the way I came across an abandoned factory, which I had seen previously from a distance across the fields. I passed alongside it on the road and, given my aforementioned resounding and unilateral stupidity, decided to approach. Coming upon the entrance and dilapidated guard station, I suddenly heard a series of snarls and barks to my flank. A wild dog I did not notice previously in my unobservant intent, was standing across from me in the overgrown inlet of the factories entrance. So what is my first reaction? Take a picture of course! I snapped some pictures from my hip in the animals general direction before backing up towards the road, the dog meanwhile approaching me, still barking with great intensity. I bolted down the road, only briefly looking behind myself to see the dog calmly ambling its way back towards the factory, its sacred ground successfully protected from intruders. Even now as I sit in my hotel room writing this, I occasionally hear the sound of wild dogs along the countryside.

I had the great fortune to be allowed the privilege of both viewing and filming the Kosovo Ballet’s performance of ‘Dasma’ (or ‘The Wedding’) at the National Theatre last Friday. It was an exhausting and emotionally gratifying experience of both witnessing a beautiful performance, and also organizing my efforts to capture it in all its gravitas. My hope is in the near future to further capture the behind the scenes nature of this ballet group for the sake of my final project. But for now, I only have images of the performance I can share here.

With the rigor of classes which has been bestowed on us these last two weeks, I feel sometimes that I am not so much living in another country, as living on the RIT Kosovo campus. I could not have expected that an international trip such as this could in its own way feel so effectively constraining in nature. And with the sparse amount of time we are allotted here, every hour, every minute spent indoors seems as a wasted one. So sometimes, when even a few hours of the day are presented to me, I like to take a walk up the street to Germia Park to hike the trails, just so I can get some time to myself, clear my head, and remind myself of the wondrous potentialities of being in another country. I say this mostly as a pretense to showing some of the photos I have taken while on these daily walks.

Since arriving at RIT Kosovo from our week long regional trip, the unity of togetherness in shared awe and misery has been been broken in a way. People go to their respective classes, sit with those they are now comfortable with, and go about their day in a manner of rapt partitionality. There is however, a single unifying factor present at RIT Kosovo which I believe connects and fortifies everyone in a particular social understanding. That is, just how freaking cute that dog is! The amount of pure affection and doting projected onto the small fuzzy frame of the puppy tentatively know as Auk is simply astounding. It is in a sense, a universal property we all may understand, that fuzzy animals with cute noses and big shiny eyes must call for and promptly deserve our never ending love and complete devotion. It is a chance for us to project onto a living thing an absolute purity of soul. (Because all dogs as we know are the utter antithesis of everything wrong in the world.) I cannot clearly think of an instance where I looked upon this animal and did not feel within myself the sense of kindness and love I now wished to bestow upon it, a feeling usually accompanied by the noise “awwwwe”. I see it, and all animals in a way, as the vessel for everything good I wish to see in the world, a slate upon which to project these things. Or maybe I’m just full of it… in any case, here are some pictures of Auk booping my camera lens with his wet puppy nose.

 

I must admit a certain inclination toward the particular aesthetic which the Balkans region presents. The orange tiled roofs, sometimes kempt, sometimes not, set against bright blue skies rolling hills and green mountains offer a visage I feel to be ripe in the necessary qualities of dramatic landscape. Throughout the regional trip I found myself consistently documenting nearly every new environment I came in contact with, of which there were many. Some may have memories of me on the trip pointing the camera lens at them from a distance, or in a state of unobservance while I ambled along the streets aiming the camera upwards towards the tops of buildings.

 

Yet I also find that there is a self perpetuated bias towards this environment that comes with me as a person foreign to this place. I say that I find it beautiful, but in what capacity do I observe its beauty? I may find streets in my hometown similar in functional and social quality to those in Bosnia, or Albania, yet I do not find these beautiful. To me it is the unknown quality, and not the aesthetic quality then, that I see as being beautiful here. It is the state of its unreachable, almost incomprehensible nature that I find, and I suspect many others find so attractive. In essence, that it is not of myself, or my familiar environment, thus it is beautiful.

What I want, what I desire most in the coming month, is to find a sort of familiar beauty in this place. To no longer see it as exotic or foreign, but as close to my personhood.

I find myself currently in a perpetual state of disassociation from my feelings towards my impending travels. Nervousness, excitement, joy and disquiet cease to carry meaning when I have no basis to pin these feelings upon.

By this I mean that the future experience I am to embark upon is as of now merely that, a future state that I have not yet had contact with. Any feelings I may have are then only in relation to a mental idea of that particular place or thing.

An idea of travel, of a city, of a people which I know only through vague adjectives and the nature of their countries past. That there is present in me the knowledge of a past state of war and strife within this newly minted nation, I cannot help but garner empathetic but perhaps wholly naive images of a particular strength of character that this country must hold.

I imagine those walking the streets carrying with them the physical and mental scars of conflict. I imagine the youth upon whose shoulders the reinvigoration of their homeland now rests. I see a collective which finds itself in the burgeoning period of something beyond themselves, a period of growth which will determine for generations the path upon which their country must walk.

This synthetic model born of an almost childlike propagation carries with it the need to devise broad narrativization of things unknown to us in their details. Though I recognize this creation and sustained development of werternized narrative, I have as of yet no other image to adhere to. I have only the awareness of my accounts innate bias and the hope that it will be brought to task and supplanted by a more whole, fruitful realization of this place and people in the course of my stay. And so I stave off my feelings of expectation towards my trip, because I know that no mere idea can be equated to reality.