MEMORIAL TO TEA VIGATO (Silba, 1953 – Zadar, 2024)
I was thinking about how to get in touch, but a phone call or a letter seemed intrusive when the news of Tea’s cruel illness reached me. The introductory “How are you?” felt utterly inappropriate. So, I left everything to time and fate, cowardly defending myself from the onslaught of memories of our friendly encounters, which over the years became deeper and deeper through the exchange of thoughts on performances we had seen, occasionally interwoven with a spirited intimate conversation.
Tea always had clear opinions and rarely gave up on them. She would allow only slight corrections, and then, after a long pause, she would clearly and convincingly develop her historical and theoretical arguments. With a slight build and flexible step, she would project her optimism to people she was talking to, and her somewhat dry but expressive face was always quick to smile, radiating warmth and showing the way to a potential solution.
At first glance, she was a self-effacing Dalmatian woman dedicated to the marine vistas of her native island (Silba, 1953), who studied at the Zadar Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (Croatian language and library science) and was an assistant professor at the Department of Teacher and Educator Training of the University of Zadar, teaching courses in puppetry, stage culture and older Croatian literature. But she was also determined and ardent in her devotion to theatre, especially puppetry, a prominent art form where she worked and lived.
In her first of four books, “Methodical Approaches to the Culture of Performing Arts” (2011), she displayed her vast knowledge of performing arts culture, basing her views on current theories and their application in Croatian puppetry, presenting cogent analyses and conclusions. Her thinking was based on the historical and contemporary developments of Zadar Puppet Theatre, and she persistently and playfully searched for information in the theatre’s archive, delighted with the discovery of something new in the material that served to detail the facts that already had been known.
She erected a monument to the enthusiast and puppetry expert Mile Gatara and analysed the plays of Zvonko Festini, as well as the genesis of Luko Paljetak’s artistic creation, based on his texts that were never put on stage or finished. She also wrote about the work of Marin Carić, who put Zadar Puppet Theatre at the centre of artistic interest in terms of literary and theatrical work.
The sincerity of her relationship with the innovative expression of puppetry, keeping up with new plays and the emergence of new topics and actors helped her gain insight into the essential interactivity of puppetry and performing arts, which she expertly documented in her book “Zadar Puppetry for the 21 st Century” (2022). She artfully illuminated the connection between the actor and the play in various aesthetically and interpretatively pulsating versions in her monograph “The Dream of a Travelling Actor – Zlatko Košta” (2022). She summarized the subtle intertwining of family roots and ethnographically spontaneous characteristics of puppetry, which showed the layers of her hidden feelings and her longing to give back to her birthplace, in essays and scientific discussions in the book “Silba’s Cultural Topics” (2023).
Her books, reviews, social engagement (President of the Cultural Council of the City of Zadar), presentations at scientific conferences (Days of Krleža in Osijek, Hvar Theatre Days), and professional participation in events and festivals (Lidrano and SLUK in 2019 and 2021, and the 2024 PIF that was never destined) is her legacy put into words, left to us by an excellent theatrologist and a noble person, but one she also took with her to Eternity in the hot days of August 2024.
In Zagreb, August 2024; Antonija Bogner-Šaban, PhD
Translation: Nikolina Vujnović
