Absurdism at The Kick & Push Festival: Bojana Babić’s ‘Basement Girl’
It’s the last show of the 2024 Kick & Push Festival—Basement Girl, a play about PhD student Jovana navigating her new life in Canada while dealing with some eerie sounds in her apartment. Director, playwright, and actor behind Jovana, Bojana Babić was kind enough to sit down with me this past week for a Zoom interview about the show.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Could you tell me a little bit about Basement Girl that’s in the Kick & Push this summer?
It is a play that I am developing with performer and actor Tracey Guptill and sound designer/artist Neven Lochhead. It’s a story about this international PhD student who comes to Kingston and rents a basement apartment that seems ideal for her to live in and focus on her research, and then strange noises begin to disturb her nights. And she can’t really find the source of them and nor can her landlady who lives right above her… It’s really about an attempt to find her [Jovana’s] place in this new city and country, and come to terms with this strange situation that she is—resolve this strange situation that keeps recurring at night.
Awesome, very interesting. And from what I understand, this is also a residency with the Tett Centre?
Yeah, so basically we applied for the Kick & Push residency back in February, and we were notified that we got the residency in July, so pretty recently. And we’ve been full-on working on the play ever since.
What has an average day looked like for you since you were notified of receiving the residency and working on it, I’m guessing very intensively?
The first goal was to develop the text more because I had an initial version but that was just a draft. And when we got—when we realized that we were going to do the residency, then I really had to work on the text. So I did that. Then we were supposed to start rehearsals and unfortunately, because of one of our team members getting ill, we couldn’t start so we had a bit of—we had some challenges on the way. And then we finally started our rehearsals and since we started it’s been every day either working at the rehearsal hall or getting props, just running around. There’s been lots of running around but the Kick & Push Festival team has been really helpful and supportive.
How much did that text change?
It changed a lot because I studied both playwriting and screenwriting but then, since my undergrad, I’ve been more involved in film. And so I did initially see Basement Girl as a film but then, here’s the thing for the film to work. I felt like I would need to find an actor to play this protagonist and I haven’t been able to find that actor yet. And anyway, I will make the film eventually. But in the meantime I started to think of it as a play as well, as a performance that would actually—where I would actually play this basement girl, Jovana. Even though I am not a trained actor, but I just felt like I could play her. So the text then changed from what I wrote for actors and for a film—that was basically a screenplay. It changed a lot from that. Now it is a play, like an absurd play…
There was a lot of influence when we started the rehearsals. So Neven plays a lot of instruments and then he sings, and Tracey also sings, and dances. And I was basically just watching them perform in rehearsals, just when we were—during our breaks and stuff. And then a lot of that influenced the play and the text, so now it has more of these elements as well.
You mentioned absurdism. I actually love absurdist theatre. Is that something you write quite a bit, or was that a new genre for you?
Yeah, I love it. I’ve always been drawn to the absurd. I find it difficult to kind of define what absurdism really is because it’s so close to realism but with a twist, I guess… I find the things I write funny but they might not be funny in a sitcom kind of way, like not everyone is happy. The laughter doesn’t come from a place of joy but maybe more from the place of conflict, I guess, and discomfort.
Working with Tracey and Neven, I was wondering how that collaboration began and how it’s been going in the rehearsal process?
I have worked with Neven before because he just graduated from the PhD program that I am still in. But in terms of the work, we never worked this intensively together, so this is definitely the first time. And then Tracey, she is also doing a PhD in cultural studies—so that’s where we all obviously met at Queen’s—and I saw her in Mercy, the show was at the Grand Theatre, and I really liked her performance there a lot. So when I was thinking about applying for the residency, I knew I needed an actor for the role of the landlady, primarily. And then, even though initially it was supposed to be an older character, I really wanted Tracey because of her performance…
It has been fun but also very intense. It is a lot of elements, and then long hours. I think the only main challenges are really just the short time that we have, very short and maybe the pressure we are putting on ourselves. We want this show to be very enjoyable for the audience, but we don’t have time to make it perfect—I mean, as good as we want it to be. So it’s kind of like, balancing those expectations.
You mentioned you hope for this to become a film one day, but would you like to see the show developed even further post the Kick & Push Festival?
Yeah, I would. I think there’s a lot of potential and every day, we just discover new elements that we could add or develop. And then we need to put some things aside, and I need to say, “No, let’s not do that. Let’s just work with what we have.” But Tracey’s performance has been inspiring me to adapt the story, or some scenes, to adapt my performance. And then Neven’s music and sound design have also been affecting the story and the entire performance—it is very, I feel, collaborative. It’s a nice collaboration, I think, and I would want it to continue after the residency as well.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about your show?
The Kick & Push is being really supportive, and they have a really lovely team, especially of [summer students], they are really great people…
I initially thought this would be more suitable for a mature audience. But then, as we were doing the play, I feel like this would be very interesting for a younger audience as well. Like teenagers, younger teenagers, undergrads for sure. I think people can—the theme is quite universal. Even though it’s a story based on a very specific experience, I feel like it can resonate with a wider audience than I initially thought.
Bojana Babić is a screenwriter, director, and playwright currently pursuing a PhD in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University.
‘Basement Girl’ plays at the Tett Centre as part of the 2024 Kick & Push Festival today, August 18 at 2:30PM and 7:30PM. More information can be found here.
