Subjective feelings of an artist are of imperative importance to the essence of their lives. They view the world around them through a prism of feelings and in the view of this study; these feelings are related to their place of work. It was an essential task of this study to bring the focus on their subjective feelings connected with their “home away from home”.
Table 4.
The queried artists were given the task of identifying and separating positive and negative feelings in relation to the theatre that is employing them.
It is notable that the most dominant feelings registered were affiliation with the environment as well as relaxation in the positive sense; and stress and discomfort in the negative feelings docket.
The questionnaire also required the polled to define which theatre in our country has the best working conditions. 84 of the questioned found that the theatres located in Belgrade provide the best working conditions [8].
However, it is to be noted that the participants tended to favor theatres in Belgrade based on perceptions of inadequate working conditions elsewhere, despite finalized reconstructions of the interiors and/or exteriors on locations;
furthermore on perceptions of funding designations favoring the capital Belgrade, even personal feeling of career stagnation (14.3% of polled), particularly when compared with assumed or perceived options potentially available to employees of theatres in Belgrade.
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Table 5.
4.4. House of Actors as a form of special housing
“The theatre is the most ephemeral of all arts, it is a feeble glimpse – it cannot be preserved, nor properly documented. However, life in the theatre and the art, which is created within, creates a shaped space, an architectural solution for the building itself, the so called House of Actors.” - [10]
The reason why a part of this study employs the term of “special housing” results from the fact that a majority of respondents (77%) declared a positive answer to the question if they regarded the theatre as their second home; additionally, an even larger number of respondents (83%) stated that they do not spend more than eight hours daily in their native theatre as their workplace, which results in a fact that this knowledge needs to be regarded from a viewpoint of a phenomenological aspect. There is a well-documented, accepted and even assumed fascination with equaling a workspace to a
“second home”, which often can be found as a dominant trait of a theatre actor. Theatre actors, ballet dancers and vocalists in the opera do not have a strict and fixated working schedule; therefore they are compelled to associate their vocation with the premises where they spend most of their time, where they dwell and work within the theatre walls. Whether it is about the wardrobes, green room/lounge, actors’ clubs or the make-up room, this feeling of belonging and dedication is expressed in every aspect of their lives.
Special housing in the theatre includes an unconventional form of acceptance of the professional vocation and identification with the collective that becomes a second family; creating a stronger bond between the theatre spaces and the residents within. A similar observation was made in a theatre play, which was later adapted into a motion picture, “The Dresser”, where this invisible bond between the private life and the professional work of an actor is conveyed in a very picturesque manner. [6]
In today’s world the fundamentals of a family are being changed and have to face stressful and turbulent vicissitudes, as forced by various work duties and establishment of existential careers. It seems that the theatre was
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ahead of time in this particular example, the identification of the workspace and the living quarters. The question arises if this form of special housing has been initiated and founded in the theatre; and if it has to be included in this study as such, where the architecture of the theatre can serve as the foundation and stimulus for such a development.
Table 6.
5. THE INTERIOR OF SPACES FOR ACTORS IN THE NATIONAL THEATRE IN SUBOTICA
If we accept that "the basic theme of architecture is life"[10], then the design process becomes a process of bringing life into a space, and to the ideas that were the starting points of our creation.
The interior design project for the National Theatre in Subotica-Népszínház [3] was developed by several teams, who were responsible for different parts of the building, and they are fostering endeavours to include the results of previous research through balance and shared style - and thus provide a joint atmosphere of the whole experience of interior space.
The interior design project for the National Theatre in Subotica-Népszínház [3] was developed by several teams who were responsible for different parts of the entire facility. One of those integral parts of a complex entirety was the “house of actors'' which represented all areas that relate to the relaxation, socialisation and preparation of actors before and after leaving the scene. It includes seven floors with approximately 2500 m2. Interventions in the internal structure were reduced to a pure, austere and minimalist enhancement of the existing concrete structure, which is treated as a context, based on finding an appropriate architectural expression through the details of the interior. It goes without saying that all technical requirements, fire protection and safety standards of stage facilities are being met.