The LADO Ensemble Hall
'To a child, every situation is a matter of life or death.
For you, who knew how to live in the worst circumstances yet never forgot how to play.
For you, who knows that not everyone survives.
For my dragons.'
Espi Tomičić
This dedication opens Always Be Like a Dragon, a play by Espi Tomičić that weaves together genres, temporal layers, and theatrical forms to create a work that is both deeply intimate and politically engaged.
The drama begins in the present day. Petar, a trans man, is in therapy. Through sessions with his therapist, he revisits memories of a key period from his childhood, when he was still Matea. Voices of the past and present constantly collide, blurring the boundaries between the real and the imagined, the documentary and the poetic. The therapist, the chorus, and other voices act as commentators and guides through the layers of memory and trauma.
At the heart of these memories is an abandoned city flat, into which Petar, then still a young girl named Matea, illegally moves with his mother Jana, brother, and sister, seeking refuge from poverty and homelessness. Led by the eldest brother Alan, the children start a game of war, converting the flat into a military base.
The game reveals cracks in the fabric of real life: Matea’s first menstruation, an awakening awareness of her body, tensions within the family, the loss of home, struggles with identity, and traumas that remain unnamed but are etched in the body.
Always Be Like a Dragon is both an anti-drama and a therapeutic process, a space of imagination and theatre. It is conceived as a theatrical act in which trauma does not remain sealed within the individual but instead becomes a space of encounter.
Olja Lozica will direct the world premiere of Always Be Like a Dragon, a play by the multiple award-winning author Espi Tomičić.
