Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars

Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars (GLWHGE\-DQD'ROHÏNL 6HQDG+DOLOEDĠLÉ 6WHIDQ+XOIHOG

Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars

Jana Dolečki · Senad Halilbašić Stefan Hulfeld Editors

Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars

Editors Jana Dolečki University of Vienna Vienna, Austria

Senad Halilbašić University of Vienna Vienna, Austria

Stefan Hulfeld University of Vienna Vienna, Austria

This research and publication project was funded by the Federal Chancellery of Austria

ISBN 978-3-319-98892-4 ISBN 978-3-319-98893-1  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951568 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Senchy/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

First of all, we wish to express our sincerest gratitude to the authors, artists and theatre activists who contributed to this volume—without their remarkable efforts, their questions and comments and their encouragements, this book could not have been made. We would like to thank the Federal Chancellery of Austria for financially supporting a panel discussion with Snježana Banović, Dino Mustafić and Gorčin Stojanović at the 2016 MESS festival in Sarajevo, and for furthering our work on this book by granting us the resources for finalizing this project in due time and scope. For the panel discussion in Sarajevo, we also owe thanks to the Austrian Embassy in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Furthermore, we are indebted to the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, and to our own Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies, at the University of Vienna. They provided significant means of support, both large and small, which were needed as much as they were appreciated: First, in supporting the conference Theatre During the Yugoslav Wars, and, second, in lending a hand towards the publication of this ensuing volume. The Austrian association Akademie an der Grenze and its chairman Dr. Klaus Pumberger were staunch partners in securing necessary funds for this project. We would also like to acknowledge the Center for Doctoral Studies of the University of Vienna and their help in organizing the above-mentioned conference, as well as our partner, the Volkstheater Wien. v

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Acknowledgements

We also extend our thanks to the fellow Ph.D. candidates at the Department for Theatre, Film and Media Studies, who, time and again, readily engaged in discussion about our contributions to this volume during our research meetings. We are grateful to the students of the class Theatre During Yugoslav Wars, taught in the 2015/2016 fall term, since it was their vivid interest in the topic that proved to us the importance of this project, and of giving visibility to the field of research tackled in the following chapters. We hope to have contributed to paving a path for new generations of academics who wish to work on these topics. We thank Erika Munk for her insightful comments and suggestions at different stages of our work, and we are also grateful for the encouragement given by Marvin Carlson whenever he happened to be in Vienna. Furthermore, we are deeply grateful to Paul Butcher for proofreading our volume and responding to our concerns, linguistic and otherwise, in such a prompt and capable manner. We also thank Lina Dokuzovic, for meticulous inspection of several chapters of this book and for providing us with added knowledge on side. Finally, we wish to thank our publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, for accepting this volume and placing it within such an inspiring environment in its publishing program, next to the monographs of e.g. Silvija Jestrovic, Milija Gluhovic or Sonja Arsham Kuftinec, all publications with which this book shares interests and perspectives. We especially thank the Commissioning Editor of the Literature and Theatre section, Tomas René, for his trust, advice and patience, and the Editorial Assistant Vicky Bates, who led us competently and with ease through the large amounts of paperwork that tend to go along with the creation of a volume such as this.

Contents

Introduction 1 Stefan Hulfeld, Jana Dolečki and Senad Halilbašić Part I  Mobilisation of Theatre Institutions Testimony Borka Pavićević 37 Borka Pavićević Stages of Denial: State-Funded Theatres in Serbia and the Yugoslav Wars 45 Irena Šentevska Bosnia and Herzegovina’s National Theatres in the Context of Language Politics During the War 63 Senad Halilbašić Testimony Amela Kreso 83 Amela Kreso Theatre as Resistance: The Dodona Theatre in Kosovo 87 Jeton Neziraj

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War Discourse on Institutional Stages: Serbian Theatre 1991–1995 107 Ksenija Radulović Part II  Shifting Stages Theatre on the Front Lines: Ad Hoc Cabaret in Croatia, 1991–1992 125 Jana Dolečki Within and Beyond Theatre: President Tuđman’s Birthday Celebration at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb 151 Lada Čale Feldman Testimony Snježana Banović 173 Snježana Banović Culture of Dissent, Art of Rebellion: The Psychiatric Hospital as a Theatre Stage in the Work of Zorica Jevremović 177 Milena Dragićević Šešić Theatre of Diversity and Avant-Garde in Late Socialist Yugoslavia and Beyond: Paradoxes of the Disintegration and Cultural Subversion 199 Ana Dević Testimony Borut Šeparović 221 Borut Šeparović Part III  Subsequent and External Perspectives The Theatre Exchange Between Slovenia and the Republics of Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s 227 Barbara Orel

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Fording the Stream of Conscience: Peter Handke’s River Journeys 243 Branislav Jakovljević Testimony Nihad Kreševljaković 271 Nihad Kreševljaković Strategies for Challenging Official Mythologies in War Trauma Plays: The Croatian Playwright Ivan Vidić 277 Darko Lukić Postmodern Antigones: Women in Black and the Performance of Involuntary Memory 297 Aleksandra Jovićević Testimony Dino Mustafić 315 Dino Mustafić Index 321

Notes

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Contributors

Snježana Banović  is a theatre director and Professor at the Academy for Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb. She has a Ph.D. in theatre studies and has published on theatre history. She has directed numerous plays in Croatia and elsewhere. Her books include Država i njezino kazalište [The State and its Theatre] and Kazalište krize [Theatre of Crises]. Ana Dević  is a sociologist, a senior Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at the KU-University of Leuven. Ana’s Ph.D. is from the University of California in San Diego. Relevant publications include “What Nationalism Has Buried: Powerlessness, Culture, and Discontent in Late Yugoslav Socialism,” in Stubbs et al. Social Inequalities and Discontent (2016). Jana Dolečki  is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department for Theatre-, Film- and Media Studies at the University of Vienna. Her current research focuses on wartime theatre in Croatia and Serbia. Milena Dragićević Šešić  is a Professor and Head of the UNESCO Chair in Cultural Policy and Art Management at the University of Arts Belgrade, and the former President of the latter. She has published about 150 essays and 16 books, some of which have been translated. Book titles include Art and Alternative, Neo-folk Culture, Art Management in Turbulent Times and Vers les nouvelles politiques culturelles. Lada Čale Feldman is a Professor in the Department for Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, where she teaches drama, theatre and performance studies. xi

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She has published and edited a dozen books in both Croatian and English, dealing with the aforementioned interests from political-anthropological and feminist perspectives. Senad Halilbašić  is a University Assistant and Ph.D. candidate in the Department for Theatre-, Film- and Media Studies at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on theatre during the Bosnian war. Previous publications include the volume Bibliothek Sarajevo. Literarische Vermessung einer Stadt (2012), which he co-edited. Stefan Hulfeld is Professor of Theatre and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna. His current research agendas focus on theatre historiography and theory. Publications include the chapters “Modernist Theatre” in The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History (2013) and “Antitheatrical Thinking and the Rise of ‘Theatre’” in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age (2017). Branislav Jakovljević  is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at Stanford University. His research focuses on avant-garde and experimental theatre, performance theory, performance and politics, and, currently, radical performance and ethics. His most recent books are Alienation Effects: Performance and SelfManagement in Yugoslavia 1945–1991 (2016) and Smrznuti magarac i drugi eseji [Frozen Donkey and Other Essays, 2017]. Aleksandra Jovićević  is a Professor in the Department of Storia dell’arte e spettacolo at La Sapienza University in Rome, and a coordinator of the doctorate program in Performance Studies at the same department. She is also curator of a book series, Politics and Aesthetics of Performance, for the publisher Bulzoni in Rome. Nihad Kreševljaković  is a historian and cultural manager. He worked as director of the Sarajevo War Theatre SARTR from 2012 until 2016. He is the co-director of the documentary Do you remember Sarajevo? He has been working as a producer at the MESS theatre festival since 1994, where he holds the position of director since 2017. Amela Kreso  is an ensemble actress at the National Theatre Mostar. She started working there during the war and has performed in various roles since then. She graduated from the department for Drama and Acting at the University Džemal Bijedić in Mostar. She also served as the theatre’s artistic director.

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Darko Lukić  is a tenured Professor at the Academy of Dramatic Art and a Professor for Doctoral Studies in Literature, Performing Arts, Film and Culture at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb. Previous publications include Uvod u primijenjeno kazalište [Introduction to Applied Theatre] (2016), Uvod u antropologiju izvedbe [Introduction to Anthropology of Performance] (2013), and Drama ratne traume [War Trauma Drama] (2009). Dino Mustafić  is a Bosnian-Herzegovinian theatre and film director. He holds a degree in directing from the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Sarajevo, where he studied during the city’s siege. He has directed numerous plays throughout the entire Balkan region. He was the director of the international theatre festival MESS. Jeton Neziraj was the artistic director of the National Theatre of Kosovo, and now he is the director of Qendra Multimedia (www.qendra. org), an independent theatre company focused on contemporary drama and theatre. He has written over 20 plays that have been staged and performed in Europe as well as in the USA. Barbara Orel  is Associate Professor of Performing Arts and head of the research group of the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television at the University of Ljubljana. Her areas of research include contemporary European performance theory, politics and culture. She has published in edited collections such as International Performance Research Pedagogies: Towards an Unconditional Discipline? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Borka Pavićević  is a dramaturge, columnist and theatre activist. She was the artistic director of the Belgrade Drama Theatre, a longtime BITEF associate, and part of the artist movement KPGT. She is the founder of the New Sensibility theatre (1981), and in 1994 she founded the Center for Cultural Decontamination, whose numerous activities are focused on fighting nationalism, intolerance and xenophobia. Ksenija Radulović  holds a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts (University of Arts in Belgrade) and is an Assistant Professor at the FDA, teaching History of Theatre and Drama. Her research interests are drama and theatre studies, and her fields of expertise are directing, respectively redefining classics and reinterpreting classical texts.

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Irena Šentevska is an independent researcher and curator. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Arts and Media Theory, University of Arts in Belgrade. Her first book The Swinging 90s: Pozorište i društvena realnost Srbije u 29 slika [Theatre and Social Reality in Serbia in 29 pictures] was published in 2016 by Orion Art, Belgrade. Borut Šeparović  is a theatre and film director currently living and working in Zagreb. He graduated in philosophy and comparative literature and also holds a Masters degree from the Amsterdam University of Arts. He is the founder and artistic director of the prestigious Montažstroj troupe, “a collective that ties different artistic disciplines and media culture in a socially responsible way.”

List of Figures

Introduction Fig. 1 Interior view of the stage in the former cultural center of Pilica [Dom Kulture], located in the territory of Republika Srpska (district of Zvornik), March 2018 (Photo courtesy of Velija Hasanbegović) 10

Stages of Denial: State-Funded Theatres in Serbia and the Yugoslav Wars Fig. 1 San letnje noći [A Midsummer Night’s Dream], National Theatre Belgrade, 1997 (Photo: Miša Mustapić, courtesy of the National Theatre Belgrade) 51

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s National Theatres in the Context of Language Politics During the War Fig. 1 Founding Document of the Ratno Kazalište HVO [HVO war theatre; HVO, i.e. Croatian Defence Council, the military formation of the Bosnian Croats] in Mostar (Photo courtesy of Rusmir Agačević [private archive]) 72 Theatre as Resistance: The Dodona Theatre in Kosovo Fig. 1 Entry of the Dodona Theater (Photo courtesy of Jeton Neziraj) 92 Fig. 2 Actors in the comedy Professor… I am talented… it’s not a joke (sequel) (Photo courtesy of Jeton Neziraj) 93 War Discourse on Institutional Stages: Serbian Theatre 1991–1995 Fig. 1 Troil i Kresida [Troilus and Cressida], Yugoslav Drama Theatre, Belgrade, 1994 (Photo courtesy of Srđa Mirković) 109 xv

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List of Figures

Fig. 2 Poslednji dani čovečanstva [The last days of mankind], Yugoslav Drama Theatre, Belgrade, 1994 (Photo courtesy of Srđa Mirković) 112 Theatre on the Front Lines: Ad Hoc Cabaret in Croatia, 1991–1992 Fig. 1 The actor Mladen Crnobrnja in the play Bratorazvodna parnica. Ad Hoc Cabaret theatre group, 1991 (Photo courtesy of Darko Bavoljak) 140 Within and Beyond Theatre: President Tuđman’s Birthday Celebration at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb Fig. 1 Veliki meštar sviju hulja [The Great Master of All Scoundrels], Zagreb Youth Theatre, 2001 (Photo: Sandra Vitaljić, courtesy of the Zagreb Youth Theatre ZKM) 163 Culture of Dissent, Art of Rebellion: The Psychiatric Hospital as a Theatre Stage in the Work of Zorica Jevremović Fig. 1 Kraljica noći [The Queen of the Night], staged for children of the medical staff of the Laza Lazarević Psychiatric Hospital (Belgrade), 1994 (Photo courtesy of Zorica Jevremović) 189 Fig. 2 Zorica Jevremović quarrelling with the police that stopped the street performance Put u nemoguće ili potraga za boginjom Klio [The Road Towards the Impossible, or the Quest for Goddess Clio], 1995 (Photo courtesy of Zorica Jevremović) 191

Theatre of Diversity and Avant-Garde in Late Socialist Yugoslavia and Beyond: Paradoxes of the Disintegration and Cultural Subversion Fig. 1 The Stage of Political Drama, the cast of Missa in A minor on the cover of the prestigious NIN weekly magazine (Belgrade), June 21, 1981 (Photo courtesy of NIN magazine) 204 Fig. 2 Boj na Kosovu [The battle of Kosovo], National Theatre Subotica, 1989. Picture from performance on September 18, 1992 performed at the Kalemegdan Fortress, Belgrade (Photo courtesy of BITEF theatre) 207

The Theatre Exchange Between Slovenia and the Republics of Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s Fig. 1 Antigone. Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana, co-producer: Wiener Festwochen, 1993 (Photo courtesy of Tone Stojko, Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana) 230 Fig. 2 King Lear. Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana, 1992 (Photo courtesy of Tone Stojko, Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana) 236

List of Figures   

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Strategies for Challenging Official Mythologies in War Trauma Plays: The Croatian Playwright Ivan Vidić Fig. 1 Actress Katarina Bistrović Darvaš as Jela 1 in the play Veliki bijeli zec [Big White Rabbit] by Ivan Vidić, 2004 (Photo N. N., courtesy of the Zagreb Youth Theatre ZKM) 287

Postmodern Antigones: Women in Black and the Performance of Involuntary Memory Fig.  1 Performance Par cipela–jedan život [A Pair of Shoes, One Life]. Women in Black, July 11, 2010 (Photo: Srđan Veljović, courtesy of Women in Black) 302 Fig.  2 Performance Srebrenica 8372. Women in Black, July 7, 2016 (Photo: Srđan Veljović, courtesy of Women in Black) 303

Introduction Stefan Hulfeld, Jana Dolečki and Senad Halilbašić

This volume assembles twelve academic contributions and six statements by theatre practitioners and active participants of the wartime theatre realm under the title Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, with the aim to explore and consolidate a research field that has been opened up in the last decade by a number of monographs and papers. This introduction first raises some general remarks about the volume, its research objectives and its title. Second, it addresses the context behind a photograph (that would have been our choice for the cover), which mirrors some of the preceding remarks. Third, it also provides an overview of the individual chapters and experimentally explores correlations between them. And finally, it initiates reflection upon the further development of the research field promoted by means of this volume.

S. Hulfeld (*) · J. Dolečki · S. Halilbašić  University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] S. Halilbašić e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_1

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“Yugoslav Wars”—A chronological overview of key events

May–June 1991: Rising violence following ethnic tension in Croatia; Croatia and Slovenia declare independence from the SFR Yugoslavia; Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) takes over border areas of Slovenia leading to the Ten-Day War. September 1991: JNA openly attacks areas in Croatia; the Croatian War of Independence starts. October 1991–December 1991: Full-scale armed conflicts are happening throughout Croatia. The Serb entity in Croatia proclaimed its independence as the Republic of Serbian Krajina, but remained unrecognized by any country except Serbia. January 1992: Vance peace plan is signed, creating zones for Serbcontrolled territories, and ending large scale military operations in Croatia; UNPROFOR forces arrive to monitor this peace treaty; the Republic of Macedonia declares independence; Republic of the Serb People of Bosnia and Herzegovina—the future Republika Srpska [Serb Republic]—is proclaimed. April 1992: Bosnia and Herzegovina declares independence; the Bosnian War begins, as well as the siege of Sarajevo that would last for 1425 days in total and result in more than 10,000 people killed by the forces of the JNA and, subsequently, the Army of Republika Srpska. Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is proclaimed, consisting of Serbia and Montenegro and with Slobodan Milošević as president. May 1992: UN impose sanctions against Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, banning all international trade, scientific and technical cooperation, sports and cultural exchanges as well as air travel; Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina became UN members states. March 1993: The Croat-Bosniak War begins, a conflict between the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the self-proclaimed Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia, supported by Croatia. May 1993: International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a body of United Nations, is formed in The Hague, Netherlands. March 1994: Peace treaty between Bosniaks and Croats is signed (Washington Agreement), arbitrated by the United States.

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May 1995: Croatia launches Operation Flash, retaking its territories from the forces of the Republic of Srpska Krajina, followed by the exodus of 11,500–15,000 Serbian refugees. July 1995: Srebrenica genocide reported, with more than 8000 Bosniaks killed by the units of the Army of Republika Srpska under the command of General Ratko Mladić, who is sentenced to life in prison by the ICTY in 2017. August 1995: Croatia launches Operation Storm and reclaims over 70% of its pre-war territory, followed by the exodus of approximately 200,000 Serbian refugees; NATO launches a series of air strikes on Bosnian Serb artillery and other military targets. December 1995: Dayton Agreement signed in Paris, marking the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. March 1998: Fighting breaks out between Yugoslav forces and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Slobodan Milošević sends in troops and police. March 1999: NATO starts the military campaign Operation Allied Force in Kosovo. June 1999: Conflict in Southern Serbia between Albanian militants and Yugoslav security forces begins upon the end of Kosovo War.

1. The title of this volume promises to explore an art form in a geographical area and during a time span defined by the term “Yugoslav wars,” that is to say, the territory of the (Ex-)Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Although the topic-time-place coordinates may seem very fixed to readers not familiar with the complexity of this historical context, we consider that the main concepts of the title and reasons for choosing them need to be addressed. First of all, what does “theatre” mean in this context? And more importantly, can we state that known concepts and definitions of theatre are challenged, extended, accentuated or corrupted in times of acute and violent socio-political transformation, such as war? Looking through some existing major research contributions, and especially those assembled in this volume, a possible answer to the above-mentioned question becomes quite obvious: during times of war, the usual theoretical

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common-places tend to be either shifted, intensified, questioned, or even reversed. Furthermore, widely shared distinctions or dichotomies in the field of aesthetics tend to be blurred. On one side of the spectrum, under exceptional life conditions imposed by the war, the pure fact of maintaining and producing theatre gains a strong meaning, e.g. as a collective act of humanity or in order to maintain “normality” (meaning the “regularity” of everyday life) against all odds. Simply performing and attending theatre, as some texts in this volume show us, may provide efficacious devices to challenge the peril of death and strengthen the will to survive. On the other hand, sometimes this maintaining of “normality,” persisting to produce theatre repertoires as though nothing of stronger social and political significance was happening outside the theatre stage, could be considered the exact opposite—an escape from the responsibility of theatre, as a public space, to communicate with its reality regardless of the consequences this may bring. And it is exactly this ambiguous position that speaks volumes of the effect that theoretical concepts of theatre could bear during wartime. Escapism as one possible function of theatre can result in an act of collective denial, or of sharing hope—and many shades between the two. On another level, and starting from the fact that wartime presupposes a certain national or other homogeneity required for actual combat, theatre can be used as an artistic weapon to fight for national independence and new forms of collective identity. This is crucial in the case of Yugoslav wars, which were fought along ethnic and national lines. Presenting and re-interpreting collective historical myths, as well as fostering “blood and soil” narratives, are the related functions of at least one type of wartime theatre. As some of the contributions in this book demonstrate, most of the state-funded theatres throughout all of the warring countries almost unanimously followed the call for national unification initiated by the dominant political powers (or, in some rare but respectable cases, decided to position themselves precisely against it). Theatre thus became a platform for openly negotiating its political potentials, engagements and responsibilities in the context of very clearly denoted and mediated positions of Us vs. Them. Furthermore, considering some theoretical positions perceiving ethnicity and ethnically based collective “identities” as not only a “requirement” of an ethically motivated war but also its products,1 throughout this volume, theatre will also be evaluated as an active mechanism able not only to reproduce but also to create the patterns of certain national unity.

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As already stated, in the case of ethnically based wars, national denotation becomes one of the most central issues of the discussion on wartime theatre. As we shall see in the presented texts, identification with concepts of nationality took place on different levels and via different modes—from the renaming of institutions (adding the attributes of ­ethnic affiliation), choosing “national” authors and nationally “relevant” topics, staging works in specific language idioms, et cetera. Furthermore, this also happened by means of expulsion—modes of forming nationally defined theatres could also be found in the reality of what was missing from the theatre stages. Authors, actors and theatre professionals of “other” ethnic affiliations suddenly perished from the nationallydefined stages, thus reflecting not only the general wartime atmosphere, focused on naming and removing enemies from the “nation’s body,” but also indicating to what extent theatre was engaged in this process. Of course, one should be aware of the perils of generalization; this is exactly why the theatrical phenomena that escaped implementing the imposed nationalistic rhetoric and its brutal consequences will be further addressed throughout the texts assembled here. Theatrical performances allow one to present oneself in a potentially limited, marginalized or suppressed public sphere and to speak out in disagreement. Individual responsibility can be enacted and postulated; fear and hopelessness can be expressed. However, the wartime context not only challenges the existing concepts in the realm of theatre, but also brings about new ones. For example, the question of whether one should perform theatre during a war becomes a prevailing one, reflecting the ethical position of theatre and its practitioners in the overall scheme of political power and its mechanisms of mediation. This question meanders through most of the texts included in this volume—the mere fact of engaging oneself in theatre production resonates with the theatre practitioners’ diversified ethical concerns during the wars in Yugoslavia. As in this research field, theatre and war relate to the concrete activities of human beings, responsibility becomes a crucial topic: the responsibility of those who produced and witnessed art, or those who made use of performative acts to achieve or promote certain ideological agendas, as well as the responsibility of those who carried out war activities or atrocities. Considering all this, “theatre” in the context of the Yugoslav wars must be understood as a wide notion including all sorts of theatrical interactions, regardless of their organizational form, respectively, their more social or artistic ambitions. The will to act or witness coram

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publico, to establish relationships in order to step out of the logic of war or to take sides, the existential need to communicate, to claim the abovementioned responsibility or to evoke a special kind of reality in a shared space where playful, symbolic, fictional or utopian features can become potentially efficient, serves as a criteria of what has to be explored. There are many historical and scholarly reasons to use “theatre” in the given context as an umbrella term and to abstain from the usual differentiations (cultural performance, performance, activist art, theatricality, performativity, et cetera) at the first level of defining the research area. Only one of these reasons shall be emphasized: the availability of food, water, electricity, financial means, public spheres or the access to public media and communication, are goods that warring factions aim to bring under their control, while the preconditions to establish theatrical interactions on a small scale can hardly be abolished or totally controlled. The organizational forms, spaces, means and aims of theatrical interactions depend greatly on such accidental factors, but their importance, effectiveness or artistic value is not determined by whether people gather in a functioning National Theatre building, an improvized venue, in front of the loading platform of a van, on public squares or streets, or in some private or clandestine spaces. Thus the decision to generally label as “theatre” interactions bearing the potential to create or transform specific realities in a playful or symbolic manner stems from the objective to make very different events comparable and to further explore their interdependencies. This strategic lack of terminological differentiation on the first level allows us to value phenomena which are obvious and hidden, “loud” and “silent,” persistent and ephemeral, while their analysis aims to initiate reflections about divergences and interdependencies in every respect. Obviously, “theatre” during the Yugoslav wars turned out to be highly relevant for opposing or at least different reasons for various groups of people according to their actual life conditions and needs. In the shadow of state-controlled media and comprehensive crises of all sorts, theatrical performances gained a vital communicational significance in negotiating the roots, the state and the future of individuals and communities, in which the framing of the latter with an ethnic, religious, nationalistic and/ or martial zeal conflicted with promoting a multiethnic, multi-confessional, anti-nationalistic and peaceful mode of coexistence. While theatre in Europe generally faced a loss of importance for the community as a means for negotiating social needs and values, theatre in the context of the Yugoslav wars increased its significance in all respects, simultaneously with bloodshed.

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“Yugoslav wars” is another term that is less defined in our context than one might presume. Historians may have depicted (and are still depicting) armed conflicts and war crimes summarized under the term “Yugoslav wars,” they may have analyzed different factors causing these wars in the framework of the breakup of SFR Yugoslavia; and they may have counted approximately how many deaths, casualties or missing persons resulted from these wars (see above: “Yugoslav Wars”—A chronological overview of key events).2 Of course one must be aware of this kind of knowledge; but as “theatre” presupposes that actual persons establish actual relationships in actual spaces during a definite time span, “war” necessarily gains a concrete meaning in this context as well. Theatre in the context of war lacks any abstractness, and instead denotes concrete experiences in concrete situations. Therefore, the notions of war in this particular case could not be more ambiguous and complex— although narrowed down to similar dates and toponyms, the “same” war can be defined and narrated differently, as we can witness by analyzing the current state of historiography and everyday politics in the successor countries. In Croatia, the term “homeland war” or “the war of independence” is still very much used officially to describe the armed conflict that took place on its territory, with attempts to label it an armed conflict with strong traits of civil war still being scrutinized3 and even potentially penalized.4 On the other side, in the official narratives of today’s Serbia, this conflict is predominately called simply the “war in Croatia.” The problem of designating an armed conflict as a war is even more present in the case of the conflicts between Croatian and Bosniak armed forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or in the case of armed combats between the Serbian Army and the Albanian minority in Kosovo. Although a common understanding of these conflicts still cannot be negotiated, and the use of the plural form thus also points to the lack of minimal agreement, the contributions of this volume address this problem by challenging the aforementioned notions, each in its own way. The point of departure for our research activities in this field can be found in two Ph.D. projects currently being led at the University of Vienna, one focusing on theatre during the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the other on wartime theatre in Croatia and Serbia. In need of widening the research field with existing and new approaches to these topics, we organized the conference Theatre During the Yugoslav Wars in November 2015 (while also conducting a seminar for students under the same name in that very semester).5 With this, an international

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research network was eventually established, and in the closing discussion of the conference, the idea for a related book project was brought up. Some major learning steps and changes in our mindsets accompanied its planning and realization, one of which is reflected in the shift of the preposition in the title from the initial “during” to the much wider “in the context of.” We started to define the project as a theatre-historiographical one and broadened our time-span focus to 1999, giving less attention to those approaches pursuing the traces and consequences of war in contemporary performances. One reason for this type of intervention in the temporal determinations of our initial project is found in the fact that, even if the administrative dates of the first and last armed conflicts can be determined to a certain extent, their influence on the state of theatre cannot. Another reason for focusing on a quite narrow time-span, with the dedicated objective of working in the field of theatre historiography, is certainly the urgent need to systematically collect, analyze and debate the remnants of theatrical activities of the war era. While a quite considerable amount of productions are well documented, and some museums, state or theatre archives, and magazines from the region provide important collections and material, a lot of basic research still has to be done, especially when considering those forms of theatre happening outside urban centres and “out of reach” of the media and further public interest. Furthermore, as we have experienced throughout our work on bringing this volume together, some phenomena of wartime theatre, for very different reasons, are still underrepresented in this research field, thus also missing basic analytical treatment (e.g. the wartime theatre activities in Banja Luka). A systematic theoretical framework in organizing and debating this very material that we already know or that we still have to discover was lacking, especially on an international, Englishspeaking level. This was another motivation for the specific focus of our first theatre-historiographical attempts. These are still important goals to achieve when considering our given intentions, but we learned from the contributions in this volume that history in this case decisively affects the present. In many case studies, the past and the present proved to be interwoven in numerous ways, with respect to theatre practice from the 1990s until this very day: therefore, it is difficult to determine whether and when exactly the Yugoslav wars came to an end. The period of war, be it as an armed and executed conflict between two or more opposing political entities or in the form of the

INTRODUCTION 

9

“new wars” of the post-Cold war era,6 can rarely be curtailed by defined initial and final dates. In the case of all the wars fought in the course of Yugoslavia’s breakup in the 1990s, there was never any formal declaration of war by the opposing parties. An end to the wars was mostly achieved through international peace conferences, and they were officially ended by peace agreements, as, for example with the Dayton Agreement in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or with the Kumanovo Agreement in the case of the war in Kosovo. But while the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously defined war as “the continuation of politics by other means,” the editorial team behind this volume was often confronted with the question of whether some present-day events surrounding our research project are not proof that, even in times of declarative peace, there may still exist something like the continuation of war by other means. More than once, we were reminded of the repercussions of the wars on the present; and theatre practice seems to entail a distinct potential to measure the long-term damage on individuals and communities, and to remember what the public discourse wants to define as forgotten or to rage against states of denial. The scandals regularly provoked by the theatrical inquiries of the theatre director Oliver Frljić are only the most distinguished, but not the only proof of this.7 In conclusion, we decided to define the research field using the preposition “in the context” as a “history of the present,” which led us to think about and to adjust the historiographical concept.

2. We experienced the extent to which the temporal determinants of the Yugoslav wars, as well as the notion of theatre, were subverted while preparing this volume—more precisely, in dealing with the choice of a cover photo for the book. Initially intrigued by the photographs presented by Branislav Jakovljević in his lecture at the mentioned conference in Vienna, we engaged in a delicate task of finding a visual expression of the books’ main topics and controversies. While we were successful in finding such a picture, the publisher unfortunately rejected our choice due to its cover design policy. However, the selected photo deserved to become part of this introduction out of different reasons. The mentioned picture, taken by the photographer Velija Hasanbegović in early 2018, impressed us due to its visual message simultaneously being vague and documentary, sufficiently general to

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Fig. 1  Interior view of the stage in the former cultural center of Pilica [Dom Kulture], located in the territory of Republika Srpska (district of Zvornik), March 2018 (Photo courtesy of Velija Hasanbegović)

be placed in different times and places, but at the same time located in a very specific place and within a striking context (Fig. 1). This image, portraying an abandoned space existing somewhere on the border between fact and fiction, storytelling and history-telling, became a conceptual frame we wanted to further address in this introduction in order to distinguish more precisely between the various discourses raised when addressing theatre and war. At first glance, the motif of the devastated stage might be associated with an abandoned venue which has fallen into decay over time. But then, one might recognize the holes and bruises on the concrete walls, as well as the white paint covering graffiti with new graffiti over it, some of it later made unreadable. The former are bullet holes; the latter document an ongoing battle to symbolically take possession of this place of remembrance. One might think that our interest in this photo was raised by its apparent trespassing of the clear border of the war as a “material,”

INTRODUCTION 

11

and theatre as a “medium” of presentation. The war affects theatre in numerous ways, transforming not only its traditional modes of representation but also very often its ways of functioning—there are numerous cases of theatre houses and stages being closed, used as shelters, moved to safer cities or zones, transferring performance times to matinees. But the photograph mainly reminds us of the possibility that a stage can become the scene of atrocities as well. It shows an interior view of the stage in the former cultural centre of Pilica, located in the territory of Republika Srpska, one of the two legal entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The venue was originally built as one of many cultural centres [Dom Kulture] throughout the former Yugoslavia, established with the foundation of the socialist state after World War II in order to provide a space for art and culture in remote and non-urban areas of the country. They were usually used for cultural manifestations, guest performances by theatre groups, concerts, film screenings, et cetera. In the course of the Bosnian War, the Pilica Cultural Centre twice became a scene of horrendous war crimes: up to 750 men and boys of Muslim ethnicity were detained in the centre for several days at the end of May 1992, following the ethnic cleansing of multiple villages in the district of Zvornik. They were supposed to be relocated to the safe area of Sapna, but this never happened: on June 1, 1992, those civilians were taken away from the Cultural Centre by armed forces of the Army of Republika Srpska [Vojska Republike Srpske, VRS], executed in the surrounding areas and buried in mass graves. As part of the genocide that took place in Srebrenica and its surrounding areas in 1995, on July 16, approximately 500 Bosnian-Muslim men and boys were executed by VRS military personnel in the cultural centre of Pilica itself, using automatic weapons and hand grenades. The theatre stage, the storage area beneath the stage and the auditorium became horrendous crime scenes.8 These two documented and prosecuted war crimes in Pilica were not the only cases in the course of the Bosnian War in which a theatrical space turned into a place of the gruesome suffering of innocents, as one of our contributing authors, Branislav Jakovljević, recently pointed out with reference to the case of Čelopek (also located in the district of Zvornik), where the stage of the cultural centre became a torture chamber.9 Showing the image of this specific place of detention and execution in the introduction of an international academic volume dealing

12  S. HULFELD ET AL.

with theatre in the context of the Yugoslav wars reminds us of the most dreadful effect of war and what this conflict meant for those imprisoned in the cultural centre of Pilica and expecting to be killed. We selected it as a memorial sign for this purpose, because the scholarly point of view tends to gain distance and, therefore, lose sight of some unbearable truths, especially by focusing on theatre and those individuals, among others, who had the strength to use it as a playful means of survival or active revolt. Furthermore, we find that this photograph comments on the inability to factually reclaim the end of war and underline one of the numerous ways it still lingers, with or without the complicity of official systems of political power. Once we had received the photos from the actual place and compared them to those taken in the last few years in other contexts, we noticed a certain “graffiti war” taking place on the walls of the venue, which, in the meantime, had became a place of annual commemoration for the victims who had been tortured and killed on the spot. Over the course of just a few years, we could follow nationalistic and other symbols being overwritten in a perpetual continuation of the “war by other means.” Pictures from 2016 show graffiti writing in support of Ratko Mladić, the commanding officer of the Army of Republika Srpska, a war criminal convicted in 2017 as the main person responsible for the very genocide happening here. These graffiti symbols appeared before an annual memorial service, organized by the Udruženje porodica zarobljenih i nestalih lica općine Zvornik10 [Association of the Families of Imprisoned and Missing Persons of the district of Zvornik], held to commemorate the imprisoned victims on May 31, 2016—the commemorating families stated that those symbols had not been present a year earlier.11 In 2018, the letters were covered by black graffiti, probably out of respect for the victims who are commemorated here each year by Bosnian Muslims and other visitors. The image chosen above is the most recent picture available—and, in contrast to pictures taken a year or two ago, it shows a new graffiti sign: on the right side of the stage we see the sign C-C-C-C, a Cyrillic abbreviation of Samo Sloga Srbina Spasava, meaning “only unity saves the Serbs.”12 As the above analysis proves, the stage and the auditorium of the Pilica cultural centre remain a place of post-war wounds and unresolved questions of historiography and responsibility.

INTRODUCTION 

13

3. The arguments for assembling this volume became clear at the above-mentioned conference, where, for the first time since the wars, such a number of acknowledged academics and theatre professionals discussed the wartime theatrical phenomena of a once mutual state, bringing their research and experiences to direct communication. This comparative presentation of knowledge thus simultaneously addressed the position of “the others” (or the former enemies during the conflicts), opening up the discussions to new forms of understanding. The outcomes of the conference were incredibly valuable, as we learned that most theatre theoreticians in the Yugoslav successor states—with few exceptions—deal with related topics in the context of their respective national framework, while their research does not necessarily transcend the boundaries of the new nation states. It is self-evident that each successor state has experienced its own peculiar political and social transformations, and thus requires specific analysis, but by assembling this volume, we wanted to further stimulate present and future research challenging transferrable levels and correlations. As stated above, the contextualization of different forms of theatre with different war experiences could be considered as a first methodological approach to the research field under construction. Out of the individual contributions, one can depict a first map of specific constellations; yet of course, the following way to outline correlations is only one possibility of reading through this volume. The first section of the volume concerns institutionalized theatre under the influence of economic transition, warmongering politics, state control and the rise of nationalism in a relationship of mutual dependence with the Yugoslav wars. The eminent intellectual, dramaturge and activist Borka Pavićević introduces the section with an analysis of the transition period in retrospect (“…privatization. That was the basis: nationalism was an upgrade”), and points out the extent to which a theatre institution mirrors the governmental system. As the artistic director of the Belgrade Drama Theatre, she witnessed the dissemination of jingoistic mindsets until she was dismissed in 1993, amid her struggles to keep the theatre repertoire relevant to the acute reality. Reacting to the uniform official cultural policy concentrated on producing national narratives and presenting its harsh consequences, which she describes in detail. In 1994, she founded the Centre for Cultural Decontamination,

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which very quickly became an important hub for intellectual and artistic resistance in Belgrade. Pavićević’s experiences of being actively engaged in both institutional and non-institutional realms of creative production in Belgrade during the wars provide a unique comparative perspective. As her testimony shows, while the independent theatre scene almost immediately and overtly critically reacted to the horrors of reality (its most prominent agents being the DAH Theatre group13), the statefunded theatres continued their activities in a certain oblivion, pretending that the war was happening to others. Managed mostly by appointed supporters of the regime, and thus under the direct influence of the government, most of the state theatres concentrated on creating repertoires either based on historical narratives (stirring up national sentiments of unity), or providing their audiences with the possibility to “escape” the violent reality. This position is exactly the starting point of Irena Šentevska’s contribution, which discusses official Serbian theatre presenting “spectacles of forgetfulness” during wartime, staging repertoires producing certain amnesia towards the perturbed reality. Furthermore, Šentevska shows how a paradoxical situation, where the state subsidized culture by the highest ever percentage of its budget14 in the midst of one of the harshest economic and social crises in modern European history, resonated on the stages of official theatre institutions, departing from the visual aspects of the staged material. After analyzing examples of lavish productions manifesting the state of denial, she introduces examples of those productions staged in state-funded theatres that expressed an attempt to criticize the positions of power responsible for their own functioning.15 Šentevska shares some part of her main analytical focus with Ksenija Radulović, who also deals with noteworthy productions of state-funded theatre in Belgrade during the wars, such as Troilus and Cressida and The Last Days of Mankind, which were staged in the Yugoslav Drama Theatre (JDP) in 1994. But, while Šentevska, focusing on visual aspects, underscores that theatre remained quite “undramatic” or trapped in aesthetics compared to everyday life, and that observably the institutions generally remained caught in the warmongering system that funded them, Radulović focuses on dramaturgical aspects and criticism, emphasizing how important the discussed performances were for the “minority of citizens who consistently struggled against official policies.” By providing deeper analysis of the productions such as Powder Keg by Dejan Dukovski (1995) or Tamna je noć [Dark Is the Night] by Aleksandar

INTRODUCTION 

15

Popović (1993), Radulović claims that a certain resistance to the “war-mongering nationalist policies and media manipulations” did, however, manifest on the institutional stages in Belgrade, but was, however, sporadic, belated or isolated. Less ambivalent was the activity of the Dodona Theatre in Kosovo’s capital Pristina, a semi-official or half-hidden institution, affectionately described by Jeton Neziraj as a “muse of resistance.” Neziraj shows that the shaky ground upon which this theatre had to assert itself, against all odds, was its source of power. During the 1980s, with nationalism growing among both the Serbian and the Kosovo Albanian inhabitants, and after Serbia severely restricted the autonomous status of the Kosovo in 1989, Kosovo Albanians boycotted the Serbian-dominated institutions and/or were expelled from them. The marginalized majority began to build up clandestine parallel structures, especially schools. Albanian teachers and students of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts also subsequently resumed their lessons in a decrepit building after their eviction. And as theatres were either closed or supervised by Serbs, a children’s and youth theatre with about 160 seats in the suburbs of Pristina became their practice venue. Although a Serbian director was imposed there as well, two notable actors succeeded in preserving the stage for evening performances in Albanian due to a fake contract. Comedies by international authors from the twentieth century were mostly played in the Dodona theatre from 1992–1998, whereas comedy-like ruses were applied to “neutralize” the Serbian director in order to accomplish forbidden tasks such as final exams for the students of the officially non-existent Albanian Faculty of Arts. The Dodona theatre was very successful, and occupies an important place in the cultural memory of many Kosovo Albanians as a “muse of resistance” until today; it put up spiritual resistance against “the national purification of Kosovo,” which first led to war-like events and then resulted in a war. Following Neziraj’s report, this stresses the current endeavor of Kosovar theatre to be a “strong promoter of democratic development” in the end. Generally, it seems that the importance of the Dodona theatre lay in the creation of a public sphere where Albanian was spoken. Similar to this case of Albanian theatre in Kosovo, processes of shaping national theatres through language politics were a key strategy in wartime Bosnia and Herzegovina, as Senad Halilbašić points out. After a survey of the language situation and language politics in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, he refers to the astonishing number of 35 national theatres

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in this federation in 1990, and highlights two illustrative examples of national theatres in Bosnia and Herzegovina at war. First, the National Theatre of the Bosnian Krajina Banja Luka, which, with the outbreak of the Bosnian War in spring 1992, changed its name to become the National Theatre of Krajina, therefore dropping any “Bosnian” attribute. Besides changing its name, this theatre began to communicate exclusively through the Serbian language and with Cyrillic letters, but these were only the exterior signs of the ethnic purification of the theatre ensemble and the respective ethnic cleansing of Banja Luka and its surroundings. Second, Halilbašić describes how the National Theatre of Mostar, established in 1951 on the eastern side of the river Neretva, where the majority of the city’s Bosnian Muslims lived, was briefly abandoned in 1992 due to attacks by Serbian militia, while due to the Croat-Bosniak war, Mostar became a divided city and its National Theatre a no-man’s land. A Croatian National Theatre was founded as early as 1994 on the western side, on the basis of a former theatre enterprise (yet claiming for itself, until today, the founding year 1951), while in the eastern part one remaining actress started to reuse the damaged building, providing theatre courses for young people as well as staging productions with amateur actors. This activity gave rebirth to the National Theatre that still exists today on the eastern side. Again, language was used in this process of division like a “flag of independence,” as the author explains. The National Theatre of united Mostar was a destroyed institution when the only remaining ensemble actress, Hadžija Hadžibajramović, gathered young people and amateur actors there during the shelling of the city. But it had an impact on individuals that prospering theatre institutions usually only pretend to achieve: Amela Kreso, today an ensemble member of the National Theatre who started acting there during the war, describes acting at times of war in a very personal report about her participation in the courses and stagings of that time: “For me personally, acting was some sort of catharsis: as it took place in another world, it permitted me to unwind from all the stress and fear of everyday life. … Theatre ‘saved’ a lot of people in Mostar—those who worked there, as well as those who visited and watched our performances.” Our next section is organized around case studies presenting symptomatic shifts and transformations in the production of theatre under wartime circumstances. Thus, Jana Dolečki writes about the travelling wartime Ad Hoc Cabaret collective that toured the battlefields of Croatia in the beginning of the war in 1991 and 1992. Providing valuable

INTRODUCTION 

17

research based on the existing material documenting the activities of this group, Dolečki analytically contextualizes the moment when a handful of established theatre artists from Croatia decided to take up their art as “weapons” of their own choice, in this way, giving their own answer to the question of whether theatre should stop or continue with its activities while the country is at war. Initiated with a clear goal of providing entertainment and interlude for those audiences caught up in the actuality of ongoing conflicts (soldiers, army personnel, the wounded, refugees, et cetera), Ad Hoc Cabaret performed short humorous skits introducing various characters, fictional and real, confronted with the real conflict. But what Dolečki argues is that this venture not only provided “therapeutic” material for those most affected by combat, but in addition, stimulated their further armed engagement by employing disparaging humour in depicting those presented as the enemy. Furthermore, she postulates that the performative collective abandoned the satirical genre by providing a positive picture of a nationally homogeneous identity, reflecting the ideological concepts of a unified national body required by the official wartime politics. The interplay between positions of power and theatre in its broader sense continues in other contributions of this section. While Dolečki focuses on theatrical activities that shifted outside of traditional theatre walls in order to deliver a political message to those mostly influenced by wartime political decisions, Lada Čale Feldman exhibits how this power actually seeks its own confirmation by taking over the most representative stage: that of a national theatre. She introduces the case of the birthday celebration dedicated to then Croatian President Franjo Tuđman, presented on the main stage of the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb in 1994. Starting from a celebratory event (which, as her text shows, used theatrical material), Čale Feldman examines how socio-political authority was performed on the central stage of a newly-formed nation state. She gives a valuable historical analysis of similar events positioning the sovereign in the centre of the receptive field, and contextualizes the concepts of political spectacle and national cultural memory established by means of stagings. Čale Feldman thoroughly inspects the elements of the above-mentioned performance honouring Tuđman’s 75th birthday, exposing it as a manipulative, populist and propagandistic “performance of power” with one goal: that of re-affirming national unity. Stating that the local theatre community did not adequately react to these and similar manifestations of power in theatre, partly avoiding reflecting their

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own political complicity, Čale Feldman introduces two theatrical examples she finds stood up to the manipulations of that time and critically deconstructed the image of the national authority, such was Tuđman. The play The Great Master of All Scoundrels, adapted from a short story by Miroslav Krleža and directed by Branko Brezovec, premiered in 2001 in the Zagreb Youth Theatre (ZKM), located a few hundred meters from the Croatian National Theatre. Dissecting the above-mentioned birthday celebration and its numerous levels of manipulation, Brezovec actually focused his unambiguous critique on the theatre community that participated in this manifestation of political obedience. Similar but also more explicit use of the same event, provoking similar questions of professional and other responsibility, is to be found in Bakhe [The Bacchae], directed by Oliver Frljić and staged in Split in 2008. In both these examples, Čale Feldman detects a valuable theatrical approach that succeeds, regardless of the real obstacles of such endeavors, in critically deconstructing wartime theatrical activities. The testimonial by Snježana Banović, one of the active participants in this theatre scene contextualized both by Dolečki and Čale Feldman, illustrates how these times were experienced by someone not willing to play along out of pure opportunism. By discussing her own directorial engagement, which gained professional significance precisely as the first armed conflicts were occurring, she reveals the conditions of work in a cultural system heavily disrupted by war. The consequences of her rejecting the imposed national patterns presented on national stages in Croatia at the outbreak of war, as well as her engagement in civil society, were harsh— she was forbidden to work on the official stages in Zagreb and was professionally exiled to smaller provincial stages. By analyzing the repertoire of the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb during the first years of the conflict, Banović detects manipulative practices in stagings of historical plays reaffirming the concepts of Croatian nationhood created not only parallel to national uprisings of the nineteenth century but, more alarmingly, during the Croatian Nazi puppet regime in World War II. Continuing with the notion of “shifted” stages and expanding the aforementioned ethical dilemma that the theatrical community throughout the region faced when confronted with armed combat and its consequences, Milena Dragičević Šešić discusses a rather exclusive example of theatrical dissent from the official cultural systems governed by the state apparatus simultaneously fighting an armed conflict. In her chapter, she goes on to present the work of Zorica Jevremović, a Belgrade-based

INTRODUCTION 

19

theatre artist and activist who, in pursuing her own vision of personal artistic commitment in the context of the wartime reality, opted for a very brave and telling move, shifting her theatrical engagement to the premises of a local psychiatric hospital. As Dragičević Šešić points out, Jevremović somewhat paradoxically found the optimal conditions for executing her creative activities in psychiatric wards, where she continued to lead several workshops and organize a few performances with patients and hospital staff between 1992 and 1995. She not only found the hospital to be a space “out of reach” of the official narratives of nationalism propagated by the state at that time; she also saw it as a suitable and applicable metaphor of a society out of joint, with patients escaping the madness of the reality by resorting to another type of madness. However, Dragičević Šešić shows that Jevremović did not perceive this elusive socio-political position of the psychiatric hospital as a platform for elusive performative material as well—by staging diverse performances composed of different text, music, visual or performance material created during the workshops with the patients, she managed to stage her projects as a paradigm of the outside world, reflecting its power positions and relations, echoing the disrupted conditions of its functioning. The novelty of Jevremović’s approach to the work with patients—in comparison to the known methods and approaches of psychodrama—was the fact that these performances were eventually being performed for an audience, marking this endeavor as a theatrical and thus social event, capable of raising the possibility of such a space as a place of “free” artistic production. By describing the contextual conditions of the dissenting theatre scene in Serbia in the early 1990s from the perspective of an active participant, Dragičević Šešić is not only providing us with beneficial knowledge rarely stated in contemporary academic research, but is also revealing the extent to which Jevremović was unique in the radicalism of her decision to withdraw from the existing forms of theatrical presentation by creating her “detached” creative platform. Furthermore, by introducing this example, Dragičević Šešić addresses the problem of such and similar theatrical events being eliminated from the official cultural memory due to not being initiated or executed by the official national systems of cultural presentations. The final paper of this section, by Ana Dević, presents the case of Kazalište Pozorište Gledališče Teatar (KPGT), the much documented “allstar” theatre group or project initiated in the early 1970s by some of the most progressive Yugoslav theatre practitioners and thinkers of the time.

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Created as a pan-Yugoslav project executing this supra-nationality on all levels of its conception or organization, KPGT was famous for its innovative aesthetics, but also for its innovative organizational practices, operating somewhere “against” and “alongside” institutional theatre and cultural systems. In addition, the group and one of its main creators, theatre director Ljubiša Ristić, gained a reputation for being quite critical towards the Yugoslav socialist system, denouncing certain myths of the Yugoslav political system from their leftist political positions. In her text, Dević provides a comprehensive study of the pre-war functioning of the KPGT, showing the different ways in which Ristić and his collaborators critically tackled the ruling political structures—either by choice of staged repertoire, or by maintaining certain production processes that to some extent avoided the “nuanced” censorship of the state. In the late 1980s, Ristić and his collaborators officially entered state theatre by accepting directorial positions at the National Theatre in Subotica (1985) and Novi Sad (1988), both soon becoming creative hubs for “alternative” theatres from all around Yugoslavia. With the first events pointing to the dissolution of Yugoslavia, KPGT, conceived as an all-Yugoslav theatre project, started to disintegrate too, reflecting the extent to which its intrinsically ideological feature was being corrupted by actual socio-political circumstances. It is exactly this point of crisis that Dević tries to examine more thoroughly, in a commendable effort to detect the way in which these events influenced KPGT’s further developments as well as its initial mission as a highly critical theatrical project. As Dević continues to show, this development took many controversial forms, with Ristić receiving financial and other support from the wife of Slobodan Milošević, Mira Marković, and her political party JUL (the Yugoslav United Left), eventually even becoming the party’s president. By displaying this example, Dević opens up a very relevant discussion on how, and under what circumstances, a politically relevant theatre movement wanting to change the system from within can preserve itself as an “independent” theatre stage. One answer to this question is offered by the testimony of Borut Šeparović, one of the most active and enduring participants of the alternative theatre scene in Croatia since the late 1980s. In the presented excerpt, Šeparović recounts the initial activities of the independent performative group Montažstroj, detecting the extent to which their first productions were influenced by the dissolution of Yugoslavia as well as by the violent nature of the subsequent war. The group was founded

INTRODUCTION 

21

in Zagreb in 1989, and it promoted a very specific type of aesthetics formed around non-verbal theatre and physical performance. According to their own words, the main goal of this “performance unit” was to bring media and pop-culture into a theatrical setting, and their performances were thus distinguished by various pop elements of that time such as techno music, high-endurance dance and MTV-like visual aesthetics. They very soon became nationally recognized and awarded for their innovative approach to theatre practice, even performing at Ristić’s YU Fest theatre festival in 1991, to much acclaim. Interestingly enough, painting an atmosphere of actively doing theatre in Croatia during wartime and in the context of international success, Šeparović recounts just how in 1994 the KPGT group, for him, suddenly switched from being a collective transcending ethnic affiliations into being a representative of the Others. In his statement, Šeparović goes on to show how the unique performative language of Montažstroj was very much created as a reaction to the national theatre scene in Croatia that, in the early 1990s, went into a certain aesthetic stagnation, dedicating itself to nationalistic and historical narratives helping to form the cultural identity of a newly formed state. Although Šeparović eventually left Croatia in 1995 as he lacked financial, but also structural support for continuing his work with Montažstroj, he regularly returned to Zagreb and still engages into theatre projects questioning the “blind spots” of contemporary Croatian society, such as the war and its official representation. By explaining the consequences that one of this projects, the show Generation 91–95, which he directed in 2009, had for its participants, Šeparović concludes with a statement on the possibilities of theatre as a socially engaged discussion platform, apt for executing direct and visible transformations. In the last section of this volume, we assemble several papers discussing theatre production in the context of the Yugoslav wars from different subsequent or external perspectives. In her paper on Slovenian theatre, Barbara Orel shows in what way the conflicts and their direct and indirect consequences influenced the cultural system of a country positioned somewhat outside of the conflict itself during most of the 1990s. Moreover, she examines the extent to which the wartime context shaped theatrical exchange between Slovenia and the newly-formed ex-Yugoslav countries and goes on to present valuable examples of these newly established cultural networks. As Orel shows, once detached from the shared Yugoslav cultural system, institutional Slovenian theatre of the early 1990s began to shift away from the political topics prevalent in

22  S. HULFELD ET AL.

the socialist era and started to stage material in line with the aesthetic movements of Western European theatre. Although not directly presented, the wartime context was still reflected on institutional stages, mostly in the form of a metaphor—as Orel points out, the rise in the number of ancient Greek tragedies staged in the early 1990s, as a comment on the prevailing conditions in neighboring countries and a sort of marking of the position of the Others, proved that the topic of war still occupied a significant part of theatre production. While the state-run theatres confronted the Yugoslav wars indirectly, the independent and alternative theatre scene responded more explicitly to the new state of affairs in the environs. In her text, Orel draws attention to the Ex Ponto theatre festival, founded in Ljubljana in 1993 with a unique ambition of offering a creative social (and eventually also performative) platform for artists who fled the wars, thus forming new possibilities of their “inclusion” in the Slovenian cultural scene. Orel concludes that, although it did not deal consistently with the topic of the wars, Slovenian theatre was nevertheless significantly marked and transformed from “within” by the social consequences of the Yugoslav wars, predominately by providing an artistic refuge to many theatre professionals in search of continuing their professional activities in the less tormented structures of a once mutual cultural space. An Antigone focusing on the fratricidal war between Eteocles against Polynices, written by Dušan Jovanović and staged by Meta Hočevar in 1993, was one of the strongest manifestations of the Slovenian National Theatre in Ljubljana during the wars, and it gained international acclaim. Antigone returns in the chapter by Aleksandra Jovićević, yet in the plural, as a silent chorus with the mission to mourn and remember what the majority denies. Referring to theoretical concepts of remembrance and denial—the twentieth century, with its abhorrent numerous genocides, brought about an extensive reflection on these topics—Jovićević frames the Serbian branch of an international feminist and anti-militarist organization called Women in Black as these Antigones. With their performative acts and installations in public spaces, Women in Black repeatedly mourned and commemorated the estimated 8372 victims of the Srebrenica genocide in Belgrade, where officially until today this historical event of an extremely brutal nature is not considered a genocide.16 Against the postmodern lack of “intense compassion for the extreme suffering of people elsewhere,” the performances and actions of Women in Black “represent a confrontation between past and present, between

INTRODUCTION 

23

forgetting and memory, between a promise to create a place of memory and the effective realization of that promise.” Jovićević emphasizes the persistent activities of these civilians as a “strong collective action,” according to Luc Boltanski, characterized by the factors such as “intentionality,” “incorporation in bodily gestures and movements,” “sacrifice of other possible actions,” the “presence of others,” and “commitment.” When discussing ways of remembering wars and everyday violence from the peripheral position of those deprived of political power, a very valuable reference point is given in the following text by Darko Lukić. Presenting the case of Croatian playwright Ivan Vidić, himself an active participant in the combat in Croatia in the early 1990s, Lukić addresses the question of how personal trauma is transformed into a theatrical testimony. Furthermore, he goes on to show how the “war trauma plays”17 by Vidić and other Croatian playwrights dispute the official wartime narratives, and why the latter were generally “always disobedient to patriarchy, war, nationalism and militarism.” His analysis of the genre, which according to Lukić can neither be considered political nor historical drama, focuses on Ivan Vidić and his plays Groznica [Fever], Bakino srce [Grandmother’s Heart], Octopussy and Veliki bijeli zec [Big White Rabbit]. As the National Theatre in Zagreb (including its production and staging of Tuđman’s birthday celebrations) was a distinctive player in the agenda to stir up patriotism, Vidić and other authors of his kind never had the opportunity to make an appearance on this stage. Grandmother’s Heart, for example, attacked the “cult of the patriarchal family,” in which propagated nationalism and the Nazi-backed Ustasha regime during World War II are closely interwoven. Yet, though their war trauma plays adopted a subversive attitude towards war and post-war mythologies, they never resulted in a counter-program. Lukić argues that this genre shows “deeply-rooted problems with identity on the level of depersonalization and uncertain identities” and therefore acts beyond realism, adopting a “non-position” or a “nowhere position.” A common characteristic of these plays, interpreted as a symptom of this lost position, is the fact that the dramatis personae bear de-individualized names like Grandmother, Grandfather, Mother, Professor, Security Guy, Boss, Uncle, Aunt, Little Sister, Baby, et cetera. War trauma plays operate with private memories, individual histories, and personal myths to escape from both the production of a triumphant history and its official mythologies, as well as counter-history with its respective counter-myths. Though the authors are engaged in deconstruction, they risk being interpreted

24  S. HULFELD ET AL.

as individuals who mythologize their own traumatic experience, from whence stems the major trap in the analysis of war trauma plays. Peter Handke’s play Voyage by Dugout, or the Play of the Film of the War [Die Fahrt im Einbaum oder das Stück zum Film vom Krieg] premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna on June 9, 1999, the day when the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia signed a peace accord with NATO in Kumanovo. The play is part of Handke’s pieces of literature and statements dealing with the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the internationally renowned author’s sympathies for the Serbian standpoint became visible even for non-readers when Handke made his appearance at the funeral ceremony for Slobodan Milošević in 2006, stating “I don’t know the truth.” One has to admit that finding truth is a complex task for a poet of such artistic rank as Handke, and the subtitle of the above-mentioned play bears witness to the difficulties caused by the many layers, between which truth easily vanishes. The chapter by Branislav Jakovljević tackles this complexity with high precision and the respect that both artistic material and truth deserve. The analysis of the setting for the play and the metaphor of the dugout results in a journey in time and space that leads to some of the crucial places where the Yugoslav wars were waged, suffered or judged. The paper discusses the aesthetic questions raised by the play. Jakovljević traces several journeys that Handke made in the region, confronting his writings with what he could or should have witnessed or known, emphasizing obvious errors, omissions and contradictions. In the end, readers are provided with enough information in order to recognize the complicity of the famous bystander Handke, but with this, the paper shifts to emphasize the related key problems at a more general level. Jakovljević first reminds us of a neglected aspect of the Yugoslav wars, pointing out that the “highly visible atrocities such as the siege of Sarajevo and genocide in Srebrenica were inseparable from the bloodless (and also very bloody) crimes that Milošević’s regime ­perpetrated against the citizens of its own country.” Second, he outlines why the intentional omission of this correlation leads to narratives of self-victimization and accusations systematically preventing us from knowing the truth. “The result of all of that,” he states, “is the lack of minimal agreement about the meaning of the Yugoslav wars and about their real outcomes.” A planned contribution about theatre activities in Sarajevo was unfortunately canceled at a late stage in the realization of this book project. With this, the internationally best-known theatre scene, actively

INTRODUCTION 

25

resisting a wartime siege, paradoxically remains underrepresented in this volume. At least there are published pieces of research concerning theatre in wartime Sarajevo, and—to name just a single one—the relevant part of Silvija Jestrovic’s monograph Performance, Space, Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile (2013) comments exemplarily on the overall situation, on individual performances, and on Susan Sontag’s Waiting for Godot in the framework of the cultural life of this city. However, we tried to compensate the missing theoretical approach with two valuable testimonials by artists who were actively involved in the unplanned and unparalleled outbreak of creativity that took place in the cultural scene (and especially in theatre) as a fast reaction to the siege. Nihad Kreševljaković, an intriguing historian and thinker in the realm of Sarajevo’s cultural memory and from 2012 to 2016 the director of the Sarajevski Ratni Teatar SARTR [Sarajevo War Theatre] gives an account of his reflections and activities during the siege, comprising considerations regarding how a “regular” walking speed could be defined in order to avoid being shot by snipers. He reports that such reflections and their impact on one’s own behaviour became some kind of artistic experiences of their own. The blurring of borders between everyday (and night) life determined by the siege, and artistic work as the only self-determined way to cope with the situation, are often evoked in his narratives and in those of other testimonies. The same is true regarding the border between actors and their audience. Kreševljaković relates that he witnessed the most “complete interaction” between these theoretically separated partners that he ever experienced. Dino Mustafić, who started to work as a director staging various plays during the siege and who was later the director of the brave MESS theatre festival, describes performance situations that let us better understand what “complete interaction” probably means. Both seem to have experienced the transformational power that theatre, at its best, can have on what is usually called reality, or on social relationships shaped by mindsets, emotions et cetera. “Every performance in Sarajevo was kind of an apotheosis to life,” says Mustafić. And the last sentences of his account make clear that this potential, in the service of freedom, needs to be revived whatever the circumstances may be. Outsiders can hardly imagine experiences of that kind, but theatre historians, considering several centuries of theatrical practice, would probably deny that lives must be threatened in this specific and atrocious way in order to share the apotheosis of life by means

26  S. HULFELD ET AL.

of theatre. In any case, one can ask questions: for example, whether the experiences in Sarajevo, in Pristina’s Dodona theatre, in Hadžija Hadžibajramović’s theatre workshops and performances in Mostar, or the experiences of actors, actresses, writers and audiences facing extreme life conditions anywhere in the region are comparable. At least the narratives, in which some wartime theatre experiences are evoked, are comparable, and some of the topoi and metaphors are recurring. But if such comparisons should turn out to be unproductive, wrong or even offensive, one could take up one of Mustafić’s assumptions, that only time will tell whether these experiences were “aesthetically relevant.” This is and will be part of the responsibility of theatre scholars, because it seems that theatrical experiences in war zones are described in similar terms and categories,18 even though the attitudes, agendas and their related aesthetics totally differ. Concerning Sarajevo, the opening production of the SARTR mentioned by Kreševljaković and Mustafić—the play Sklonište [Shelter], written by Safet Plakalo and Dubravko Bibanović at the beginning of the siege, with a narrative taking place in an abandoned theatre props room where two unnamed theatre artists debate the sense of theatre and art at times of war—would merit discussion in detail as it is obviously “aesthetically relevant.”19 For example, it features a highly original character, namely the notorious, rather confused but fanciful liar Mina Hauzen, who simply pops up in the shelter from the streets of wartime Sarajevo, rooted in the experiences, fears and fantasies of this period. At the same time, she appears equipped with traits originating from the grotesque, applied by the authors with theatrical knowledge of how obvious liars may transform themselves into midwives of truth when they set foot on stage. To invent a female descendant of Baron Munchausen, who challenges narratives of war agitated in state-controlled media on stage in besieged Sarajevo during a time in which “the truth” is highly manipulated, might be just one of many reasons why Sklonište could one day become part of the world’s cultural heritage. Many specific observations and questions arose as we started to think about connections between the contributions of this volume. We indicated some of them in providing a perspective on the three sections, but what we intended to do moreover was to initiate curiosity and encourage readers to find their own approach to exploring this book.

INTRODUCTION 

27

4. We are quite aware that with this volume we have not reached “completeness” concerning the geographical areas of research (what about the Republic of Macedonia, Republika Srpska?), topics (what about artists in exile?), possible correlations (what about those between theatre and media?), methodological approaches (what about gender studies?) et cetera raised by the title. Some deficiencies are due to coincidences, others to the editors’ awareness of the crucial points and outlines of the addressed research field, which grew while working on this book. Apart from the fact that completeness mostly remains a kind of phantasm, one would in any case have to define assumptions of what kind of completeness would possibly be worth struggling for. In conclusion to this introductory section, we would like to focus generally on some steps in our learning process that we find would be helpful for any future research heading in the same direction. With our notion of “theatre”—explained in the first section of this introduction—we opened up the research field very widely. With the intention of reflecting correlations between selected theatrical phenomena at distant places or within one city, the focus falls on the exploration and explanation of differences and/or similarities, therefore on specific wartime situations, social strata, political agendas or language politics in relation to the choices of theatre makers and activists, and the resulting outcomes of their efforts. One of the best examples of how intriguing it is to think about whether there are hidden ties, telling differences or unexpected points of contact between the cultural life in Belgrade and Sarajevo during the wars is presented in the notable and above-mentioned monograph Performance, Space, Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile (2013) by Silvija Jestrovic. Pointing out differences and starting from a perspective that mostly takes performances and protest actions in the 1990s and early 2000s into analytical focus, Jestrovic defines Belgrade as a “city-as-action” whereas, under the same criteria, she names Sarajevo a “city-as-body.” Furthermore she engages in a very interesting differentiation of her own standpoint, denoting herself as an “insider-who-has-left” (in the Belgrade chapter) or an “intimate outsider” (when she explores the artistic creation flourishing in Sarajevo). Besides the many theoretical perspectives that this book provides for this type of research, Jestrovic positions one’s own standpoint in knowledge production as an important layer. This position of research, which is also

28  S. HULFELD ET AL.

very much visible in our contributions, will become even more relevant as a new generation of scholars, lacking direct experience of the war, start to discover and research topics in the context of Yugoslav wars which have already been tackled or, in some cases, are theoretically unexplored. In addition, as noted above, there are many cities of war and cities of exile that have so far remained rarely noticed. These remarks may further outline the research area, but the crucial point still remains to be labeled. In the majority of the chapters in this volume, as well as in additional readings, there is one topic that recurs in explicit and implicit form, namely the question of artistic responsibility. This comprises reflections as to whether it makes sense to produce theatre or claim the streets for artistic interventions while wars are raging. As we learned through our research and contributions to this volume, such thoughts were of crucial importance to some theatre makers, and completely ignored by others. Asking and answering these questions during wartime did not remain in a theoretical vacuum, but instead had very practical repercussions, such as theatre practitioners voluntarily leaving or being dismissed from their workplaces. To position responsibility as the key concept of future comparative research means to think further about and understand the options theatre makers faced and chose to partake in during the period of armed conflicts. This perceptive approach would be indispensable in order to comment on and fully grasp the choices they made at that time, in respect of their social commitment on the one hand, and, on the other, in respect to the creativity they developed in the framework of their repertoire politics and their chosen aesthetic features. Similar questions would also be applicable for theatre goers. In addition, putting responsibility and related options and choices in the limelight affects the historiographical design in a decisive manner. Concerning the latter, we already pointed out that saving the research material concerning theatrical activities in the context of the Yugoslav wars and making them accessible to a wider public is still an important task. Furthermore, we stated that the past and the present concerning the Yugoslav wars are still closely interwoven, but restricting our thinking to options and responsible choices prevents us furthermore from falling into the trap of seeing historical development as inevitable. Of course, it is important to know much more about “what happened” within and via theatrical activities in the context of the Yugoslav wars, but consciousness that nothing evolved the way it did inevitably, but rather through choices of individuals and communities, is also of

INTRODUCTION 

29

great relevance. What were the options, what were the criteria for these choices? Did reflections on responsible behaviour emerge at all? Were they reserved to individuals, or was there a certain consensus? Questions of this kind could be the starting point for a future theatre-historiographical approach. Crucial considerations and insights on this topic can be found in the volume presented here. On the whole, they concern artists who do not regret their choices of that time or who are—for good reasons—even proud of the decisions they made. On the other hand, there are those who, like Banović, contextually confront their own experiences from today’s point of view, stating that their theatre productions should have “been braver.” Then, there are cases such as those of Ljubiša Ristić or Peter Handke, analyzed in the two relevant contributions, providing complex perspectives for us to question the concept of the artistic responsibility. And lastly, there are those responsible for repertoires, plays or performances that seemed neither artistically relevant nor guided by ethical principles, which are barely present in this volume. It is obviously not easy to speak about the less brave choices, about having instrumentalized an art form as a weapon in service of those who promoted or waged war, or about the sense of shame that stems from such activities. Nevertheless, one can hardly avoid such difficulties, because the full range of more or less responsible (artistic) choices must be discussed in order to get a measure of mutual correlations between different cultural spheres. Theatre scholars are experts in discussing artistic responsibility, and in such discussions general questions of responsibility will be inescapably mirrored—pursuing such a research agenda could at least aim to contribute to a “minimal agreement about the meaning of the Yugoslav wars and about their real outcomes.”

Notes

1. See Dubravka Žarkov, The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007). 2. For a more general overview on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, see for example John B. Allcock, Marko Milivojević, and John Joseph Horton, eds., Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1998); Catherine Baker, The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Lenard J. Cohen, and Jasna Dragović-Soso, eds., State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe: New

30  S. HULFELD ET AL.







Perspectives on Yugoslavia’s Disintegration (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2007); Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (Indiana University: Penguin Books, 1996); Joel Martin Halpern and David A. Kideckel, eds., Neighbors at War: Anthropological Perspectives on Yugoslav Ethnicity, Culture, and History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Dejan Jović, Yugoslavia: A State That Withered Away (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2009); Branka Magaš, The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-Up 1980–92 (New York: Verso, 1993); Aleksandar Pavković, The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism and War in the Balkans (London: Macmillan Press LTD, 1997); and Carole Rogel Poirier, The Breakup of Yugoslavia and Its Aftermath (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 2004). 3. The most recent debate on this question took place in October 2017, when the Croatian prime minister Andrej Plenković, provoked by a statement by the Serbian minister of defense, Aleksandar Vulin, said that “no civil war was ever fought in Croatia.” See https://www.vecernji.hr/ vijesti/andrej-plenkovic-aleksandar-vulin-milan-tepic-1198393. Accessed April 30, 2018. 4. In 2015, Ivan Turudić, the president of the County Court in Zagreb, proposed imprisonment for all those who say that “the Homeland War was a civil war.” See https://www.jutarnji.hr/vijesti/hrvatska/trazim-zatvor-za-sve-koji-kazu-da-je-domovinski-rat-bio-gradanski-a-akcija-olujaetnicko-ciscenje/488407/. Accessed April 30, 2018. 5. See http://tdyw2015.univie.ac.at. Accessed April 30, 2018. 6. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 7. Oliver Frljić (b. 1976) is a playwright, director and theorist who investigates the political and social anomalies of the societies where he directs, transposing these problems onto the scene, choosing an uncompromising directorial style. Frljić’s work often arouses controversy and resistance from various centres of power (see examples of Đinđić staged in Belgrade theatre Atelje 212 in 2012; Izbrisani [Erased] staged in the Slovenian Prešernovo gledališče Kranj in 2013; Balkan macht frei staged in Residenztheater Munich, Germany, in 2015; Naše nasilje vaše nasilje [Our Violence and Your Violence], Aleksandra Zec and Hrvatsko glumište [Croatian Theatre] staged in the Croatian National Theatre Rijeka in 2016 and 2017; Klątwa [The Curse] staged at Powszechny Theatre Warsaw in 2017, et cetera). His plays are characterized by unique and recognizable poetics, always on the verge of broader social or political conflict, challenging and provoking our common state of mind. For more on Frljić, see Florian Malzacher, ed., Not Just a Mirror. Looking for the Political Theatre Today: Performing Urgency 1 (Berlin: Alexander Verlag,

INTRODUCTION 















31

2015); Vlad Beronja and Stijn Vervaet, eds., Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture, 83–99 (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2016). 8.  United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Srebrenica Investigation: Summary of Forensic Evidence— Execution Points and Mass Graves, http://stroga.anonima.free.fr/srebrenica/srebrenica_evidences.pdf. Accessed April 25, 2018. 9. Branislav Jakovljević, “Zvornik 1992. Diletantske inscenacije i teatar zločina,” Peščanik, September 12, 2016, https://pescanik.net/ zvornik-1992-diletantske-inscenacije-teatar-zlocina/. Accessed April 30, 2018. Jakovljević presented an English version of this paper at the conference Theatre During the Yugoslav Wars, from where we learned that such horrifying incidents happened in various Dom Kulture [Cultural Centres]. 10. See http://www.zv-udruzenje.info. Accessed April 30, 2018. 11. See  http://www.direktno24h.com/porodice-ubijenih-zvornicana-docekali-uvredljivi-grafiti-na-zidinama-doma-kulture-u-pilici. Accessed April 30, 2018. 12.  A cultural code, which Serbian tradition attributes to St. Sava in the twelfth century, used by Chetniks during the World War II. It began to reappear among Serbian nationalists in the 1980s, even ending up in official use in Slobodan Milošević’s propaganda apparatus. It may be just a matter of time until this Serbian nationalist code on the wall of a crime scene against Bosnian Muslims is again erased—and until the next one is sprayed on. 13. See Dennis Barnett, ed., DAH Theatre: A Sourcebook (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016). 14. In a public panel discussion organized at the Sarajevo MESS Festival, the Serbian director Gorčin Stojanović stated that “those were the Pericles times of Serbian culture … with as much as 3% of the national budget being appointed to the cultural sector.” Gorčin Stojanović, recording of panel discussion “Teatar u ratu/Rat u teatru,” MESS Theatre Festival, Sarajevo, October 7, 2016. 15. For more examples, see Irena Šentevska, Swinging 90s: pozorište i društvena realnost Srbije u 29 slika (Belgrade: Orion Art, 2016). 16. On the controversies concerning the terminology and definition of the Srebrenica massacre, see John Carey, William V. Dunlap, and R. John Pritchard, eds., International Humanitarian Law: Origins, Challenges, Prospects (Ardsley: Transnational Publishers, 2003), 270; Clotilde Pegorier, Ethnic Cleansing: A Legal Qualification (Oxford: Routledge, 2013), 151; and William A. Schabas, Genocide in nternational Law: The

32  S. HULFELD ET AL. Crimes of Crimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 197. For the most recent official position, see for example this interview with Ana Brnabić, Serbian prime minister as of June 29, 2017: http://www. novosti.rs/vesti/naslovna/politika/aktuelno.289.html:705402-Brnabic-Srebrenica-nije-genocid. Accessed April 28, 2018. 17. One part of Lukić’s academic research is dedicated to the question of war trauma, and more precisely, focuses on the notion of “war trauma playwriting,” a specific form of the genre of trauma literature, established in his book Drama ratne traume (Zagreb: Meandar Media, 2009). 18. Further narratives of this kind (e.g. “it was like the magic of the theatre was protecting us”) concerning Osijek, Zadar and Dubrovnik are reported in Sanja Nikčević, “Croatian Theatre and the War 1992–1994,” in Theatre and Performance in Eastern Europe, The Changing Scene, eds. Dennis Barnett and Arthur Skelton (Lanham MD/Toronto/Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, 2008), 181–191. 19.  See Senad Halilbašić. “Die Illusion, ein normales Leben zu führen… (Realitäts-)flucht und Illusion im Theater während der Sarajevoer Belagerung 1992–1995,” in escape. Strategien des Entkommens, ed. Nicole Kandioler, Urlich Meurer, Vrääth Öhner, and Andrea Seier, June 16, 2016. http://escape.univie.ac.at/die-illusion-ein-normales-leben-zufuehren. Accessed April 30, 2018.

Works

cited

Barnett, Dennis, and Arthur Skelton, eds. Theatre and Performance in Eastern Europe: The Changing Scene. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2008. Barnett, Dennis, ed. DAH Theatre: A Sourcebook. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. Beronja, Vlad, and Stijn Vervaet, eds. Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture, 83–99. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. Carey, John, William V. Dunlap, and R. John Pritchard, eds. International Humanitarian Law: Origins, Challenges, Prospects. Ardsley: Transnational Publishers, 2003. Diklić, Davor. Teatar u ratnom Sarajevu 1992–1995. Sarajevo: Biblioteka Manhattan, 2004. Halilbašić, Senad. “Die Illusion, ein normales Leben zu führen… (Realitäts-) flucht und Illusion im Theater während der Sarajevoer Belagerung 1992– 1995.” In escape. Strategien des Entkommens, edited by Nicole Kandioler, Urlich Meurer, Vrääth Öhner, and Andrea Seier, June 16, 2016. http:// escape.univie.ac.at/die-illusion-ein-normales-leben-zu-fuehren. Accessed April 26, 2018.

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Jakovljević, Branislav. “Zvornik 1992. Diletantske inscenacije i teatar zločina.” Peščanik, September 12, 2016. https://pescanik.net/zvornik-1992-diletantske-inscenacije-teatar-zlocina. Accessed April 30, 2018. Jestrovic, Silvija. Performance, Space, Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Kaldor, Mary. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Lukić, Darko. Drama ratne traume. Zagreb: Meandar Media, 2009. Malzacher, Florian, ed. Not Just a Mirror. Looking for the Political Theatre Today: Performing Urgency 1. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2015. Pegorier, Clotilde. Ethnic Cleansing: A Legal Qualification. Oxford: Routledge, 2013. Schabas, William A. Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Sušec Michieli, Barbara. “The Disappearing Balkans. National Theatres and Geopolitics.” In National Theatres in a Changing Europe, edited by Steve Wilmer, 196–203. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

PART I

Mobilisation of Theatre Institutions

Testimony Borka Pavićević Borka Pavićević

Activist, Belgrade

Centre for Cultural Decontamination, Belgrade (June 28, 2016) History always seems to repeat itself, but not in the form of analogies. Instead, it seems to take form in the shapes of those analogies. In my opinion, it all began before the war; or more precisely, the turning point where we could see that something was about to happen was the 8th Session of the Central Committee of the Serbian Communist Party in 1987. Even at that point, we could see that everything was being prepared. We saw the engagement of various people; we saw interviews; we saw the “public opinion.” We could see that the whole thing was headed towards nationalism. If only all the anti-war initiatives could have come together and prevailed at that point, I am sure that the war would not have happened at all. So, for me, it all began there: with the elections, the street spectacles, the cranes, billboards and all the forms of populism that took place at that time. It then became clear how the 1990s were going to be and B. Pavićević (*)  Center for Cultural Decontamination Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_2

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how they were going to look, but we could not foresee that it would end up being so dreadful. It all comes from this unbelievable paradox. We read so much about it. We saw so many films and television shows about it, but it is somehow unbelievable that we never foresaw it ­happening again. We were just not capable of recognizing it. Maybe only those who were familiar with Bosnia could predict the extent of things to come. The form of war that took place in former Yugoslavia was nothing more than a process of transforming a political system, or, as we now refer to it: privatization. That was the basis: nationalism was an upgrade. For instance, Slobodan Milošević instated a new law on the nationalization of state ownership in 1989; and the specificities of Yugoslavia lie precisely in that moment. Yugoslav socialism had the concept of social ownership. Yet we still must not forget that a vast number of intellectuals played a decisive role in the disintegration of Yugoslavia. What was the role of theatre in all of this? I do not think that we talk about it enough, about the role of theatre during the war. Beyond a doubt, it is very difficult to talk about, as the war and all the other things that were taking place were really dreadful. How do you talk about that? We tried various things, we protested, we were active in the civil resistance, we staged public performances—at least we did something. However, all of this becomes meaningless when you realize that people were being bombed in Sarajevo for four years. Then you ask yourself about the meaning of such actions. Nevertheless, it is very important to talk about those times, to testify, although I am personally always worried that all this repetition of the same stories will make them somehow seem banal. At the beginning of the war, I was the artistic director at the Belgrade Drama Theatre. What is interesting about this theatre is that the first major strike took place there: we protested with the goal of making the artistic administration of the theatre responsible for the management of the theatre. We thought that a theatre could not be managed while having its financial department functioning separately from its production department: that made no sense to us at all. The strike itself may have been more focused on the fact that the theatre had planned to stage Vučjak [Wolfhound] a play by Miroslav Krleža, and the management was against that play being part of the repertoire. They justified themselves by saying that we did not need Krleža, a Croatian author, at that time. So you can understand against whom this decision was directed. One day I came to the theatre and saw that an entire display case, containing photos of Tito and Krleža from the performance of

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the play in 1957, had been completely demolished. Furthermore, some of the people targeted by these actions also worked in the theatre, like Rade Šerbedžija, Žarko Laušević, among others. In fact, a theatre house is a lot like a state, because, in a way, the theatre is a reproduction of the state. This is how I began to understand that there are people who are based within theatres and those outside of them. There are always people from within, who are on the payroll, and then those people from outside, the freelancers. Some of those freelancers may be people of other nationalities, which can work well for a theatre, and the Belgrade Drama Theatre had a lot of freelancers whose surnames did not end with “-ić.” But those outsiders, the freelancers, provided an opportunity for the theatre to be able to reject anything that was different—such as different nationalities. Then I began to realize that some of the people employed by the theatre were subverting the theatre itself. For instance, we organized matinee performances and friends would call me asking whether I had any extra tickets for them. I would reply surprised, telling them that tickets were available at the ticket office. Then I realized that the people answering our phones were deliberately saying that performances were sold out, so that they would not have to work during the day. I found these types of disruptions from within quite amazing. I was never able to explain to anyone from within the theatre that the ­freelancers were not taking their jobs and money away. It was all about protecting their positions, their “territory.” The censorship with which I was confronted was never direct, but it occurred in specific forms. For instance, we would receive ­ letters addressed to our freelance actor, Rade Šerbedžija, saying that he should go back to Croatia and perform for the Croatian president at the time, Franjo Tuđman. Or we would receive bomb threats and the like. I will never forget the day when our doorman came into work wearing a Serbian armed forces uniform, with a big copper shell standing next to him. I remember telling him that this was a theatre and asking him what he was doing sitting there in that uniform. He replied “you are all going to see one day.” Then when Sarajevo happened, we received even more letters and threats. Haris Burina, one of the actors employed at the time, was staying in my father’s apartment, since the theatre was trying to cut down on costs. During one of the performances of the play Burn Me! people broke into the apartment and attacked his wife. They put a gun to her head! I went to report the incident to the police, and they convinced me that it was just an isolated incident.

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Then, in 1993, I took part in a big travel of Belgrade independent intellectuals to Paris, along with Goran Marković, Mira Miočinović, Bogdan Bogdanović among others. We participated in an open discussion in the FNAC library, with Predrag Matvejević moderating the conversation. Then the scandal took place: we declared that a fascist regime had taken over Serbia, and the attendees started to attack us. We were escorted away into a hall. We were nearly physically attacked by members of our diaspora, who are always more heavily manipulated than people living in Serbia. When we returned to Belgrade, we were welcomed by articles declaring that we were traitors and the like. That rage grew worse and worse with each day, but we survived the media witchhunt. I remember how I went to the theatre one day, and the director asked to see me. He told me that he had to drink two glasses of whisky before talking to me, and I immediately knew what he was going to say. I knew that I was being let go. Interestingly enough, though, that scandal was only one of the reasons I was asked to leave—a contextual ­reason, so to speak. One of the other reasons was a subversive action that we had undertaken with the performance of Seven Against Thebes during the fall of Vukovar. At the end of the play, Uliks Fehmiu, who played a guard, had a line that went something like “and to hell with everyone, Filoctetes and all of you, now I hold the power!” But Uliks was not able to work through that line. He could not find the right way to do it. At the time, however, the organization Bela Ruža was holding a rally in Belgrade, with Biljana Plavšić as one of the speakers. Then my friend calls me and says “Look Borka, look who is standing next to Biljana Plavšić!” and I recognize our theatre secretary there, standing proudly in a white suit. This was a man who constantly placed representative state photos and declarations in our display case—of which I did not have a key. Then, during our last rehearsal for the play, Uliks put on a fascist uniform—with a white suit over it just like the one our secretary had. Then he uttered the final line of the play while taking off the white suit, thereby remaining in the uniform. Our theatre secretary walked out of the audience. Theatre is a miracle, whether deliberate or not. That was the end of the story. I left the Belgrade Drama Theatre and slowly began to develop my ideas for the Centre for Cultural Decontamination. So about the repertoire… I had to do something with that theatre when I arrived. It was a very marginalized theatre at that point in time. I tried to give it a level of significance, and I tried to do that via the repertoire. I tried to combine “classics” with relevant modern and

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contemporary theatre. I knew that we had to have some “hits” in order to finance some of the other things we were staging. I tried to create some sort of a patchwork repertoire. We had hits like Burn Me! And The Glass Menagerie, but we also had Waiting for Godot, which premiered on June 25, the same day the first Yugoslav National Army tanks left Belgrade and headed towards the borders. That play was already heavily situated within its context—it was simultaneously staged in two states: Yugoslavia as we once knew it and this new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It was the last play that summoned all the Yugoslav cultural elites, critics came from all of the states… I remember how Rade Šerbedžija and Ljuba Tadić were constantly running back and forth during the show to watch the TV broadcast of the Yugoslav parliamentary session. With Burn Me!, we tried to introduce the new repertoire. You could see how the people working on that repertoire, like Alisa Stojanović, Radmila Vojvodić, Dušan Jovanović, Sonja Vukićević, Mira Karanović, somehow connected the past with the present context, and how a new form of theatre was being produced. One does not do that consciously, however. You do not sit down and tell yourself “okay, this is how we are going to make our repertoire.” Only by choosing the people with whom you work, the topics of your creative preoccupation, can you slowly build your repertoire. It forms because you are choosing the things that best correspond with the specific context. Of course, one cannot build a repertoire without a context. You are always thematizing it. However, that repertoire did not have a direct political influence. Those plays were not explicitly anti-war. It was not that this type of theatre was an impossibility, but I guess that back then I thought that such a theatre could not be created within the context of an institution like the Belgrade Drama Theatre. Strangely enough, public interest in our theatre grew during that time. I thereby recognized that there was a certain need for that type of theatre. The plays we staged during that early phase of my engagement there were the most enduring ones. However, some of them were not able to continue, due to specific circumstances, such as actors leaving Belgrade, among others. Parallel to my activities at the Belgrade Drama Theatre, I was active in the context of the Belgrade Circle, within which the notorious Druga Srbija [The Other Serbia] was being created with authors, discussion circles, talks, books and so on. We had those sessions together and started thinking about doing something for the sake of all of the ideas

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presented in the sessions, in order to see how all those discussions could look in an oneiric form—in a theatrical, sensual sense—and we started planning the development of a new cultural centre. We even wanted to have an impact through its name, so we decided to call the place Centre for Cultural Decontamination. The centre was envisaged as a c­ultural annex for all the actions and performances that were taking place at that time. For example, we would do these “Magical Cloth” performances. They were very popular back then, during the sanctions. The real product was advertised in the media. I remember some opera singers advertised it as well. We had a performance where we took the TV broadcast of Ratko Mladić entering Srebrenica, and had the actress, Sonja Vukićević, trying to clean that image off the TV screen with a cloth. That performance eventually led to the Macbeth performance, which was then performed in the street in front of the police cordon at the 1996 anti-government protests. The Centre itself was opened with the Albert Camus play The Possessed. Then we staged Danilo Kiš. We staged these classics in order not only to correspond with other parts of our program (lectures, ­exhibitions and discussions), but also to confront the culture of kitsch that ruled at the time. They were chosen as a form of protest. You have to understand the context during that time. During the war, the public was very fragmented. Some were reading the newspaper Politika and watching national television, others were reading the magazine Vreme and watching channel B92 on television. However, this was more of an “agreed public,” which is something we now know of as the “public opinion,” and that had nothing to do with the public. The main question then became: who has greater influence and who is mainstreaming the information? Different groups look at the same things in ideologically different ways. In The Possessed, a play by Albert Camus that we staged for the opening of the Centre, there was one line that summed it all up. It states that terror is not solely based on the force exerted by those who are doing the terrorizing, but it is also based in the weaknesses of the liberals. The Centre had its own specific context as well, its own cultural ­heritage, and this is why we tried to tackle the questions of cultural continuity and discontinuity. If you would look at the repertoire of the Centre, it almost seems unbelievable for that time: Kafka, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Broch. You are always aware of your context. However, being accurate is a question of fate, just like theatre is. Everything is connected on

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different levels. You have one historical stream, which is also your own ­historical stream. The important thing with the Centre is that it creates a certain energy that attracts people who have something in common and who like what you do. It has always been like that. The Centre is not about me, but about all of my collaborators, friends and associates. Theatre was able to and managed to do a lot during the war. It is able to generate a kind of pressure on society, and that is very important. Sometimes that also takes place on a personal level—it all starts from the individual that recognizes their context and the processes taking place within it. Then one simply tries to transmit this idea further, through different forms of creativity that can have some kind of an influence. However, one must also not forget how much we were influenced by the transition from the modern into a post-modern world, where this type of relativization was nothing more than escapism. There are many ­processes one needs to bear in mind, and this requires a more general analysis, which is very important for understanding our positions both then and now. In my opinion, there is no such thing as conditions of historical distance for presenting war on stage. For instance, we always tried to do and to present things in the Centre while they were actually happening—­ an exhibition on Sarajevo while it was under siege, or discussions with Slobodan Šnajder or Lordan Zafranović, among many others. Then when we think of the form of theatre… What doesn’t become theatre here? We used to have discussions and panels at the Centre that were more theatrical than the theatre itself. One of the major problems in our theatre is the system of positioning theatre management along party lines: that is a real problem when the government can directly influence theatre administration. Then you have another problem: the rapid de-intellectualization of theatres. It is very important that a theatre keeps its openness, its chain of events, that it brings people from the outside in, to discuss, suggest, criticize… When I was working at the Atelje 212 Theatre in Belgrade before the war, it functioned along those exact principles. We all went there to talk and to discuss our ideas, because the theatre is certainly not a private space. It is a public one.

Stages of Denial: State-Funded Theatres in Serbia and the Yugoslav Wars Irena Šentevska

Introduction: Theatre on Shaky Ground In the 1990s, the Serbian theatre system entered slowly and belatedly a process of transformations which visibly changed the theatre landscape in comparison to the models of management, production, financing, PR and artistic premises inherited from the socialist period. This study focuses on what changed the least in the state-funded theatres—and on their social roles in pacifying or mobilizing theatre audiences1 for participation in (or revolt against) the political projects pursued on the frontlines of the ongoing wars. I look at the ways in which theatre in Serbia coped with the war reality of the 1990s, from a rather specific viewpoint—its visual language. This study argues for a more refined understanding of the social use of the theatre in this specific context, and attempts to reach a more universal level of comprehension of the ways in which theatre uses its complex arsenal of expressive resources to respond to extreme situations of social crisis.

I. Šentevska (*)  Department of Arts and Media Theory, University of Arts in Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_3

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During the 1990s, the theatregoer in Serbia had to simultaneously experience several different political, social and economical processes— the political democratization and the introduction of multi-party government; transfer of the state property to private ownership; collapse of both public and private sectors; waves of hyperinflation and the galloping devaluation of labour; amassing of private capital accompanied with illegal operations in legal businesses, etc. In addition, staggering waves of migration saw an influx of refugees from the war-afflicted areas as well as the mass emigration of the cheaply educated population; corruption spread throughout the judicial, health care and education systems; and the economic and cultural sanctions imposed isolation. Despite Serbia’s proclaimed neutrality in the war, there were successive waves of army drafts accompanied by the rise of chauvinism and outbreak of xenophobia “in defense of ” patriotic values and national legacies. The deregulation of the media was followed by a collapse of professional standards and a monopoly on current affairs reporting by Radio Television Serbia. The global hegemony of the mass media industry was embodied in local turbo-folk idioms and what was known as the Pink Culture. In the context of the transitional restructuring of the post-socialist national states, theatre became part of the inherited infrastructure governed by the political leadership. Theatre was thus expected, in a largely democratic manner (without explicit censorship), to follow the political agenda of the state and to reproduce the ideological premises which underlie the new order. The art world in the majority of post-socialist countries retained and even consolidated its social and political prerogative. In the other post-socialist countries, the 1990s were a decade of the transformation of production models2 in which the rigid system of state support for institutions gave way to project funding, internationalization, networking and rise of the independent art scene with contributions from private and public foundations, the European Union, the Council of Europe and corporate sponsors. In Serbia, because of UN sanctions and the international isolation, this transformation amounted only to occasional assistance for the feeble independent scene. Statefunded institutions remained largely untouched by these reform processes, which contributed additionally to the atmosphere of lethargy and systemic inertia. Thus, the regime continued to give generous support to international events inherited from socialist times (such as BITEF, the Belgrade International Theatre Festival)3 in order to maintain the illusion that, despite the sanctions, everything stays the same and Belgrade is

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still what it once was. Notwithstanding the distinct tendency to maintain the status quo in every single aspect of production, and in the changed cultural landscape, theatres in Serbia were still very well attended during this period. The establishment theatres developed various strategies for dealing with reality and the bitter truth that they found themselves in the gap between the pseudo-totalitarian regime pursuing policies which had overall catastrophic results (whose budgets nevertheless were still financing theatres), and their self-proclaimed artistic and social objectives.

Nation and Narration: Interpretations of the Tradition and Crisis of National Identity As in some other countries of the post-socialist realm, the 1990s in Serbia was a period of major reconstruction of the national identity, which a decade earlier had been various combinations of Yugoslav, Serbian, Montenegrin and other identities. The rise of national revisionist historiographies throughout Yugoslavia “took the shape of aggressive nationalist and mutually competing victim centered narratives”4 which resulted in the entrance of “dead bodies”5 on theatre stages. They played at the same time both artistic and political roles.6 As for Serbia, In those years our repertoires were dominated, as certain theatre professionals later somewhat dismissively called them, “S productions” … is the commonplace notion of the local theatre community. No less common is the opinion that the works in question were markedly anachronistic in terms of stage expression and manipulative on the semantic level, and that, in reverse proportion to their increasing presence in the repertoire, they failed to have almost any aesthetical effect on our theatre life.7

Notwithstanding the genuine motives and the national resentment of the authors (which may have been utterly different), some notable examples of “S-ploitation” in the Serbian theatre include for example the 1980s productions of Golubnjača (Serbian National Theatre, Novi Sad); Seoba Srbalja (National Theatre, Belgrade); Propast carstva srpskoga (Atelje 212); KPGT’s “socialist musical” Tajna Crne ruke; Kolubarska bitka (Yugoslav Drama Theatre) and Sveti Sava (National Theatre, Zenica).8 This list includes productions with “Kosovo themes” which either recounted the events of the famous medieval battle in 1389 or the plights of contemporary Serbs in the turbulent Southern province.9

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In this (late-socialist) period, both the distant medieval past and the more recent period of constitution of the Serbian bourgeoisie were “subjects of permanent glorification.”10 As noted by Elin Diamond, “the past is always under construction.”11 In Serbia in the 1990s, whether because of the preceding decades in which disparate national identities were suppressed for ideological and political reasons, or due to something completely different, the focus for reconstituting personal and collective identity was the national-ethnicreligious complex. This inevitably left its mark on the theatre, especially in the dominant drama production. Thus, in the 1990s, productions which aspired to reflect social issues approached the problem of transformation of national identity and interpretation of the national heritage in different ways. There were basically two approaches to the visualization of national themes on stage. The first approach is a spectacular staging of canonical literary pieces, usually with biographic content. The dramatic biography of the Montenegrin nobleman Maksim Crnojević (1457–1528), written by the romantic poet Laza Kostić and set in lavish Venetian interiors and wild Montenegrin exteriors, was staged at the National Theatre in Belgrade in April 2000 as one of the most important plays from the Serbian theatre of the romanticist era. The play, often referred to as “Serbian Hamlet,” was first published in 1866 and opened at the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad in 1869. Geroslav Zarić’s set design situated the play with precision in its historical and geographic context, emphasizing the contrast between scenes set in Venice and Montenegro. However, certain modernist stylizations occasionally suggest the eternal nature of the human drama. Continuing this visual concept, Božana Jovanović’s highly aestheticized costumes were embedded in the period, but with a discrete, Armani-inspired modern touch. In this way, Maksim Crnojević’s intimate tragedy was communicated with exhaustive use of spectacular stage imagery. If the production of Maksim Crnojević glorified the antiquity of the nation, according to Benedict Anderson’s remark that “image of antiquity (is) so central to the subjective idea of the nation,”12 a second and different approach to visualization of the national literary heritage was adopted in cases of displacement of plays from their historically context and their topicalization, “translation” into the present tense. In the year of NATO’s military intervention in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1999),13 director Gorčin Stojanović staged Jovan Sterija Popović’s

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Rodoljupci [The Patriots], his “jolly play in five acts” and the “private history” of the Serbian national movement in the Habsburg Empire, inspired by the revolutionary events of 1848–1849. In Serbia’s literary canon, this is a paradigmatic comedy on the hypocrisy of trading in patriotism and other people’s lives. In this case, it was placed in the context of current political hypocrisy. The visual key to its currency is now different: the design of the production is completely removed from its historical context. Everything takes place in a contemporary interior of pseudo-industrial architecture, monumental in scale and dominated by a grey concrete wall with features such as hydrants, vents, fire ladders and evacuation doors. In this interpretation, Sterija’s characters are “grotesque creatures which live somewhere underground and observe what is going on in the outer world through the grilles of the vents.”14 This ambiance may also be read as a cargo hold, an atomic shelter or a refugee camp. The characters roam furiously around this space, mostly in swivel chairs on casters designed for use in modern corporate workplaces.

Back to Shakespeare and Molière: Settings As demonstrated by Maksim Crnojević and Rodoljupci, there were two basic ways to revive classical pieces of the literature in the Serbian mainstream theatres of the 1990s. I would respectively call them traditional and eclectic. I would also argue that there were two basic ideological reasons for the never-ending revivals of classics: (a) in their ­timeless words, we recognize our own time and place—they assure us that both good and evil are timeless as well (naturalization) and (b) they help us forget and escape our own time and its traumas, at least for a time (suppression). At this point, through a fictional mini-Shakespeare-Molière festival, I will discuss four productions (Troilus and Cressida, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Misanthrope and The School for Wives) as examples of different paths of return to the classics, not only in terms of visual interpretation, but also in ideological terms. As for Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s cynical assessment of the disenchantment with the futility of war and its frail morality had often proved successful in communicating resentment with the social reality. In 1994 it seemed that these unlimited possibilities for interpretation had motivated the director Dejan Mijač to stage this play in Belgrade— during the Siege of Sarajevo, and sometime halfway between the Vance-Owen Plan and the Dayton Accords. His staging was judged

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as a work of remarkable value, intellectually challenging and effectively amusing which, moreover, artistically sublimated “our everyday experience.”15 In Geroslav Zarić’s showcase eclectic visual concept we were confronted with Troy—ruined, burned to the ground, reduced to a pile of useless rubble, below something that might represent anything from a half-demolished rail bridge to the dark vaults of a fortress under siege. For her part, costume designer Bojana Nikitović drew on the Mad Max franchise, bringing costumes mostly adopted from cyberpunk literature and apocalyptic visions of a militant society. The classical heroes and minor characters wore a grab-bag of remnants of the archaeological past, invisible traces of the traumatic present and visible traces of the fictional future. This combination of elements from various “time-zones” gave a frightening appearance to the heroes from the Greek and Trojan camps at the same time disclosing their flawed vulnerability.16 In comparison with Troilus and Cressida, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is less likely to tackle contemporary ethical issues. This play is usually an opportunity for temporary escape into a spectacle of forgetfulness. This certainly applies to the staging by Nikita Milivojević for the 1997 Grad teatar Budva [Budva Theatre City Festival], sometime halfway between the Dayton Accords and the NATO military intervention in Yugoslavia. Economic sanctions, an overall decline in buying power and rigorous visa regimes, forced the people of Serbia and Montenegro to spend their summer vacations at the Montenegrin summer resorts. Budva became the choice of theatre lovers. Under the auspices of the Montenegrin government, the Theatre City festival somehow managed to present attractive and dynamic programs: during its more successful seasons it would become a true theatre centre of the reduced Yugoslavia. From its first seasons, the festival used the Citadel, a mediaeval walled city, and other spaces such as beaches, monasteries, the harbour, the park, the main square, the churches, etc. Miodrag Tabački’s design for A Midsummer Night’s Dream was described as “perhaps the most spectacular” in his entire career and compared with the empaquetage projects of Christo Javacheff.17 The spectacle commenced on the terrace of Hotel Mogren, with a parade of wedding gowns for Hippolyta. Angelina Atlagić’s slick white wedding dresses were sharply contrasted with the combination of black leather and peacock feathers, in another eclectic interpretation of Attic Greece with a nod to Mad Max.

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Two enormous ostriches, heads buried in the ground, symbolically communicated the “midsummer night’s dream” situation, reminding the cheerful and well-tanned audiences of the festival that they were not the only ones who buried their heads in the sand of Budva’s beaches, demonstrating “denial at work” (Fig. 1).18 In this way, during the festival and within the safe confines of its ancient walls, the City Theatre could abolish the “real world” and forget about it completely for fifty days and nights. In its unique settings the audiences were surrounded by the aura of what Elinor Fuchs terms as, “you’ll-never-be-here-againness.”19 As for the great French comediographer, his story of The Misanthrope is one of moral uprightness and stubbornness, of non-compliance with lies and hypocrisy in a time of majority rule. It is also a story of the right to be in the minority. The Misanthrope, as staged by Dejan Mijač for the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in 1997, was a didactic spectacle, an aestheticized spoonful of syrup against hypocrisy. “What the hell, the world is

Fig. 1  San letnje noći [A Midsummer Night’s Dream], National Theatre Belgrade, 1997 (Photo: Miša Mustapić, courtesy of the National Theatre Belgrade)

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ugly and morally corrupt, but art needs to be beautiful” was the m ­ essage sent from the stage by Miodrag Tabački and Angelina Atlagić. The costumes, the sets and the actors were all beautiful. Under lighting, this aestheticized mimesis of architecture from Molière’s era combined with shaggy surfaces had the surrealist texture of Meret Oppenheim’s tea cup. Such Tapezierung had the additional purpose of isolating the protagonists of salon reality from the outside world. The show’s director and designers suggest that the salon in question is indeed a ruin, “a relic of a world which is collapsing, dying out, perishing, eating itself…”20 This production was born into a turbulent life right from the beginning: it premiered in the dramatic days of mass demonstrations and students’ revolt against the government’s election fraud on February 12, 1997.21 In fact only few Belgraders cared to take part in any kind of public entertainment, theatre included.22 On October 17, 1997, a dark cloud of smoke rose in the sky over Belgrade. On that day fire destroyed the Yugoslav Drama Theatre: this cloud consumed the earthly remains of Molière’s salon which literally collapsed into dust. On the other hand, The School for Wives directed by Zoran Ratković and staged somewhat earlier in Atelje 212 (1994), was a spectacle visually based on similar principles to those behind The Misanthrope. Božana Jovanović’s costumes lavishly simulated Molière’s era with the curly wigs of early baroque and other recognizable details. This provides a safe distance and creates the kind of alienation effect characteristic of theatre which does not aspire to topicality and relevance in the present, avoids ethical questions and aesthetic enigmas and simply entertains the audience. Radivoje Dinulović’s sets, elegant and subdued, created a neutral background which highlighted the protagonists and the romantic plot. In The School for Wives, this plot revolves around the project of the middle-aged bachelor Arnolphe to raise a perfectly faithful and virtuous wife, and the impossibility of succeeding in this project. The School for Wives may be considered as one of Molière’s feminist pieces because it advocates a form of human emancipation—this time, the right to free choice in love. However, within the overall context of the production by Belgrade’s theatre Atelje 212, this version of The School for Wives cannot be considered as particularly emancipatory. The revolutionary 1960s had seen an initial enthusiasm in Belgrade for new trends in theatre which resulted in the creation of Atelje 21223 and the Bitef Festival.24 In the 1990s, the expiration of this revolutionary zeal had lead to a degree of refocusing in the repertory on boulevard and lighter subjects.

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Among these, the battle of the sexes was rather dominant. Nevertheless, this emphasis in the repertory did not give the impression that there was any concrete goal, any form of social emancipation of either of the sides in the conflict: rather, it confirmed the status quo, the dominant patriarchal model of gender relations based on heterosexual relationships and the institution of marriage. This escapist mode of theatre saw the topicality of “the classics” in the inherent human flaws dissected in the plays rather than because “something is rotten in the state.” This often served as a justification for being exclusively preoccupied with amusing audiences with comic plots. In this case, the guarantees of artistic value were the status of the author, a first-rate production and, above all, the skill of the actors—all those little joys of the theatre which, in times of crisis and turbulence, make the lives of the audience seem more “normal.”

The Theatre Tribunal: War-Related Subject Matter and Ethical Issues on the Stage As noted by playwright Stevan Koprivica, in the theatre life of Serbia in the early 1990s, nothing would ever be the same. The engaged theatre of the 1980s, the poetics of Havel and Mroźek became outdated, or a new key for their reading could not be found. The engagement of the local theatre professionals was communicated in the public life, in the streets and in the political parties, while the plays that would reflect the turbulences and horrors of the 1990s were altogether missing. The theatre of cruelty was being played out around us, in boiling Belgrade…25

In the circumstances of overall confusion in the repertoire of the Serbian theatres, their stages were frequented by the characters of Feydeau and Labiche, comedy relief and national epics, “while only a couple of kilometers away, unimaginably brutal wars were raging, about which the theatre audiences could not (and, in all likelihood, did not want to) know very much.”26 According to theatre director and historian Anja Suša “the theatre in this period assumed the function of morphine for the audiences bombed by the ghastly images of Sarajevo and Vukovar.”27 Mirjana Miočinović claims that the theatre in Serbia supported all the stages of Slobodan Milošević’s rise to power. At first it took pains to create an illusion of

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subversion of the communist system, and playing with old prohibitions only created new space for taboos. This contributed to new indoctrination, adding fuel to the fire of national disputes with rhetorical clichés which accommodated new arguments for old nationalist hatred. In the second phase, when the war actually broke out, a huge machinery of entertainment was put to work in order to relieve the collective guilty conscience. This created an illusion that the war and misery did not exist, or if they did exist, that they possessed some higher meaning. In the third phase, when the war machinery was halted and when the catastrophic outcome of the war came to light, theatre came up with the idea that all this perhaps made no sense, that our conscience is not exactly clean and that there still might be some dignity worth saving. Consequently, ethical questions pertaining to the personal and collective responsibility for circumstances and consequences of life under Milošević’s regime in Serbia did not remain in the “ghetto” of independent theatre production. As we have seen, these issues may have been unpopular in the overall context of mainstream theatre production (in accordance with Jovan Ćirilov’s remark that “in such complex circumstances the theatre adopted an attitude that the role of art was not to criticize the regime directly, or even to concern itself with it at all,”)28 but they were present, occasionally even occupying a prominent place in the repertoire. Among the most ambitious projects of this kind was the Yugoslav Drama Theatre’s production of The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus. This adaptation by Nenad Prokić, which drew a parallel between AustroHungarian and Serbian notions of totalitarianism, was staged in 1994 at the climax of the dissolution of the formerly Austro-Hungarian Bosnia and Herzegovina. Kraus (portrayed by actor Predrag Ejdus) was able to address the audience with the question: “And what shall we do with Dubrovnik, Vukovar and Srebrenica?” This production was conceived as a series of monumental scenes set in a fragmented stage space created by Todor Lalicki. This space of simultaneity of the interior and the exterior featured architectural signifiers of Kraus’s era: stylish furniture in the interior; ancient Atlantes in the exterior, carrying on their shoulders, as it were, all the weight of the atrophied Empire. But it also included signifiers of the present—television screens as universal symbols of mediated reality. Boris Čakširan’s costumes paid homage to Kraus’ period-against such an eclectic background Messrs Powolny and Pokorny, the Lieutenant General, the Colonel/Baron, Civis Honorabilis and Kraus himself appeared more convincing in their stylistically defined attire

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of military and civilian uniforms. As an anti-authoritarian and anti-war statement, The Last Days of Mankind displayed similar intentions as some other 1990s productions of the mainstream theatres.29 This list certainly includes the numerous staging of works by Bertolt Brecht on the issues of authoritarian political regimes, social hypocrisy and turbulence. In the mainstream theatres, the works of one contemporary author of international renown, Ronald Harwood, often served as some form of social commentary.30 This was largely due to Harwood’s sympathetic or, rather, neutral attitude to the armed conflicts in former Yugoslavia. It appears that the National Theatre in Belgrade, the “beacon” of the national theatrical culture,31 displayed a high level of anti-war engagement only during the NATO military intervention in 1999. Its conveniently located building at the main central square (Trg Republike) even carried a conspicuous sign of the target—the symbol of resistance to the alleged international conspiracy behind this unfortunate campaign (Operation Allied Force). Unlike the other productions which premiered in Belgrade’s theatres during the NATO operation and were rehearsed before March 24, hastily produced The Persians was a direct response to the war circumstances and a political statement. It was announced as a “work which presents the inevitable demise of a powerful conqueror in the battle against the small, proud and brave people who defend their country and their freedom.”32 According to Ksenija Radulovića bigger trouble is that in the society at large and, after all, in the theatre profession itself, the period of the bombing campaign, once finished, failed to become one of the central topics for questioning all those circumstances and causes that had led to it in the first place, and which resulted in devastation and collapse of the value system of an entire country.33 The scarce theatre productions which somehow communicated the experience of day-to-day life during the NATO operation left ephemeral traces in the theatre life of the decade.34

Family Stories of the Second-Class Passengers: Theatrical Realism of the 1990s In the 1990s, art in Serbia was characterized by two mechanisms of isolation35: external—blocked access to the zones of global exchange of information, experience, commodities and labour, and internal—the (self-) isolation of artists, mainly communicated through some form of “active escapism.”36 It may be concluded that institutional (state-funded)

56  I. ŠENTEVSKA

theatre, had an ambivalent position—balancing on a swing between selfproclaimed engagement and overt escapism. On the one hand, there was the unwritten rule and convention that serious theatre of artistic merit must be engaged in a meaningful dialogue with the social reality, in accordance with the remark that “the role of the playwright has from time immemorial signified reflection on the universal problems and persistent moral and social engagement.”37 Hence the importance attached to the works of contemporary authors, for instance, Biljana Srbljanović, Goran Marković, Nebojša Romčević and Vladimir Arsenijević. The theme at the heart of this wave of new realism in the Serbian theatre of the 1990s was the dissolution of the traditional (and modern) family, including the problems of forced migration of the population in war (and pseudo-war) circumstances. These plays abound with the macro-political traces of the socialist Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav wars, UN sanctions, the financial collapse of 1993, the Kosovo crisis, the NATO military intervention, the regime of Slobodan Milošević, corruption in society, ongoing political scandals and media depictions of the social reality. The society described in these plays is one whose meta-narratives have irreversibly collapsed, one which is dissolving on a daily basis. This wave brought in the paradigmatic production of the Serbian neo-realist theatre of the 1990s. For his first novel In the Hold,38 Vladimir Arsenijević (born in 1965) received the NIN Award for the novel of the year, the youngest winner in the award’s history. The novel, judged as “more dramatic than its dramatization,”39 is basically a convincing testimony from Belgrade on the civilian background of the 1991 war in Croatia, with a sequence of authentic episodes about the tragic survival of the thirty-something generation mutilated by war. According to critic Željko Jovanović, hiding from mobilization, the return of the wounded and escape from the all-consuming madness were merely the starting points for this story based on painful subject matter. The theatre adaptation directed by Nikita Milivojević thus suggested a lack of distinction between fiction and “our overwhelming reality, barely conceivable even by a most imaginative alcoholic.”40 Nevertheless, its visualization was dominated by an almost realistic approach. The designers (Miodrag Tabački and Angelina Atlagić) used every means available to locate the story in the here and now: from real magazines and cigarette packets to realistic Yugoslav National Army uniforms. The apartment of the main protagonists resembled the typical, slightly run-down homes of Belgrade’s more or less devastated middle class. However,

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the illusion of reality is untenable and this is demonstrated in the graveyard scene: during the funeral of Anđela’s brother the stage was covered with newspaper obituaries.

Conclusion Among the many challenges that theatre in Serbia faced during the 1990s, this seems to be the greatest: how could theatre fiction match the unbelievable events occurring in day-to-day life? At this time, the lives of almost every person in the audience were more dramatic than those of the characters on stage. The theatre encounters this problem whenever the social reality becomes excessively dramatic. The main paradox is that, whatever they did, whichever strategy they opted for to deal with the social reality, they still operated within the same system which sustained the military operations—the system which catered for their very existence and used them for embedding a sense of normality in a social climate of permanent crisis. As demonstrated, the mainstream theatres in Serbia—sporadically and without apparent coordination—issued anti-war statements at v­arious stages of war operations in the former Yugoslavia. What eventually connected the “free” territories of the theatre world in the 1990s Serbia with those under occupation by Milošević’s “postmodern” political regime was the cry for catharsis which despite the political changes of the year 2000 has never actually occurred. The 1990s were a formative period for the social reality we live in today. The traumas of this decade, coupled with its liberating and positive aspects, compel us to continue questioning whether we have truly left behind the social reality of the 1990s and how long what we experienced in this period will remain embedded in our present and shape our futures.

Notes



1. On theatre audiences in Serbia in the socialist and post-socialist periods, see Irena Šentevska, “Od Agitpropa do PR-a: pozorišna publika socijalističke i postsocijalističke epohe,” in Istorija umetnosti u Srbiji: XX vek (Vol II), ed. Miško Šuvaković (Belgrade: Orion Art, 2012), 805–812. 2. On the situation in Serbia, see Jelena Đurović, “Novi produkcioni modeli u periodu tranzicije: Izazov i nove inicijative,” in Pozorište u Srbiji 1990– 2000 (II), Teatron 27, no. 119–120 (2002): 44–51.

58  I. ŠENTEVSKA











3. See the contributions by Jovan Ćirilov (pp. 31–33), Vladimir Stamenković (pp. 33–34) and Anja Suša (pp. 35–38) to “Bitef pod sankcijama,” in Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (I), Teatron 27, no. 118 (2002). 4. Vlad Beronja and Stijn Vervaet, eds. “Introduction: After Yugoslavia— Memory on the ruins of history,” in Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 4. 5. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (New York: Columbia UP, 1999). 6. In this period the national theatres were especially inclined to become “useful objects of revisionist theatre historiography.” Aldo Milohnić, “Performing identities—national theatres and the re-construction of identities in Slovenia and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,” in Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-) Transitional Societies, eds. Aldo Milohnić and Nada Švob-Đokić (Zagreb: Institute for International Relations, 2011), 54. 7. Ksenija Radulović, “Nacionalni resantiman na sceni,” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (I), Teatron 27, no. 118 (2002): 7. 8. This play about St. Sava, Serbian medieval prince and Orthodox saint, was best remembered for the aggressive interruption and abrupt end of the performance in the Yugoslav Drama Theatre on May 31, 1990, by the activists of the political party Srpska svetosavska stranka who were in the audience. 9. For more details see Irena Šentevska, The Swinging 90s: pozorište i društvena realnost u Srbiji u 29 slika (Belgrade: Orion Art, 2016), 61. 10. Radulović, “Nacionalni resantiman,” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (I), Teatron 27, no. 118 (2002): 7. 11. Elin Diamond, “Modern Drama/Modernity’s Drama,” Modern Drama, no. 44.1 (2001): 5. 12. Benedict Anderson, Nacija: zamišljena zajednica. Razmatranja o porijeklu i širenju nacionalizma (Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1990), 48. 13. How the theatres in Serbia operated in these circumstances was described in Aleksandar Milosavljević, “Pozorište i rat u Beogradu,” Reč 1 (June 1999), http://www.b92.net/casopis_rec/arhiva/milosavljevic.html. Last accessed on February 8, 2016. 14. Ivan Medenica, “Rodoljupci iz podzemlja,” Politika, March 1, 1999, 25. 15. Vladimir Stamenković, “Zastrašujuća savremenost,” NIN, Decembar 9, 1994, 44. 16. Aleksandar Milosavljević, “Po meri ovog vremena,” Politika, December 14, 1994, 22. 17. Gordana Popović Vasić and Irina Subotić, Miodrag Tabački (Belgrade: Clio, 2004), 36.

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59

18. Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 51. 19. Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 135. 20. Aleksandar Milosavljević, “Utopijski povratak sceni,” Vreme, February 22, 1997, 44. 21. On the theatre life in Serbia during the 1996/97 protests, see the publications of Jestrović (2013), Suša (2002), Jovićević (2000) and Vujović 2000. See also the transcript of the discussion Umesto predstave (held in the Centre for Cultural Decontamination on December 3, 1996) in Anonymus, “Pozorište i pobuna: Igrati ili ne—Gluma po savesti,” Vreme, December 21, 1996, 44–49. 22. See Vladimir Stamenković, “Stroga škola,” NIN, May 23, 1997, 43. 23. See Bojan Đorđev, “Pozorišna (neo)avangarda pedesetih i šezdesetih godina—Atelje 212,” in Istorija umetnosti u Srbiji: XX vek (Vol I), ed. Miško Šuvaković (Belgrade: Orion Art, 2010), 367–374. 24. See Ana Vujanović, “Nove pozorišne tendencije: Bitef—Beogradski internacionalni teatarski festival,” in Istorija umetnosti u Srbiji: XX vek (Vol I), ed. Miško Šuvaković (Belgrade: Orion Art, 2010), 375–384. 25. Koprivica, “Čaša meda i čaša žuči,” in 20 godine Večernje scene Radović (Belgrade: Malo pozorište Duško Radović, 2006), n.p. 26. Anja Suša, “Promeniti odnos—stvoriti sistem,” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990– 2000 (II), Teatron 27, no. 119–120 (2002): 69. 27. Ibid., 70. On media representations of the war in former Yugoslavia, see Pal Kolstø, Media Discourse and the Yugoslav Conflicts: Representations of Self and Other (London: Routledge, 2009). 28. Jovan Ćirilov, “Nova rediteljska imena devedesetih: Sačuvati meru,” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (I), Teatron 27, no. 119–120 (2002): 40. 29. For a detailed list of examples see Šentevska, Swinging 90s, 110. 30. Ibid., 110. 31. “An institution lends material existence to the ruling ideology.” Barbara Sušec Michieli, “The Disappearing Balkans: National Theatres and Geopolitics,” in National Theatres in a Changing Europe, ed. Steve Wilmer (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 198. 32. Ksenija Radulović, “Ne izneveriti sebe (NATO bombardovanje 1999),” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (II): 103. 33. Ibid., 104. 34. Šentevska, Swinging 90s, 120. 35. Stevan Vuković, “Privatna hladnoća/javna okrutnost: lagani posrćući hod kroz devedesete,” in Remont. Review: beogradska umetnička scena devedesetih (exhibition catalogue), eds. Darka Radosavljević, Jasmina Čubrilo and Stevan Vuković (Belgrade: Galerija Remont, 2002), 23.

60  I. ŠENTEVSKA 36. See Lidija Merenik, “No Wave: 1992–95,” Art in Yugoslavia 1992–95 (Belgrade: Fond za otvoreno društvo & Centar za savremenu umetnost, 1996), n.p. 37. Aleksandra Jovićević, “Dramsko stvaralaštvo devedesetih: Milošević i njegovi savremenici,” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (II), Teatron 27, no. 119–120 (2002): 19. 38. Vladimir Arsenijević, U potpalublju (Belgrade: Rad, 1994). 39. Ivan Medenica, “Veština zavođenja,” Politika, May 9, 1996, 19. 40. Željko Jovanović, “Dijalog ili ubistvo,” Naša borba, May 10, 1996, 13.

Works

cited

Anderson, Benedict. Nacija: zamišljena zajednica. Razmatranja o porijeklu i širenju nacionalizma. Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1990. Anđelković, Branislava, and Branislav Dimitrijević. “Poslednja decenija: umetnost, društvo, trauma i normalnost.” In O normalnosti (exhibition catalogue), 9–129. Belgrade: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005. Arsenijević, Vladimir. U potpalublju. Belgrade: Rad, 1994. Beronja, Vlad, and Stijn Vervaet, eds. Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2016. Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. Ćirilov, Jovan. “Nova rediteljska imena devedesetih: Sačuvati meru.” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (I), Teatron 27, no. 119–120 (2002): 37–43. ———. “Bitef pod sankcijama.” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (I), Teatron 27, no. 118 (2002): 31–33. Ćirilov, Jovan, and Feliks Pašić, eds. Grad teatar Budva 1987–1996: Prvih deset godina. Budva: Grad teatar, 1998. Diamond, Elin. “Modern Drama/Modernity’s Drama.” Modern Drama, no. 44.1 (2001): 3–15. Đorđev, Bojan. “Pozorišna (neo)avangarda pedesetih i šezdesetih godina— Atelje 212.” In Istorija umetnosti u Srbiji: XX vek (Vol I), edited by Miško Šuvaković. Belgrade: Orion Art, 2010, 367–374. Đurović, Jelena. “Novi produkcioni modeli u periodu tranzicije: Izazov i nove inicijative,” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (II), Teatron 27, no. 119–120 (2002): 44–51. Fuchs, Elinor. The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Jameson, Frederic. Brecht and Method. London: Verso, 1998. Jestrović, Silvija. Performance, Space, Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

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Jovanović, Željko. “Dijalog ili ubistvo,” Naša borba, May 10, 1996, 13. Jovićević, Aleksandra. “Dramsko stvaralaštvo devedesetih: Milošević i njegovi savremenici,” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (II), Teatron 27, no. 119–120 (2002): 19–32. ———. “Društvena stvarnost i beogradska pozorišta (1991–1995): Trenutak srećnog samozaborava.” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (I), Teatron 27, no. 118 (2002): 42–49. ———. “Teatar, parateatar i karneval: građanski i studentski protest u Srbiji 1996–1997.” In Urbani spektakl, edited by Milena Dragićević-Šešić and Irena Šentevska. Belgrade: Clio and Yustat, 2000, 145–160. Koprivica, Stevan. “Čaša meda i čaša žuči.” In 20 godine Večernje scene Radović. Belgrade: Malo pozorište Duško Radović, 2006. Kolstø, Pal, ed. Media Discourse and the Yugoslav Conflicts: Representations of Self and Other. London: Routledge, 2009. Medenica, Ivan. “Rodoljupci iz podzemlja.” Politika, March 1, 1999, 25. ———. “Veština zavođenja.” Politika, May 9, 1996, 19. Merenik, Lidija. “No Wave: 1992–95.” Art in Yugoslavia 1992–95. Belgrade: Fond za otvoreno društvo & Centar za savremenu umetnost, 1996. Milohnić, Aldo. “Performing identities—national theatres and the re-construction of identities in Slovenia and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” In Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-) Transitional Societies, edited by Aldo Milohnić and Nada Švob-Đokić. Zagreb: Institute for International Relations, 2011, 47–59. Milosavljević, Aleksandar. “Pozorište i rat u Beogradu.” Reč, no. 1 (cyber edition), June 1999, http://www.b92.net/casopis_rec/arhiva/milosavljevic. html. ———. “Utopijski povratak sceni.” Vreme, February 22, 1997, 44–46. ———. “Po meri ovog vremena.” Politika, December 14, 1994, 22. Miočinović, Mirjana. Nemoć očiglednog: Prvi i drugi deo. Belgrade: CZKD, 2014. Popović Vasić, Gordana and Irina Subotić. Miodrag Tabački. Belgrade: Clio, 2004. “Pozorište i pobuna: Igrati ili ne—Gluma po savesti.” Vreme, December 21, 1996, 44–49. Radulović, Ksenija. “Ne izneveriti sebe (NATO bombardovanje 1999).” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (II), Teatron 27, no. 119–120 (2002): 101–104. ———. “Nacionalni resantiman na sceni.” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (I), Teatron 27, no. 118 (2002): 7–12. Stamenković, Vladimir. “Bitef pod sankcijama.” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (I), Teatron 27, no. 118 (2002): 33–34. ———. “Stroga škola.” NIN, May 23, 1997, 43. ———. “Zastrašujuća savremenost.” NIN, December 9, 1994, 44.

62  I. ŠENTEVSKA Suša, Anja. “Bitef pod sankcijama.” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (I), Teatron 27, no. 118 (2002): 35–38. ———. “Promeniti odnos—stvoriti sistem.” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (II), Teatron 27, no. 119–120 (2002): 69–73. ———. “Ostao je direktan prenos (građanski protest 1996–97).” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (II), Teatron 27, no. 119–120 (2002): 94–100. Sušec Michieli, Barbara. “The Disappearing Balkans: National Theatres and Geopolitics.” In National Theatres in a Changing Europe, edited by Steve Wilmer. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 196–203. Šentevska, Irena. The Swinging 90s: pozorište i društvena realnost u Srbiji u 29 slika. Belgrade: Orion Art, 2016. ———. “Od Agitpropa do PR-a: pozorišna publika socijalističke i postsocijalističke epohe.” In Istorija umetnosti u Srbiji: XX vek (Vol II), edited by Miško Šuvaković. Belgrade: Orion Art, 2012, 805–812. Verdery, Katherine. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Vujanović, Ana. “Nove pozorišne tendencije: Bitef – Beogradski internacionalni teatarski festival.” In Istorija umetnosti u Srbiji: XX vek (Vol I), edited by Miško Šuvaković. Belgrade: Orion Art, 2010, 375–384. Vujović, Sreten. “Beograd kao pokretni praznik.” In Urbani spektakl, edited by Milena Dragićević-Šešić and Irena Šentevska. Belgrade: Clio and Yustat, 2000, 130–146. Vuković, Stevan. “Privatna hladnoća / javna okrutnost: lagani posrćući hod kroz devedesete.” In Remont. Review: beogradska umetnička scena devedesetih (exhibition catalogue), edited by Darka Radosavljević, Jasmina Čubrilo and Stevan Vuković. Belgrade: Galerija Remont, 2002, 23–32.

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s National Theatres in the Context of Language Politics During the War Senad Halilbašić

Theatre, Language and Nation-Building Processes Apart from the many other functions of language, two seem to be ­commonly regarded as fundamental: that of communication among and within societies, and that of defining these by marking them off from other groups.1 The role of language as an element of identity represents a crucial factor in the demarcation of the collective or personal self from the Other in any society, especially in ethnically mixed ones. Ever since the emergence of national consciousness following the revolutions in America and Europe in the late-eighteenth century and Johann Gottfried Herder’s philosophy on the formation of unities through nations, language has been one of the crucial elements in constructing a c­ ollective.2 The construction, destruction and reconstruction of states and any

S. Halilbašić (*)  University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_4

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64  S. HALILBAŠIĆ

nation-building processes have always been accompanied by comparable developments regarding languages. Considering the often rapidly changing political map in the geopolitical region of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), it comes as no surprise that the question of language and communication within a territory inhabited by various ethnic groups had a great influence in each historical period of vast political changes. The founding of Tito’s Second Yugoslavia followed the occupation and fascism of the World War II. The challenge of politically unifying at least six peoples and various groups of minorities under the socialist ideologies of a new, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual nation had to face the question of language policy. The political issue of language(s) turned out to be a field of constant tension and oppressed conflict within identity discourses in the entire region, especially among Croatian and Serbian inhabitants. For cultural, historical and political reasons, possessing one’s own national language “was a requirement of the first order for the Slovenes and Macedonians, followed by the Croats, while being less urgent for the Serbs and Montenegrins and practically playing no part at all in the case of Muslims.”3 The question of distinguishable languages of one’s own was later heavily debated within the conflicts surrounding the country’s breakup, and language affiliation acquired huge importance in the context of the nation-building processes in the 1990s, also resulting in a negation of the term which had been Yugoslavia’s official state language for several decades: Serbo-Croatian. This text will first give an introduction to linguistic and sociopolitical developments regarding the predominant spoken languages in the SFRY. It will become evident that linguists and other official representatives of language policies had a huge impact on the separatist-nationalist upheavals of the 1990s by focusing their entire ­ work on differences between the spoken languages and dialects. Thus, the impact of linguists on ethno-nationalist segregation was similar to that of representatives of churches, historians and other leading protagonists of cultural and intellectual life. Subsequently, this text will deal with the impacts of the various new language politics on institutional theatres as public houses of art. It will raise the question of how National Theatres in the specific case of Bosnia and Herzegovina (the most ethnically mixed state in SFRY) reacted to the new on-going nation- and language-building processes.

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One Language, Many Heirs–Language Policy of the SFRY in the Context of the State’s Breakup In linguistic terms, the languages of the entire Balkan Peninsula seem to be very fragmented—“a meeting ground between language families.”4 The Yugoslavian Constitution of 1946 constructed the country as a federal system, and regional differences were “even encouraged by setting up academies in each of the regional capitals in which intellectuals thought about the meaning and consequences of their own national questions.”5 Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins (and, from 1969, also Muslims) were recognized as their own peoples and given equal rights. The languages and alphabets used were, however, not given a precise cultural policy within the first constitution. Only in 1963 was the issue of languages noted within the constitution, in which Slovenian, Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian respectively Croato-Serbian were recognized as equal languages within the country.6 Four of the predominant languages of the region were codified as Serbo-Croatian (also accepted terminology: CroatoSerbian, Croatian or Serbian, Serbian or Croatian—depending on the perspective), a terminological concept which had its theoretical roots much earlier and which went on to represent the official state language, but ceased to exist after Yugoslavia’s breakup.7 SerboCroatian forms the basis of later newly established official languages: Bosanski (Bosnian), hrvatski (Croatian), crnogorski (Montenegrin) and srpski (Serbian). Native speakers of these languages do not need interpreters to understand each other. The lexical variation between ­ the four languages lies between 3 and 7%,8 “all mutually comprehensible, and dialect boundaries cut across state boundaries.”9 While the official language in politics, diplomacy and military was defined as “Serbo-Croatian” (or one of the aforementioned equally accepted terminologies) in the first constitution, most issues regarding the status of the languages seemed to be in constant debate within intellectual circles. Leading Croatian and Serbian writers and linguists agreed on a “basic unity of the language” at a conference in Novi Sad in 1954, but a nationwide compromise on what to call the supposedly unified language was never reached. Speaking solely from the point of view of linguistic comparative research, “Serbo-Croatian” belongs to the sociolinguistic category of polycentric standard languages, along with English, German, French and many others.10

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Under Tito’s regime, all forms of nationalism11 were suppressed, including linguistic ones.12 However, in the 1960s, the country expe­ rienced a rise in Croatian linguistic consciousness led by leading cultural institutions from Zagreb, demanding the official recognition of Croatian as a language in its own right rather than a variant of Croato-Serbian.13 The language issue emerged again after Tito’s death with alarming frequency.14 The more the discourse on ethnic differences and national separation reached everyday life, the more a separation of the spoken languages and even the artificial creation of supposed “differences” became a crucial element in all the events leading to the country’s break-up. Under Franjo Tuđman’s regime (1990–1999) in Croatia for instance, a hypersensitivity to the Serbian language and dialects and otherwise non-Croatian forms was prevalent. As a result, linguists and language planners worked constantly on prescriptive manuals and dictionaries with the aim of educating the public to speak proper Croatian.15 Even the differences between the Serbian and the Croatian language received their own state-funded dictionaries, mostly called razlikovnici (“differentiating dictionaries”), ranging in length from 107 to 632 pages.16 The issue of language segregation was not debated exclusively in small academic circles, but became a major factor in on-going political practice: the newly founded national Academies of Sciences published books on their own national languages almost immediately following the federation’s break-up. The new state constitutions also defined the official state languages. All the new constitutions focused on language segregation, thus diminishing and ignoring any possibility of a unified and shared spoken language. The public was constantly confronted with the issue of these newly founded state languages within mass media: linguists (and self-declared pseudo-linguists) were constantly seen in TV and radio shows promoting the new state languages and talking about the constructed differences between the Croatian and Serbian (and later Bosnian) languages. Especially the Croatian mass media close to the Tuđman regime regarded themselves as role models for the “correct use of language.” The official state broadcaster HRT issued a manual with “desired Croatian words” and “undesired foreign words.” Not talking in the purified Croatian language, as prescribed in this manual, was also an excuse for HRT to sack many unwanted journalists in 1991.17 The language issue was exploited by all parties in the course of the war in order to gain territories, purify them ethnically, and mark them culturally with linguistic walls. “… Language, having been shamelessly

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exploited as a weapon of fierce propaganda against nations was ­mutually perceived as a menace to one’s own national or cultural identity and even survival.”18 One language was politically split into four, “with normally insignificant existing distinctions blown up by largely artificial measures of linguistic engineering”19: Croatian was the first to depart. In contrast to the other languages, Serbian language planners never tried to demonstrate the language’s difference. Serbian nationalism claimed that all these supposedly new languages were actually Serbian under different names. The case of Bosnian was more complex, since there was great resistance from the Serbian and Croatian population in accepting a state language with this name in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnian language planners therefore stressed oriental aspects of its linguistic heritage and focused on the large number of Turkisms, which was achieved with only limited success.20 The first attempts to codify the new Bosnian language (in most cases meaning the language of the Bosniaks, the Bosnian Muslims) were carried out while the war was still raging and the future of an independent Bosnian state was still largely unclear.21 Since the Dayton Peace Agreement, the official language of Republika Srpska is Serbian, whereas the languages of the Federation territory are both Croatian and Bosnian. The language planners within Republika Srpska have even attempted to purge their language of words derived from Turkish, “but to do so they would have to do without many common things such as sugar (šećer), cotton (pamuk), or socks (čarapa).”22 Before the late 1980s, linguistic differences were rarely perceived between the ethnic groups in Bosnia,23 even though Robert D. Greenberg has showed that there had been an increase in ethnocentric dialect studies since the 1960s.24 To sum up: in an atmosphere of nationalism and ethnic segregation, the discourse on language rejected one of its basic functions. Instead of increasing the possibilities of mutual intelligibility, language planners were “charged with the task of setting up new barriers to communication.”25

Whose Nation Is a National Theatre? Regarding these developments, an obvious question to raise is how National Theatres, as cultural institutions in which language is one of the main communication factors between the artist and the audience, reacted to and coped with this rapidly changing atmosphere of language segregation. First, a short note on the status of National Theatres in the

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SFRY as well as on the general role of National Theatres within nationbuilding processes is necessary. The first nation-states in this region emerged in the nineteenth century, followed in 1918 by the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which later became Yugoslavia. On the eve of the country’s breakup in 1990, there were as many as thirty-five theatres in this region calling themselves National Theatres.26 National theatres had already begun to play a fundamental role in state-building processes with the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918: German theatres and various other stage institutions for minorities were immediately dissolved and their premises were taken over by Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian theatre companies—theatre was nationalized.27 The immediate foundation of National Theatres came as no surprise, since National Theatres had “played an important role in trying to construct distinctive national identities as well as in asserting the cultural achievements of their nations”28 since the late eighteenth century. Another boom in the founding of National Theatres occurred in the aftermath of the World War II, as the SFRY was created. Between 1944 and 1954 “as many as 18 new National Theatres were established in Yugoslavia, of which seven were in Macedonia, three in Serbia, one in Kosovo, four in Vojvodina, two in Croatia and one in Montenegro. Performances were held in the official languages of the individual republics.”29 Barbara Sušec Michieli regards the “multiplication” of National Theatres as “a sign of increasing decentralization of power” and “as a symptom of the strengthening of regional structures.”30 Therefore, the immense number of newly founded state theatres corresponded perfectly with the contemporary Yugoslav policy of pursuing the goal of strengthening regional identities, but simultaneously undermined socialist politics and Yugoslav unity. National Theatres in Yugoslavia marked the country’s political centres and the territories of ethnic communities, but all of them primarily served the function of locally establishing state influence and the authority of the new socialist regime. While the National Theatres of the region founded in the nineteenth century in the course of nation-building-awareness continued to carry the prefix of the respective nation within the Yugoslav regime (e.g. the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb or the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad), most of the names of the newly founded National Theatres were dedicated to the respective city. The break-up of the Social Federal Republic of Yugoslavia naturally led to a change in the status of National Theatres. A process of naming and renaming theatrical institutions began immediately: “Individual linguistic and ethnic communities attempted

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to include, in an explicit manner, national attributes in the names of National Theatres.”31 The process of ethnically marking “whose” National Theatre the former Yugoslavian theatre is can also be seen in the case of the state theatre in Banja Luka, the largest city and de facto capital of the Serb entity Republika Srpska in northwestern Bosnia. Narodno Pozorište Bosanske Krajine Banja Luka [The National Theatre of the Bosnian Krajina Banja Luka] was immediately renamed Krajiško narodno pozorište [National Theatre of Krajina] following the beginning of the Bosnian War in spring 1992. The name of the theatre, founded in 1930, derived from the geographical region Bosanska Krajina, which includes large parts of northwestern Bosnia and some of Herzegovina.32 The name of the national theatre was maintained in the socialist period, hence stating that it is not a theatre belonging exclusively to the intellectual code of a specific city, but to an entire geographical region populated by various ethnicities. The change of name occurred in the context of a vast political and cultural change within Republika Srpska: the entity and its government followed the official policy of the leaders in Belgrade and the nationalistic Serbian idea of a Serbo-centrist Yugoslavia or a Greater Serbia. While Republika Srpska was not recognized as a state entity until the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement, it behaved like a state during the war by establishing parallel political structures corresponding with Serbian politics. One of the many steps in the cultural life of Banja Luka during the war was renaming the state theatre by dropping the “Bosnian” attribute. Even though the theatre was not officially renamed into its current denomination Narodno Pozorište Republike Srpske [National Theatre of the Republika Srpska] till 1999, it was often referred to as such in Banja Luka’s daily newspaper during the war, therefore suggesting that, by the fact of having its own national theatre, Republika Srpska could be considered a nation. While Banja Luka’s theatre (like almost any other National Theatre in the SFRY) had an ethnically mixed ensemble of actors before 1991, the expulsion and escape of Croatian and Muslim Banja Lukans f­ollowing the official policy of the government of Republika Srpska33 led to an ethnically purified and almost exclusively Serbian ensemble—only one remaining actress was of Bosnian Muslim origin. Furthermore, apart from the predominance of boulevard comedies such as traditional Vaudeville plays (Idem u Lov, a translation of Monsieur Chasse! by Georges Feydeau) and British farces, the repertoire consisted of plays on mythical SerbianOrthodox figures (e.g. Princ Rastko–Monah Sava by Milovan Vitezović, premiering on January 27, 1995) and controversial characters from recent history with highly problematic re-interpretations of historical events

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(e.g. Đeneral Milan Nedić by Siniša Kovačević, premiering on April 16, 1993). These productions of comic relief and Serbian national epics were also predominant in state theatres in Serbia, making theatre “a refuge from social reality rather than the place to reflect on and criticize it.”34 Evoking a genuinely “Serbian” national theatre was also achieved through changing the theatre’s primary language overnight: from 1992 onwards all the publication material, e.g. programs, newspaper advertisements and bulletins, was published in Cyrillic. It is worth mentioning that the cultural predominance of the Serbian language and specifically the Serbian (Cyrillic) alphabet was more commonly used in communicating with the general public than in the theatre: while the new name of the theatre was written onto the building in Cyrillic letters (as opposed to before the war, when the old theatre’s name was written in Latin alphabet) and all publication material was published in Cyrillic, most of the textbooks used for staging a play were written in the Latin alphabet, as were almost all the artistic remarks of the dramaturges within those textbooks.35 These processes followed a clear ethno-political logic of language policy which operated on two parallel levels: renaming institutions with the aim of clearly establishing the new owner (see also: the renaming of the Museum of the Bosnian Krajina to the Museum of the Republika Srpska) and changing its representative language and alphabet. Similar cultural– political decisions were also made regarding the main regional (and soon to be regime-controlled) Banja Luka-based newspaper, which was renamed from Glas to Glas Srpski and published in Cyrillic alphabet only.36 This is one of many region-wide examples of “purifying [territories] ethnically” and marking them “culturally with linguistic walls” by changing the language and alphabet used in public.37 The purification of cultural space by building “linguistic walls” was, however, never a sole, singular and enclosed process—it was always the result or beginning of ethnic cleansing which influenced and destroyed thousands of civilian lives.

Divided City, Divided Theatre—The Case of the National Theatre(s) in Mostar The direct connection of cultural, theatre and language policy in times of war can also be observed in the case of the theatre development of the city of Mostar. Herzegovina’s largest city was one of Yugoslavia’s symbols for a peaceful relationship between ethnicities and cultures: its

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Old Bridge connecting the two sides of the river Neretva represented a metaphor for peaceful dialogue and the cohabitation of two cultures. The eastern side of the river Neretva historically marked the space largely inhabited by Bosnian Muslims, while the western side was predominantly a Croatian-Catholic cultural space. Following the aforementioned cultural policy of the SFRY, a new National Theatre was established in Mostar as early as 1951, the second founding of a National Theatre on Bosnian territory after the World War II, after the founding of Tuzla National Theatre in 1949.38 The theatre, built on the eastern side of the river, was briefly abandoned in 1992, after Serbian militia attacked the city and both parts of the town suffered from heavy shelling. As in other cities, many artists escaped the war and theatre production was put on hold. For a short period of time, even the Serbian propaganda radio station of Herzegovina had its headquarters in the occupied theatre.39 A coalition between the Bosnian Army and the Croatian Territorial Army (supported by Tuđman’s regime in the neighbouring state) succeeded in defending the city from Serbian soldiers and freeing any occupied territory on the eastern side. Actors, directors, dramaturges and other employees of the National Theatre who remained in the city started to re-build the building and its stage immediately after the end of the bloody conflict. Many parts of the theatre were completely destroyed, and while reconstruction was ongoing, the theatre was used as a refugee camp for Muslim and Croatian displaced persons from the entire region.40 In 1993, however, the political tension between Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims in Herzegovina has already escalated and an armed conflict broke out between these two formerly cooperating parties, consequently making the two sides of the river opposing enemy territories. The Croatian-Bosnian war, often referred to as “the war within the war,”41 lead to horrendous suffering and destruction on both sides of the river.42 Most Serbian theatre employees had already escaped Mostar, and Croatian artists did not dare to cross the river back into the eastern part of the town. Therefore they were left without a stage, and once again the national theatre stopped its work and turned into a cultural-political no man’s land. Hadžija Hadžjibajramović, one of the last ensemble members remaining in Eastern Mostar, started to use the space of the National Theatre and staged various plays with amateur actors and children,43 while the heavy shelling of the city continued and the war reached its peak in 1994. In the meantime on the other side, however, former Croatian employees of the National Theatre founded a new institution:

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Fig. 1  Founding Document of the Ratno Kazalište HVO [HVO war theatre; HVO, i.e. Croatian Defence Council, the military formation of the Bosnian Croats] in Mostar (Photo courtesy of Rusmir Agačević [private archive])

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Hrvatsko Narodno Kazalište u Mostaru [The Croatian National Theatre in Mostar] was officially founded in September 1994 as a cultural institution of the Herzeg-Bosnian entity.44 This “founding” was actually only a renaming of a previously existing theatre society on the western side: almost two years earlier, while the armed conflict between the Serbs and the coalition of Croats and Muslims was ongoing, theatre artists on the western side founded the Ratno Kazalište HVO [HVO war theatre; HVO = Croatian Defence Council, the military formation of the Bosnian Croats], a theatre for “our brave soldiers as well as the residents of all the communities of Herzeg-Bosnia,” which was to be a “traveling theatre whose content shall be the amusement of all our defenders as well as the increasing of their morale.” According to the founding document of the new theatre, quoted above, the Ratno Kazalište HVO “has to fully contribute to the fight for the liberation of our birth and memory spaces” (Fig. 1). The renaming of the Ratno Kazalište HVO as a theatre which does not include the term “war” and which proclaims itself to be a Croatian National Theatre reminds one of the logic of the very first foundations of national theatres in Central Europe, according to which national theatres often pre-dated the nations itself.45 The Hrvatsko Narodno Kazalište u Mostaru was officially financed by Herzeg-Bosnia, hence from money coming largely from the state of Croatia. Furthermore, it was the government of Herzeg-Bosnia which persisted in re-naming the theatre into a “national” one.46 While a repertoire analysis of the wartime period remains problematic and incomplete, it can be observed that from the very first moments of the founding of a theatre in Western Mostar, the Kazalište was deeply connected to the idea of propagating a distinguishable Croatian language of their own within the Herzegovinian territory.

Language (in Theatre) as a Flag of Independence The founding of a national theatre belonging to one specific nation within a multi-national city at war is, as Sušec Michieli states, an explicit inclusion of national attributes in the names of national theatres by individual linguistic and ethnic communities.47 The founding of a theatre in Western Mostar in 1994 follows the cultural policy of marking an ethnic territory by founding (supposedly) national institutions—similarly to processes previously described in the case of Banja Luka. The dominant differentiator of the new theatre in Western Mostar, in contrast to the

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National Theatre on the eastern side, was from the very beginning (and still is today) the performance of material in the Croatian language. The repertoire of the HNK Mostar does not limit itself to Croatian plays or Croatian playwrights; it regularly stages international classics. However, those must be performed in Croatian translation. This specification also lies within the name: while the National Theatre on the eastern side (as in almost any other city in the territory of the SFRY) is called Narodno Pozorište, the Croatian National Theatre founded in 1994 carries the name of Narodno Kazalište. It neither calls itself pozorište nor teatar, words for theatre used in both Bosnian and Serbian (but also in Croatian) distinctive dictionaries, but kazalište: a genuinely Croatian word meaning the very same as pozorište and teatar. Until today, the specification of the national theatre on the Western side lies in the fact that it provides only acting in the “Croatian language” and for the “Croatian people.”48 A theatre of their own for specific language communities is nothing unusual in urban areas with notable language minorities (English language theatres in Vienna, French language theatres in Germany etc.)—however, they never call themselves national theatres. Regarding the aforementioned minimal differences between Croatian and other official languages in the region, and considering the Bosnian– Croatian war within Mostar and the break-up of the SFRY, it becomes evident that the founding of the Hrvatsko Narodno Kazalište u Mostaru represents a cultural marking of a specific space by “setting up linguistic walls.”49 In 1999, the first director of the Kazalište, Ivan Ovčar, reflected in retrospect on the founding of the HNK Mostar: “The pozorište is erased; not erased however, is the war.”50 The founders of the Kazalište also negated the known fact that the Pozorište was actually still active. In its own historiography, however, the foundation of a Croatian National Theatre was represented as the actual continuation of National Theatre traditions in Mostar—even though the Croatian theatre was officially founded in 1994, the preface of the first published historiography goes back to the repertoires of the Narodno Pozorište in Mostar founded in 1951. Therefore, paradoxically, the historiography of the Kazalište written by the director of the theatre aims to build up upon the common theatre, which it started to negate during the war. The political decision-makers of Herzeg-Bosnia (and elsewhere in the region) were focused on marking cultural space by following obviously Croatian nationalistic policies—not only by destroying monuments and buildings dedicated to Islam and the Ottoman tradition, but also by

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building Croatian and Catholic ones.51 The financing and re-naming of the newly founded theatre also follows the logic of culturally marking a certain geo-political space—as can again be seen in the founding document of the previous Croatian theatre, according to which theatre artists are responsible for fighting for their “birth and memory spaces” (see Fig. 1). Furthermore, shortly after its founding date in 1994, the ­decision-makers of Herzeg-Bosnia promised a new, monumental building for the HNK. Architectural plans were approved and the construction even started52—however, only a few months later, this project stopped indefinitely due to reasons of finance. The obvious question remaining is how the theatre artists involved in the founding of the Hrvatsko Narodno Kazalište u Mostaru reacted to the ethno-nationalist policies of segregation as practiced by their main financiers, the para-governmental entity of Herzeg-Bosnia and the Croatian republic lead by the nationalist government of Franjo Tuđman. Trying to answer this question leads to a paradox which can often be observed when talking to contemporary witnesses of theatre during war. The stated motives for founding a new theatre on the western side and working in it during the war follow similar narrative patterns to those of any other theatre artists who are suddenly surrounded by extreme political circumstances. With the outbreak of the war in Mostar, Croatian artists were no longer able to work on the eastern side, and therefore many of them founded a new theatre in the western part of town. Their motive was to act, to be on stage, to continue doing what they were used to do, to escape everyday realities and struggles. Individual actors did not see themselves as people who worked for a nationalist para-government like Herzeg-Bosnia, the financier of the theatre, but as artists, who continued their profession under extreme circumstances and with a certain pride.53 Such narratives can also be found when talking to theatre artists from the National Theatre of Republika Srpska in Banja Luka. It seems as if the question of artistic moral responsibility and one’s individual political role within a society at war was never raised—or, perhaps, it has been ignored to this very day. The question of individual responsibility is one that remains to be researched. As for the discourse on national theatres and languages within a newly founded nation following the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia, we can make an observation following Kenneth Naylor’s linguistic terminology: language in the entire Balkan region has functioned as a flag with which each people has asserted its sovereignty and

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independence.54 National theatres, whether newly founded as places of cherishing a specific language like in Western Mostar, or renamed and therefore culturally re-marked like in Banja Luka, were one of many abused cultural tools used to achieve nationalist goals of ethnically purifying previously shared cultural spaces.

Notes









1. Ranko Bugarski, “Language, Identity and Borders in the Former SerboCroatian Area,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 33, no. 3 (2012): 220. 2. Michael N. Forster, After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 25; Siegfried Weichlein, Nationalbewegungen und Nationalismus in Europa (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 10. 3. Ranko Bugarski, “Language, Identity and Borders in the Former SerboCroatian Area,” 222. 4.  Cathie Carmichael, “‘A People Exists and That People Has Its Language’: Language and Nationalism in the Balkans,” in Language and Nationalism in Europe, eds. Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 223. 5. Ibid., 235. 6. Miloš Okuka, Eine Sprache, viele Erben–Sprachpolitik als Nationa­ lisierungsinstrument in Ex-Jugoslawien (Klagenfurt: Wieser, 1998), 89. 7. The identity of this idiom has been discussed controversially. The compound label was already in use in the early 19th century by foreign scholars like Jakob Grimm and Jernej Kopitar. The notion of having a common language emerged in correspondence within the pan-Slavic politics of that time on the Serbian side with Vuk Karadžić (1787–1864) and on the Croatian side with Ljudevit Gaj (1809–1872), with the only major difference being the claim on the usage of alphabet (Karadžić demanded the Cyrilic, Gaj the Latin alphabet). This led to a meeting of linguists in Vienna in 1850 resulting in the Vienna agreement, proclaiming “that being of the same kin, Serbs and Croats should share a common literary language.” However, due to historical and cultural traditions and developments, this language was never unified to the full extent. See Ranko Bugarski, “Language, Identity and Borders in the Former Serbo-Croatian Area,” 222. 8. Daria Sito-Sucic, “The fragmentation of Serbo-Croatian into Three New Languages,” Transition 2, no. 24 (1996): 13. Available at: http://govori.tripod.com/daria.htm. Accessed on April 30, 2018.

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9. Cathie Carmichael, “‘A People Exists and That People Has Its Language’: Language and Nationalism in the Balkans,” 236. 10. Ranko Bugarski, “Language, Identity and Borders in the Former SerboCroatian Area,” 231. 11.  In this text I will use the term ‘nationalism’ as defined by Adrian Hastings: “In practice nationalism is strong only in particularist terms, deriving from the belief that one’s own ethnic or national tradition is especially valuable and needs to be defended at almost any cost through creation or extension of its own nationstate.” Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4. 12. Robert D. Greenberg, Language and Identity in the Balkans (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 11. 13. Ranko Bugarski, “Language, Identity and Borders in the Former SerboCroatian Area,” 227. 14.  Carmichael, “‘A People Exists and That People Has Its Language’: Language and Nationalism in the Balkans,” 237. 15. Greenberg, Language and Identity in the Balkans, 49. 16. Ibid., 116. 17. Snježana Kordić, Jezik i nacionalizam (Zagreb: Durieux, 2010), 359–360. 18. Bugarski, “Language, Identity and Borders in the Former Serbo-Croatian Area,” 227. 19. Ibid., 230. 20. Ibid., 231. 21. Greenberg, Language and Identity in the Balkans, 8. 22.  Carmichael, “‘A People Exists and That People Has Its Language’: Language and Nationalism in the Balkans,” 238. 23. Ibid., 226. 24. See Robert D. Greenberg, Language and Identity in the Balkans (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 25. Ibid., 13. 26. Barbara Sušec Michieli, “The Disappearing Balkans: National Theatres and Geopolitics,” in National Theatres in a Changing Europe, ed. S. E. Wilmer (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 196. 27. Ibid., 198. 28.  S. E. Wilmer, “The Development of National Theatres in Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in National Theatres in a Changing Europe, ed. S. E. Wilmer (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 15. 29.  Sušec  Michieli, “The Disappearing Balkans: National Theatres and Geopolitics,” 198. 30. Ibid.





78  S. HALILBAŠIĆ 31. Ibid. 32. Nebojša Radmanović, ed., 60 godina Narodnog Pozorišta Bosanske Krajine Banja Luka (Banja Luka: Narodno Pozorište, 1990), 3. 33.  See Philipp Ther, Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten: ‘Ethnische Säuberungen’ im modernen Europa (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 246; Armina Galijaš, Eine bosnische Stadt im Zeichen des Krieges–Ethnopolitik und Alltag in Banja Luka, 1990–1995 (Berlin: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2011), 171–203. 34. Irena Šentevska, “In Search of Catharsis. Theatre in Serbia in the 1990s,” Südosteuropa. Journal of Politics and Society, no. 65 (2017): 613. 35. This material can be accessed within the archive of the National Theatre of the Republika Srpska. Most of the material was furthermore digitalized and archived by the author of this text. 36. Galijaš, Eine bosnische Stadt im Zeichen des Krieges–Ethnopolitik und Alltag in Banja Luka, 1990–1995, 29. 37. Bugarski, “Language, Identity and Borders in the Former Serbo-Croatian Area,” 227. 38. Salko Šarić, Pozorišni repertoar u Mostaru, 1879–2001. Repertoar i pozorišta, pozorišnih družina i grupa, pozorišta narodnog oslobođenja Hercegovine, festivala, smotri, susreta i gostovanja (Mostar: Narodno Pozorište, 2006), 10. 39. Ivan Ovčar, Hrvatsko narodno kazalište u Mostaru (Mostar: Hrvatsko Narodno Kazalište, 1999), 140; see also: Senad Halilbašić, “‘Dieses Theater hütet und schützt vor der Angst wie ein warmer Mutterleib’– Oder auch nicht. Neuverortungen der Funktion von Theatergebäuden im Bosnienkrieg,” in Flucht–Migration–Theater: Dokumente und Positionen, eds. Birgit Peter and Gabriele C. Pfeiffer (Mainz and Vienna: Mainz University Press/Vienna University Press, 2017), 391. 40. Ibid. 41. Željko Ivanković, “Hrvatsko-muslimanski rat u ratu,” STATUS–Magazin za političku kulturu i društvena pitanja, no. 3 (2004): 62. 42. Ther, Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten: ‘Ethnische Säuberungen’ im modernen Europa, 248. 43.  Many of these amateurs continued to act after the war, and some of them also studied acting at art academies. Amateurs who started to act on stage while the war was raging ended up becoming official members of the new post-war ensemble, some of them still acting at the National Theatre Mostar today. See also Senad Halilbašić, “Geteilte Stadt, geteiltes Theater,” Theater der Zeit, no. 11 (2015): 48.

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44.  The Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia was an unrecognized, self-proclaimed Croatian entity within the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its political protagonists established para-governmental structures with clear political orientations towards Tuđman’s Croatia and its ultra-nationalistic Greater Croatia policies. See Kristóf Gosztonyi, “Non-existent States with Strange Institutions,” in Potentials of Disorder: Explaining Conflict and Stability in the Caucasus and in the Former Yugoslavia, eds. Jan Koehler and Christoph Zürcher (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 46–61. 45.  Wilmer, “The Development of National Theatres in Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” 18. 46. This was confirmed to me by the actor Robert Pehar, an ensemble member of the Croatian National Theatre in Mostar. The interview with him is, like many others, in my archive related to my doctoral thesis research. It took place on June 12, 2015 in Mostar. 47.  Sušec  Michieli, “The Disappearing Balkans: National Theatres and Geopolitics,” 198. 48. See also self-definition on website: http://www.hnkmostar.ba. Accessed on April 30, 2018. 49. Bugarski, “Language, Identity and Borders in the Former Serbo-Croatian Area,” 227. 50. Ovčar, Hrvatsko narodno kazalište u Mostaru, 140. 51. Dragan Markovina, Između crvenog i crnog–Split i Mostar u kulturi sjećanja (Zagreb: Plejada, 2014), 177–207. 52. Ovčar, Hrvatsko narodno kazalište u Mostaru, 197–203. 53. See also Senad Halilbašić, “Geteilte Stadt, geteiltes Theater,” Theater der Zeit, no. 11 (2015): 46–49. 54. Kenneth Naylor, “The Sociolinguistic Situation in Yugoslavia with Special Emphasis on Serbo-Croatian,” in Language Planning in Yugoslavia, eds. Ranko Bugarski and Celia Hawkesworth (Columbus: Slavica, 1992), 83.

Works Cited Bugarski, Ranko. “Language, Identity and Borders in the Former SerboCroatian Area.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 33, no. 3 (2012): 219–235. Carmichael, Cathie. “‘A People Exists and That People Has Its Language’: Language and Nationalism in the Balkans.” In Language and Nationalism in Europe, edited by Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael, 221–239. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Forster, Michael N. After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

80  S. HALILBAŠIĆ Galijaš, Armina. Eine bosnische Stadt im Zeichen des Krieges–Ethnopolitik und Alltag in Banja Luka, 1990–1995. Berlin: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2011. Gosztonyi, Kristóf. “Non-existent States With Strange Institutions.” In Potentials of Disorder: Explaining Conflict and Stability in the Caucasus and in the Former Yugoslavia, edited by Jan Koehler and Christoph Zürcher, 46–61. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Greenberg, Robert D. Language and Identity in the Balkans. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Halilbašić, Senad. “Dieses Theater hütet und schützt vor der Angst wie ein warmer Mutterleib’—Oder auch nicht. Neuverortungen der Funktion von Theatergebäuden im Bosnienkrieg.” In Flucht—Migration—Theater: Dokumente und Positionen, edited by Birgit Peter and Gabriele C. Pfeiffer, 389–397. Mainz and Vienna: Mainz University Press and Vienna University Press, 2017. ———. “Geteilte Stadt, geteiltes Theater.” Theater der Zeit, no. 11 (2015): 46–49. Hastings, Adrian. The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Ivanković, Željko. “Hrvatsko-muslimanski rat u ratu.” STATUS Magazin za političku kulturu i društvena pitanja, no. 3 (2004): 58–65. Kordić, Snježana. Jezik i nacionalizam. Zagreb: Durieux, 2010. Kuftinec, Sonja Arsham. Theatre, Facilitation, and Nation Formation in the Balkans and Middle East. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Markovina, Dragan. Između crvenog i crnog-Split i Mostar u kulturi sjećanja. Zagreb: Plejada, 2014. Milohnić, Aldo. “Performing Identities–National Theatres and the Re-construction of Identities in Slovenia and the Social Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” In Cultural Transitions in Southeastern Europe—Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies, edited by Aldo Milohnić and Nada Švob-Đokić, 47–59. Zagreb: Institute for International Relations & Peace Institute, 2011. Naylor, Kenneth. “The Sociolinguistic Situation in Yugoslavia with Special Emphasis on Serbo-Croatian.” In Language Planning in Yugoslavia, edited by Ranko Bugarski and Celia Hawkesworth, 89–90. Columbus: Slavica, 1992. Official internet site of the Croatian National Theatre in Mostar. http://www. hnkmostar.ba. Okuka, Miloš. Eine Sprache, viele Erben–Sprachpolitik als National­ isierungsinstrument in Ex-Jugoslawien. Klagenfurt: Wieser, 1998. Ovčar, Ivan. Hrvatsko narodno kazalište u Mostaru. Mostar: Hrvatsko Narodno Kazalište, 1999. Petković, Brankica. “Erased Languages, Aroused Alliances–Language Policy and Post-Yugoslav Political and Cultural Configurations in Slovenia.” In Cultural

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Transitions in Southeastern Europe—Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-) Transitional Societies, edited by Aldo Milohnić and Nada Švob-Đokić, 71–84. Zagreb: Institute for International Relations & Peace Institute, 2011. Radmanović, Nebojša, ed. 60 godina Narodnog Pozorišta Bosanske Krajine Banja Luka. Banja Luka: Narodno Pozorište, 1990. Sito-Sucic, Daria. “The Fragmentation of Serbo-Croatian into Three New Languages.” Transition 2, no. 24 (1996): 10–16. Available at: http://govori. tripod.com/daria.htm. Sušec Michieli, Barbara. “The Disappearing Balkans: National Theatres and Geopolitics.” In National Theatres in a Changing Europe, edited by S. E. Wilmer, 196–203. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Šarić, Salko. Pozorišni repertoar u Mostaru, 1879–2001. Repertoar i pozorišta, pozorišnih družina i grupa, pozorišta narodnog oslobođenja Hercegovine, festivala, smotri, susreta i gostovanja. Mostar: Narodno Pozorište, 2006. Šentevska, Irena. “In Search of Catharsis. Theatre in Serbia in the 1990s.” Südosteuropa. Journal of Politics and Society, no. 65 (2017): 607–631. Ther, Philipp. Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten: ‘Ethnische Säuberungen’ im modernen Europa. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011. Weichlein, Siegfried. Nationalbewegungen und Nationalismus in Europa. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006. Wilmer, S. E. “The Development of National Theatres in Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” In National Theatres in a Changing Europe, edited by S. E. Wilmer, 9–20. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Testimony Amela Kreso Amela Kreso

Actress, Mostar

Panel Discussion, Volkstheater/Volx Margareten, Vienna (November 19, 2015) For me, the war started in May 1993, when I was forced to leave my house, together with my father and brother. After one month spent in a bomb shelter, my cousin took me to the Theatre Restaurant in Mostar, which was owned by the actress Hadžija Hadžibajramović. Before the war, she had been one of the actresses of the Mostar National Theatre, which, thanks to her initiative, continued to exist without the actors who had fled from the city. Approximately, 70 employees used to work in this theatre, but since the outbreak of the war she was the only remaining actress from the whole ensemble. For this reason, she organized an audition to build up an amateur troupe, and I was one of a small group of six individuals chosen to work with her. For me personally, acting was some sort of catharsis: as it took place in another world, it permitted me to unwind from all the stress and fear of everyday life. Hadžibajramović also picked up 15–20 children from the

A. Kreso (*)  National Theatre Mostar, Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_5

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streets of Mostar, doing theatre workshops with them in the mornings. She felt it was necessary to give them a space where they could easily live out their childhood. I went there because life was really terrible—we lived in the bomb shelter and we did not know whether it was day or night outside. It was difficult for young people to live in these circumstances, because we constantly felt in some way responsible for this war happening to us. Theatre “saved” a lot of people in Mostar—those who worked there, as well as those who visited and watched our performances. First we worked with Hadžija—she taught us how to speak on stage, how to act… We were all amateurs, but I was the only one from this group who decided to study drama at Mostar University after the war. Performing drama during the war meant more for us actors than it did for the spectators who attended our performances once a month or so. We could escape to a different reality. Theatre meant everything to me personally: it was a new life, a new beginning. It was the activity that helped me to stay normal and healthy. Since then, I have not suffered from any kind of post-traumatic stress or such things. Concerning the repertoire, we started with some kind of poetry evenings, and then decided to stage the play Hasanaginica by Alija Isaković as our first feature-length show. After that, we made Bašeskija, san o Sarajevu [Bašeskija: A Dream of Sarajevo], written by Darko Lukić. With Hasanaginica, we travelled to Sarajevo, where we played in the National Theatre, which was something really incredible. We travelled for a whole day from Mostar to Sarajevo, in a bus with no windows, freezing… As we entered Sarajevo through the tunnel, the soldiers who checked our belongings, looking for guns and weapons, realized that we were a theatre troupe, and they could hardly believe what we had put ourselves up to. After the performance in Sarajevo, we were really happy with the energy that came from the audience. The applause lasted for 10 minutes, and the auditorium was packed to the last seat. People were so thrilled by the fact that we were all amateurs. One cannot compare any other guest performance to ours in Sarajevo. We were there for just two days, sleeping in the Armed Forces Hall, in the beds of soldiers who were at the front that night. When we went to other cities, such as Zenica or Tuzla, I remember how surprised we were that the people there had running water or electricity, something we have not experienced for a long time. We were excited to take a normal shower or a bath there.

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The working conditions in Mostar National Theatre during the war were extremely harsh. The theatre did not have a roof or windows, so we put some plastic bags on the window screens. At the time around 100 refugees were living in the National Theatre, and we performed for them too. We would go to the theatre every evening, as we were scared of snipers and grenades. Some of us lived in the bomb shelters during the day, some of us were soldiers actively fighting on the frontlines: but at night we all came from different places and worked together. We had performances maybe three times a month. Needless to say, we did not have food, we did not have water, we did not have electricity—the only light that we had was one single candle on the stage. In reality, Mostar had two wars. In the first one, the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina fought alongside the Croatian Army against the Yugoslav National Army. In the other war, allies became enemies: the war between the Bosnian–Herzegovinan Army and the Croatian Army began in May 1993. Mostar is now a city where everything is duplicated and separated, including the theatre—the National Theatre is in the eastern part of Mostar, while in the western part of the town, there is the Croatian National Theatre. During the war, it was impossible to cross from one side of the town to the other. But, interestingly, during the war, there were people of all ethnicities working in our theatre. We were a mixed group. This also influenced our work—we never did anything to hurt or criticize people of other ethnicities; partly out of respect for our colleagues. The reactions of the audience at that time were really intense. There were many soldiers coming to our shows, many older people and people coming from the surrounding villages who were seeing theatre for the first time in their lives. There was a completely different emotion from now. And the audiences were very mixed, much more so than today.

Theatre as Resistance: The Dodona Theatre in Kosovo Jeton Neziraj

From Partisan Theatre to Political Theatre The first Albanian plays were written at the beginning of the twentieth century and predominantly addressed topics and problems from the past. Throughout later stages in the development of Albanian dramaturgy1 many authors also turned back to history in order to “document” past events. However, authors also used history for drawing parallels to the present reality in which they lived. Analyzing the past—and using “good examples”2—was often done in order to raise political and cultural awareness in a society that was gradually being emancipated at the given time, and more often than not, the authors used the past to refer directly to their political and social present. The past often served as a paradigm for conveying messages and ideas that could not be transmitted directly to readers and audiences due to the changing social and political circumstances of the time. Furthermore, it is also worth noting that

J. Neziraj (*)  Qendra Multimedia, Pristina, Kosovo e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_6

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the development of dramaturgy in Albania and Kosovo diverged after the World War II, as dramaturgy in Albania was entirely subject to communist ideology. After the World War II, and about fifty years after the first Albanian plays had been written, the first theatres and theatre groups emerged in Kosovo. Those first groups were formed in Prizren, Pristina, and Mitrovica, and then also in Gjakova, Gjilan and Peja among other towns. Enthusiastic amateurs predominantly flocked to those theatres. In towns that were ethnically mixed, two different groups of actors typically formed: one performing in Albanian and one in Serbian. There was also a theatre group performing in Turkish in Prizren. The plays of that period, from the late 1940s to the 1960s, primarily dealt with the Partisan War and the reconstruction of the country. It was “agit-prop” theatre, which employed well-known plot lines of the time such as partisan bravery or communist heroes who fought against the fascist and bourgeois enemy as well as post-war heroes who built the new socialist order. The very first Albanian show of the newly founded theatre in Prizren took place on November 24, 1945, and consisted of two acts. The first was Mother, a fragment taken from Gorki’s novel, and the second was The Flag, which was taken from a novel based on the World War II by the Kosovar writer Tajar Hatipi.3 A theatre review that published a piece on that show a few years later summarized one of the main messages theatre performances delivered during the post-war period, stating: although it consisted of many professional acting and staging flaws, it had a huge echo in the Albanian population, because it proved that socialist victory could enable every individual and every nation to enjoy the fruits of their freedom.4

The late 1940s and early 1950s were also a time of general social emancipation, especially for Kosovar women. However, because of their work on stage actresses such as Naxhie Deva, Hyrije Hana, Katarina Josipi, among others were deeply stigmatized and ostracized by society.5 The early 1960s introduced a turning point in the development of Kosovar theatre. A play by Ahmet Qirezi, called Erveheja (staged in 1966), directed by actor and director Muharrem Qena6 and staged at The Popular Regional Theatre,7 introduced a completely new style

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and aesthetic for the time, shifting from the realistic and conventional acting and staging of the previous era. The performance was visually abstract, and tended toward an expressionist style of staging and acting. That play initiated a period of substantial aesthetic reform at The Popular Regional Theatre, which became one of the most dynamic and interesting theatres in former Yugoslavia in the 1970s. In the 1960s and 1980s, The Popular Regional Theatre staged works by Beckett, Shakespeare and other well-known international playwrights for the first time in Kosovo. That was also the period when a new generation of Kosovar Albanian directors—mostly educated in theatre academies in Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo and Ljubljana—began to work in Kosovo. Moreover, it was also the most “relaxed” political period in nearly all of Kosovo’s one-hundred-years of modern history following the liberation from the Ottomans. For instance, the use of the Albanian flag was allowed in Kosovo in 1968, and in 1974, a new constitution was adopted which gave Kosovo more autonomy within Yugoslavia.8 During that time, the University of Pristina was established, interethnic relations between Serbs and Albanians improved significantly and Kosovo began experiencing widespread cultural and political autonomy within Yugoslavia. During the 1980s, after the death of Josip Broz Tito, dramatic political events influenced the style of theatre in Kosovo once again, and it became impossible to communicate certain Albanian national issues and themes. For instance, every positive association to Albania was considered unsuitable by Yugoslav communists, and was thereby “politically condemned.” In practice, Albanians in Kosovo were denied any form of connection to Albania, and any kind of promotion of “Albanian national values” was treated as “separatist” or “irredentist” behavior by the Yugoslav state.9 In this complex political landscape, Albanian artists in Kosovo increasingly resorted to using a variety of theatrical symbols and signs. Some of these were universal, but there were some symbols that communicated with Albanian audiences in Kosovo in specific ways. For instance, a white horse stood for freedom, dark clouds symbolized violence, the cross represented suffering, fire warned of war, a long leather jacket depicted an inspector or an official in power and so on. These and other symbols were frequently used in various contexts and generally referred to specific political situations at the time.

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The Dodona Theatre and the Spiritual Resistance The 1990s were a period of massive social and political upheaval in Kosovo. The disintegration of Yugoslavia actually began in Kosovo as Belgrade violently repressed the political demands for freedom and equality of the Albanians of Kosovo. Albanian school children and university students were expelled and purged from their school buildings, because they refused to follow the curriculum imposed by the Milošević regime. In general, this was a time of deep divisions between Albanian and Serbian society in Kosovo.10 Albanians created a parallel system of education, which functioned separately from the “official” system that was controlled and financed by Belgrade. Throughout the 1990s, Albanian pupils and students studied in private homes, cellars, churches, mosques and other spaces. Approximately 400,000 students and teachers participated in this parallel educational system. The Faculty of Arts met the same fate. The students of that faculty were violently expelled from their buildings and had to find other locations for continuing their studies. Faruk Begolli,11 a wellknown actor in Yugoslav films and a professor of acting at that faculty, describes the staff’s struggles in the context of the newly imposed working conditions: They expelled us from the faculty … We continued our lectures in an old abandoned building near the Faculty of Economics after a pause of two or three months. That building had been completely destroyed and it had no doors or windows. It became like a public lavatory, the kind of place where people went to have sex at night, but we cleaned it up and held our lessons there. We taught two generations of students there until they completely destroyed the building and we were forced to find another space. The currency market, where various dealers worked, was below the faculty. The Serbian police sometimes came into the faculty and caught us when they were chasing the dealers, but they never threw us out. Looking back now, when you tell someone about those times, you feel as if “you did something” at least, that you didn’t just give up.12

The majority of the theatres in Kosovo were either closed or placed under the management of Milošević’s cronies. Most of the Albanian actors and directors of Pristina’s Regional Popular Theatre were fired. Very few plays were produced in Albanian for nearly ten years, and

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Serbian Drama took center stage at the theatre instead.13 Of course, everything that was produced in Albanian passed through the filters of the censors imposed by the Serbian administration. Nevertheless, Albanian playwrights tried to draw parallels to the current political and social situation by staging plays dealing with various historical topics. One of the most successful plays of that time was Last Night at Goli Otok by actor and director Xhevat Qorraj, which told the story of the murder and torture of Albanian political prisoners by Yugoslav communists at the infamous political prison on the island of Goli Otok. In one of the performances that I saw at that time, the actors genuinely wept on stage, and so did the audience. The play was extremely popular and was performed over one hundred times back then, but when the play was shown again after the war in Kosovo in 1999 there was little interest in it. There may be several reasons for the lack of interest in the play after the war, but it seems clear that the public no longer bore the same emotional and psychological burden that it had prior the war. In addition, it is also significant that Albanian audiences had no other options before the war, and each play staged in Albanian was, therefore, a must-see. It should also be noted that during the period of extreme ethnic divisions the Albanian audience generally considered the Regional Popular Theatre in Pristina as a ‘Serbian theatre’. Due to the “violent measures” that were imposed (most of the Albanian artists were forced to leave) and the repertoire politics, Albanian audiences generally boycotted the plays staged there. The cultural history of Kosovo between 1992 and 1998 may be best reflected by the example of The Dodona Theatre, a small theatre for children and young adults, founded in 1992 and located in the suburbs of Pristina (Fig. 1). The Dodona Theatre was the home of a theatre group that was established in Pristina in 1986, called the Theatre of Youth, Children and Puppets. During the first four years, the theatre operated with a group of about 17 boys and girls. It was initially under the direction of Borislav Mrkšić, a well-known dramaturge and theatre expert from Zagreb. Mrkšić was then followed by the Kosovar director and actor Melehate Qena. The war had already begun in Bosnia, and a different kind of war was taking place in Kosovo, one of apartheid and discrimination. In 1992, an old abandoned building in the Çiklik neighborhood of Pristina, which had been used by a boxing club until then, was turned into a theatre. The Theatre For Youth, Children And Puppets moved into continue its

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Fig. 1  Entry of the Dodona Theater (Photo courtesy of Jeton Neziraj)

activities, finally able to have its own location.14 That theatre’s stage was narrow with little depth and with an auditorium consisting of only 167 seats. The stage operated in two shifts. In the morning they staged plays for children, and in the evening they staged plays for adults. The director of the theatre was Enver Petrovci, a well-known Albanian actor who had experienced great success on the stages of Belgrade. Petrovci had left Belgrade and returned to work in his birthplace of Pristina during the immense political upheaval. The theatre, later called The Dodona, opened with the play Professor… I Am Talented… It’s not a Joke, which came to The Dodona after being performed approximately 20 times at the former Popular Provincial Theatre (which changed its name to The Kosovo National Theatre in 2008 after Kosovo declared independence). According to the media echo, the performance was considered the cultural event of the year, and the simple fact that the performance was in shown in Albanian was recognized as a crucial point. One of the media reports stated that:

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Now, as this theatre is open and Albanian is again openly being spoken in it, students from the Department of Acting, directed by Professor Faruk Begolli, have very successfully produced and performed the play Professor… I Am Talented… It’s not a Joke. The play is a real breath of fresh air in our dead cultural life … They brought all their talent and art to the “boards that mean the world” … keeping the Albanian language alive in the theatre where Albanian is still spoken …15

The ensemble (Fig. 2) eventually decided to call the evening stage program The Dodona Theatre. According to a very generalized explanation of ancient history, the famous oracle of Dodona once lived in a territory of the IllyrianPelasgian tribes. However, Petrovci explained the choice of using that name, outlining that:

Fig. 2  Actors in the comedy Professor… I am talented… it’s not a joke (sequel) (Photo courtesy of Jeton Neziraj)

94  J. NEZIRAJ We gathered together … to find a name for the evening stage. I had some ideas, for instance, because of the number of seats, I suggested that the theatre be called Atelie 167. Someone said that it should be called The Pristina Theatre. There were a lot of suggestions, but we didn’t like any of them, so we decided to meet again after a break. A week later, the same people met and we decided we liked Shyqeri Niman’s idea to call it The Dodona. Of course, Shyqeri explained the reason for his suggestion, but there was another reason why I personally thought it was the right decision. At that time, there was a children’s song sung in Serbian, do do dole, and it could provide us with a kind of protection. If someone from the Serbian regime was to ask me why it was called The Dodona, I would have answered, “oh, it’s from that song do do dole,” and that way I would have avoided any complications. So, we decided on The Dodona. Of course, I didn’t dare announce it officially at the municipality, because it was a very bad time politically, but the people adopted the name very quickly and all the evening performances were known as The Dodona Theatre.16

The first play produced by The Dodona Theatre itself was The Zoo Story by Edward Albee, and it was directed by Faruk Begolli in November 1992. Approximately 50 plays for children and adults premiered in the theatre before the war began in Kosovo in 1998. Following the eruption of the war, the repressive measures that had been imposed by the Serbian government were then also applied to cultural institutions. The Dodona Theatre was, therefore, targeted as well. Petrovci was forced to leave the theatre and a new Serbian director, Radoslav Zlatanović, replaced him. In an article published in the Serbian weekly NIN in May 1994,17 the Albanian politician and philosopher Shkelzen Maliqi stated that Zlatanović was part of the intellectual elite of Kosovo’s Serbs, which was characterised by extreme nationalistic beliefs. He also mentioned that Zlatanović, being a poet, even wrote a poem dedicated to Slobodan Milošević in 198718: Today, the majority of those “artists” and mediocre intellectuals are accomplishing tasks of the nationalist commissars in order to “liberate” cultural institutions from what they refer to as ‘Albanian domination’. So, the poet Zlatanović is continuing that duty to “liberate” The Dodona Theatre the same way. By the way, Radovan Karadžić is also a poet. Cleansing The Dodona Theatre this way also follows the same logic of a similar phenomenon of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.19

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However, just days before the changes in the theatre’s administration, and knowing that he was about to be dismissed and replaced as the director of The Dodona, Petrovci managed to sign a fictional contract with a company called FTD, which was co-owned by Begolli. Since that company was registered in Belgrade, it gave Begolli’s firm the opportunity to rent the theatre’s evening stage. Therefore, the newly imposed theatre direction could not question a contract with a firm that was registered in Belgrade (i.e., a similar contract with a company registered in Kosovo would not have been respected at all unless it was initiated by a Serbian citizen of Kosovo). This contract stated that all of the future productions on the evening stage would actually be produced by FTD, which was thereby committed to paying The Dodona Theatre 20% of the ticket sales. It was actually on the basis of that contract that the theatre managed to stage a repertoire intended for the Albanian public. These and similar kinds of “strategies” were obvious symptoms of the new cultural policies through which Kosovar Albanians were denied their statuses as equal citizens. Although The Dodona Theatre continued operating under the aforementioned conditions, the same did not happen with other theatres in Kosovo where Albanian actors and theatre employees were dismissed and replaced with an imposed Serbian administration. Shkelzen Maliqi named this strategy “the national purification of Kosovo,” continuing that: The decision of the Serbian authorities to forcefully impose a Serbian director in The Dodona Theatre took place in order to take control of the theatre and perhaps to stifle it. By taking over The Dodona, the Serbian regime demonstrated that its objective was not limited, as declared, to just establishing Serbia’s full sovereignty and supposedly not impacting the cultural rights of Albanians. On the contrary, this case showed very clearly that the goal of the Serbian regime was the total national purification of Kosovo, and the stifling of all non-Serbian institutions. Albanians were not even allowed their cultural autonomy. The Dodona, which had developed a model of cultural autonomy, did not directly threaten the statehood of Serbia. The theatre had just managed to obstruct those that wanted to cleanse Kosovo of Albanian culture, and also of Albanians themselves. In “Serbian” Kosovo, they thought that not a single Albanian should exist at all.20

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As already stated, The Dodona Theatre continued its work under specific circumstances, and it was somewhat protected by the aforementioned contract. Aside from staging plays, the evening stage (now maintained by Begolli’s FTD Company) was also used for conducting exams for the acting and directing students of the clandestine (Albanian) Faculty of Arts. Although the imposed directors, Radoslav Zlatanović and Zoran Kosovac (who replaced Zlatanović in 1995) as one of Slobodan Milošević’s cronies, prohibited this practice, they continued to do so nevertheless without his knowledge. In order to conduct the exams, the staff of The Dodona tried to get the director drunk until the exams were over. The same “strategy” was applied when the theatre put on shows, concerts and events of a more challenging political character. However, not all of the plays staged at The Dodona managed to escape the censorship of the imposed director—for instance, the dance performance Albanian Odyssey by the late Abdurrahman Nokshiqi-Abi, a Kosovar choreographer and ballet dancer who had performed on international stages, was cancelled on the day of its planned premiere, because it was accused by Zoran Kosovac of containing “Albanian nationalist elements.”21 Under those circumstances, The Dodona Theatre remained practically the only place in Kosovo where various cultural activities continued to be produced and shown in Albanian until 1999 and the beginning of the NATO bombing of Serbian military forces. Not only did it manage to continue functioning, but it had a very busy schedule, hosting up to five different cultural events a day. One of the most popular plays of the period was the abovementioned Professor… I Am Talented… It’s not a Joke, the first performance staged on the evening stage. The original production actually premiered at the former National Provincial Theatre in Pristina and moved to The Dodona after about 20 performances. Directed by Faruk Begolli himself, the play had a very simple structure, describing a student’s audition at the Academy of Arts. Playing the role of the professor, Begolli stayed seated in the audience as young actors came on to the stage one after the other, presenting the material they had prepared for their audition. Based on a similar popular play Audicija from 1984,22 Professor… also featured musical intermissions and improvisational material that mostly centred around the politics of the time and place. The play was staged approximately 360 times at The Dodona and in predominantly improvised rooms and spaces in other towns in Kosovo. As Begolli described,

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they continued performing the play in order to provide an opportunity for acting students to “try out” their acting skills in front of an audience: My direction of these plays was entirely devoted to the actors’ performances, so I tried to highlight their talents rather than my own skills as a director (which are debatable to begin with). In other words, I did all of these plays to meet the needs of the acting students. I directed around thirty plays, but to tell you the truth, I never kept count. I started directing in 1989 with the first generation of acting students, and it continued, generation after generation, play after play … Although I’ve directed about 30 plays, I still don’t think of myself as a director.23

Dodona’s repertoire consisted mostly of comedies, including works by international playwrights such as Audience by Václav Havel, BoeingBoeing by Mark Camoletti, The Chairs by Eugène Ionesco, George Washington’s Loves by Miro Gavran, Persona by Ingmar Bergman, et cetera. The majority of the productions were realized on a minimal budget or without any budget at all. For instance, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which premiered on February 24, 1996, was produced with no more than 150 euros. With stage props, including a tank that symbolised the acute oppression and violence executed by Milošević’s regime against the Albanian Kosovars, Godot was interpreted as a vision of freedom that failed to arrive. Directed by Fadil Hysaj, the production won the Special Jury Prize at the MESS International Theatre Festival in Sarajevo in 1998. During the festival, the play’s ensemble visited Kosovar refugees stationed at a camp in the former Coca-Cola factory in Hadžići near Sarajevo. Accompanied by the visiting actress and activist Vanessa Redgrave, they managed to perform an extract from Professor… on the spot. The same director had previously staged The Chairs by Ionesco (1995) as a possible reflection and metaphor of the spiritual isolation that prevailed in Kosovo at the time. As mentioned, alongside the productions on the evening stages and those for children and youth taking place during the daytime, The Dodona Theatre was also used for the rehearsals and exams of Albanian acting and directing students, who studied in houses and buildings that were converted into classrooms after the closing of their faculty in 1991.24 Most of these students would then continue performing on the evening stage, and for them The Dodona was like a workshop platform where they had the possibility to experience the theatre. The work and

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performing conditions were hard—for instance, the actors and theatre staff did not have any fixed income, but were paid according to ticket sales instead; sometimes the actors even needed to produce their own costumes, et cetera. The actor Luan Daka speaks of the risks and benefits of his engagement in The Dodona then: At that time, I managed to buy food for my family with the income I earned from the play Professor…. Looking back, it sounds a bit pathetic or ridiculous, but at the time I depended on that play to survive. It wasn’t easy being an actor. Once, when I was returning from Gjilan, where we had filmed the play, I was stopped by the Serbian police on my way home and was beaten up…25

Regardless of the risks of being censored or banned, The Dodona’s productions continued to tour throughout Kosovo, performing in different towns. However, the pressures they experienced were ongoing. For instance, after returning from a performance tour once, the police ordered the actors to burn the Albanian flag that had been used as a prop. It is important to note that this was a time of harsh police patrols in which Serbian police frequently provoked Albanian citizens, and that meant that going to The Dodona had become a somewhat difficult endeavor. However, theatre audiences evidently overcame their fears of clashing with the Serbian police as all of The Dodona’s productions were very well-attended. It was often the case that during sold-out performances, the people that were eager to see the plays but did not have tickets would break into the theatre or somehow do so using the rooftops of neighboring houses. The audiences recognized The Dodona as a small oasis in the violent atmosphere that prevailed outside of it. In addition, they used and considered that theatre as a space that allowed a type of “spiritual resistance,” and many would later refer to The Dodona as the “muse of resistance.”26 That type of resistance provided audiences with a sense of dignity and diverted their attention from the humiliation and dehumanization that they experienced from the police forces and Serbian paramilitary groups in their everyday lives. Of course, it was not a time of progressive theatre aesthetics. New political circumstances also imposed new aesthetic approaches. Directors who had previously been successful and well-respected were unable to find work. Those who managed to continue working had to adapt to

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the new circumstances, so their styles had to conform to the new conditions—meaning minimal theatre budgets, minimal casts, improvised costumes and limited scenography. Some of the directors (such as Fadil Hysaj and Isa Qosja) only produced political theatre performances. Another group of directors produced light and entertaining comedy. And a third group, mostly consisting of younger directors, occasionally tried to experiment and produce work that went beyond the realist theatre that was prevalent then. Above all, that recent period of theatre history in Kosovo should be seen in light of the political events of the time and as a part of a struggle to protect a certain cultural identity. Albanian theatre in Kosovo was completely isolated from the theatre developments in other parts of former Yugoslavia at that time. Even though Bosnia and Croatia were impacted by the war then, those conflicts were not addressed in Albanian theatre in Kosovo, because it would not have been allowed by the Serbian authorities, and those responsible for producing or staging such plays would most likely have been imprisoned. The Dodona Theatre continued its activities until five days before NATO began bombing Serbian military and police forces (March 23, 1999). During that time, Adriana Abdullahu, a young actress at The Dodona Theatre, was killed in a terrorist attack in Pristina. She had just graduated from the acting school and was considered one of the most talented actresses of her generation. The day after her murder, Begolli and other actors of The Dodona, tried to organize a commemoration service for Adriana in the theatre, but were prevented by Zoran Kosovac. Nevertheless, the commemoration was held in the small courtyard of the theatre. On that occasion, Begolli stated that: “Those who kill us are the same people who are preventing us from holding this commemoration meeting today.”27 During the Kosovo War, from 1998 to 1999, about one million Albanians had to flee the country and the theatre artists were no exception—most of the people who worked at The Dodona Theatre were violently expelled from Pristina. Begolli was one of the few that managed to avoid his colleague’s fate as he hid in his sister’s house, somewhere in the suburbs of Pristina. He was a well-known film actor in Yugoslavia during the 1970s and 1980s, performing in over 70 films which mostly dealt with the partisan movement. During the first few days of the NATO bombing, Serbia’s public broadcaster RTS28 showed many World War II films, most of which starred Begolli. On camera, he was usually cast as a

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brave partisan who fought the fascists and their collaborators, but in real life he found himself waiting for the Serbian police to come and forcibly evict him from his home. Begolli later recounted the dramatic story when the Serbian soldiers entered his home in Pristina in 1999: One day, they were showing Operation Belgrade by director Žika Mitrović on television, in which I play the brave liberator of the city of Belgrade, and then the Serbian police came and evicted us from our house. It was terrible. “Come on, you kept asking for Albania, so get dressed and get out” … I started to get dressed. At first, I was shaking of course. They carried on. “Don’t you want to go? Do you have any money?” I took out all the money I had. They threw it all over the floor. “You have both attacked us, so we’re going to kill you now.” They continued that torture for two hours, but a man eventually discovers new strength. At first, I was shaking. I was listening, but at some point I started to play one of my film roles and said “come on, send me wherever you want, whatever you want” … “Come on, kill me” … It was all performed with a different strength and a serenity that seemed superhuman.29

Most of the Kosovar actors fled to Albania and Macedonia. Some of The Dodona’s actors, who found refuge in Macedonia, established The Dodona in Exile and performed plays for children and adults in the refugee camps. In addition to the aforementioned repertoire, they also performed Audience by Vaclav Havel, a play that had previously been performed at The Dodona Theatre in Pristina. When Havel heard about that he wrote a letter in which he expressed his support for the people of Kosovo, while also expressing that he was pleased that his play was being staged by and for the refugees.30 At the end of the Kosovo War, on June 12, 1999, most of the theatre actors who were in Macedonia and Albania returned to Kosovo and began to work again under entirely new circumstances. In the first two years following the war, The Dodona worked closely with UNICEF, performing plays in many villages of Kosovo in order to raise awareness among children about the dangers of the landmines left behind after the war. The actors from the Serbian Drama group in the former “Popular Theatre” of Pristina also left as Serbian forces withdrew from Kosovo and NATO forces arrived. After working in Serbia for a few years, they returned to Kosovo, where, with the support of the Serbian authorities they continued their activities in the northern part of the country in the town of Zvečan. Later, the Serbian actors moved their

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“Popular Theatre” of Pristina to Gračanica, a small town in the district of Pristina that was largely inhabited by Serbs. It is also important to note that the functioning of that theatre was considered “illegal” by the Kosovo authorities as it was directly financed and administrated by the authorities in Serbia.

Conclusion Over the more than 70 years of its existence, the theatre scene in Kosovo played an important social and political role. It remains the most convincing and most precise chronicle of the social developments in Kosovo and a precise testing grounds for the stories and the traumas of the society. It promoted and articulated the important political demands and aspirations of the Kosovars, especially from the early 1980s until after the war in the context of the construction of a new national and cultural identity. Its role was particularly important in the 1990s at the time of the apartheid and Serbian repression of Albanians in Kosovo. Just by “existing,” it created a sense of resistance among the public, commonly regarded as a “spiritual” sense. I believe that a slightly modified version of the phrase by Albert Camus31 “we make theatre, therefore we resist” could metaphorically summarize the social and political impact of Kosovar theatre during that period. Regarding its content, Kosovar theatre of the 1990s was confined to problems that were often considered provincial and marginal. The destruction of the theatre system in the 1990s resulted in some “mediocre” theatrical performances that lowered the aesthetic standard and featured provincial humor and everyday jokes. It was a type of theatrical “fast food” that corresponded to the needs of the time, but which also had a long-term impact on the audiences by devaluing their aesthetic demands. During the 1990s, the majority of theatrical practice was reduced to that of conventional theatre as the artists of the time lacked the knowledge and expertise to use theatre more effectively as a tool against oppression and violence. However, even if those artists had the necessary skills and creativity, it would not have been easy to do. Just like the majority of the people in Kosovo, most artists were also caught by surprise by the quick political changes of the 1990s, and, therefore, did not manage to creatively respond to its challenges. Many of them simply refused to work, thinking that the war would be over quickly anyway. Unfortunately, the reality proved them wrong.

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After the war, Kosovar theatre had less of an important role socially and politically. However, in numerous cases it has produced and stimulated substantial debates on Kosovar society and politics. Some plays about identity, multiculturalism, dialogue and Serbian-Albanian cultural cooperation, war crimes or corruption initiated powerful debates within intellectual circles in Kosovo, and the theatre has become a strong promoter of the democratic development of the country as a result. The history of the development and functioning of Kosovar theatre should be seen in light of the broad social and political events and developments in former Yugoslavia as well as the local context in which it operated. It is in this light that its theatrical aesthetic should be judged, and it was, in most cases, entirely dominated by ideological goals. Naturally, even within this limited framework, there were many artists that tried to shake off the ideological and political conditions of the time. They offered the public plays with sophisticated theatrical aesthetics and their messages were eternal and universal. Now that the great dramas and traumas of the past have been left behind, Kosovar theatre has come back to being theatre again. It opened to the public and its repertoire now includes plays on topics and issues that were previously considered “inappropriate” to address in a theatre. Its key battles are transforming its governing policies, clarifying its relationship with the state and reformulating the way it communicates with a new audience, specifically with the internet generation. In the context of the new state, this remains a serious challenge which the theatre must address.

Notes

1. The term “Albanian dramaturgy” is a language-based definition and refers to the dramaturgy written in Albanian by authors in Albania, Kosovo and other parts of former Yugoslavia, as well as that written by Albanian authors living in the diaspora (i.e., in Romania, Turkey, Greece or Italy). The first Albanian play is considered to be Emira by Anton Santori, written in 1885 in Cosenza, Italy. Other plays of that early period were written by “Arberesh” authors (the term for Albanians who emigrated to Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth century), while others such as Sami Frasheri, who wrote Besa, were based in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The term itself is widely accepted in Albanian dramaturgy studies, and can hardly by attributed to a certain nation in particular.

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2. In many plays of that period, thematic content dealt with rich Albanian or Balkan mythology, ranging from various rituals to important historical events. 3. See Qemajl Sokoli, Monografia e Teatrit Kombëtar të Kosovës 1945–2005 (Pristina: Autori, 2006). 4. See Jedinstvo, April 15, 1949. 5. Jeton Neziraj, “Naxhije Deva and Our Late Justification,” Loja Theatre Magazine, no. 3 (2008). 6. A well-known Kosovar actor, singer and director. He became famous with the play Erveheja, with which he won five prizes at the Yugoslav festival Sterijino Pozorje in Novi Sad. It became a cult play of Kosovar theatre. 7. During its 70-year history, The National Theatre of Kosovo has changed its name four times, depending on the political status experienced by Kosovo. In the beginning, until the 1960s, it was called The Popular Regional Theatre. Then until 1999 it was called Peoples Provincial Theatre, and after the war and up to the declaration of independence of Kosovo in 2008, it was called the Kosovo Theatre. After 2008, it was formally named The National Theatre of Kosovo. 8. See http://www.constitutionnet.org/country/constitutional-history-kosovo. Accessed on February 16, 2018. 9. As a result, three in every four ordinary prisoners in Yugoslav prisons at that time were Albanian political prisoners from Kosovo. Sabile KeçmeziBasha explains that Albanians of former Yugoslavia spent 666 centuries, 72 years and 7 months in political prisons of Yugoslavia: “Albanians in former Yugoslavia comprised up to 12% of the total number of the population of former Yugoslavia, while they had approximately 90% of political prisoners from the total number of political prisoners of former Yugoslavia … From 1945 to 1990, about 8220 Albanians of former Yugoslavia were held in prisons for political reasons.” See Sabile KeçmeziBasha, Të burgosurit politik shqiptarë në Kosovë 1945–1990: gjate viteve 1945–1990 [Albanian political prisoners in Kosovo 1945–1990] (Pristina: Logos A, 2009). 10. Statistically, Albanians constituted a little over 90% of Kosovo’s population, Serbs about 7% and Turks, Roma and Bosniaks approximately 2–3%. 11. Faruk Begolli (February 17, 1944–August 23, 2007) developed his career in Belgrade and was a well-known film actor, starring in over 70 films. At the end of the 1980s, he returned to Kosovo where he founded the acting department at the Faculty of Arts at The University of Pristina. During the 1990s, he managed The Dodona Theatre. Faruk Begolli, Enver Petrovci and Bekim Fehmiu were without a doubt the three most famous Albanian actors of former Yugoslavia. 12. Jeton Neziraj, Faruk Begolli Monograph (Pristina: Integra, 2007), 65.

104  J. NEZIRAJ 13. Until the beginning of the 1990s, The Regional Popular Theatre consisted of two drama groups: Albanian Drama, which performed plays in Albanian, and Serbian Drama, which performed plays in Serbian. At the beginning of the 1990s, with the arrival of Milošević to power, Albanian Drama was almost entirely shut down. 14. The first children’s play on The Dodona Theatre’s stage was Picrraku by Karel Novak, directed by Melehate Qena in June 1992. 15. S. Zejnullahu, Gazeta Bota e Re, 1991. 16. Jeton Neziraj, Teatri Dodona (Pristina: Fondacioni Kosovar për Shoqëri Civile, 2002), 24. 17. Shkelzen Maliqi, “Osvajanje ‘Dodone’,” NIN, May 13, 1994. 18. In 1995, Radoslav Zlatanović left this position for unknown reasons and was replaced by Zoran Kosovac who remained the director until the end of the Kosovo War in 1999. 19. Shkelzen Maliqi, “Osvajanje ‘Dodone’,” NIN, May 13, 1994. 20. Ibid. 21. See Jeton Neziraj, Teatri Dodona, 10. 22.  Audicija was created at the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo in December 1984 as part of the students’ curriculum. Consisting of comical sketches depicting a student’s audition, it enjoyed tremendous popularity in the 1980s and is still performed to this day, although by a somewhat alternated acting ensemble. 23. Jeton Neziraj, Faruk Begolli Monograph (Pristina: Integra, 2007), 79. 24. On St. Vitus Day (a Serbian national and religious holiday known as Vidovdan) on June 28, 1991, after the summer semester of the academic year 1990/1991 was completed, the Serbian Parliament applied the violent measures to The University of Pristina. See Howard Clark, Civil Resistance in Kosovo (London and Sterling: Pluto Press, 2000), 110–111. 25. Jeton Neziraj, Teatri Dodona, 118. 26. This term was first used by Shkelzen Maliqi, the philosopher and art critic from Kosovo, in a public presentation he held in Stockholm on June 5, 1998, entitled “Art of the Resistance, Resistance of the Art—Kosovo Case.” 27. Jeton Neziraj, Teatri Dodona, 70. An excerpt from a speech held for the audience that was gathered in order to enter The Dodona Theatre for the commemoration meeting that was supposed to happen in The Dodona Theatre. 28. Although only two republics—Serbia and Montenegro—of the original six remained by then, they retained the official title of Yugoslavia. Serbia made persistent efforts to present itself as the “inheritor” of Yugoslavia, because it wanted to retain Yugoslavia’s political, financial and military legacy, especially in the countries of the East. Later, after the Kosovo War of 1999, the state that remained (now without Kosovo) was called Serbia and Montenegro, but only until Montenegro declared its independence in 2006.

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29. See Jeton Neziraj, Faruk Begolli Monograph, 86. 30. Alisa Maliqi, “Staging ‘Audience’ by Havel in Tetova,” in Jeton Neziraj, Teatri Dodona, 204. 31. I rebel—therefore I exist.

Works Cited Balfour, Michael. “Performing War: ‘Military Theatre’ and the Possibilities of Resistance.” Performance Paradigm 3 (2007). http://www.performanceparadigm.net/index.php/journal/article/view/30. Accessed February 16, 2018. Clark, Howard. Civil Resistance in Kosovo. London and Sterling: Pluto Press, 2000. Keçmezi-Basha, Sabile. Te burgosurit politike ahqiptare ne Kosove 1945–1990: gjate viteve 1945–1990 [Albanian Political Prisoners in Kosovo 1945–1990]. Pristina: Logos A, 2009. Maliqi, Shkelzen. “Osvajanje ‘Dodone’.” NIN, May 13, 1994. Neziraj, Jeton. Teatri Dodona. Pristina: Fondacioni Kosovar për Shoqëri Civile, 2002. ———. Faruk Begolli Monograph. Pristina: Integra, 2007. ———. “Eine späte Geschichte des jungen Theaters.” In Landvermessungen: Theaterlandschaften in Mittel-, Ost- und Südosteuropa, edited by Martina Vannayová and Anna Häusler, 48–60. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2008. ———. “Naxhije Deva and Our Late Justification.” Loja Theatre Magazine, no. 3 (2008). Rexhaj, Besim. Tipat e dramës së sotme Shqiptare në Kosovë (1950–1990) [Forms of Contemporary Albanian Drama in Kosovo (1950–1990)]. Pristina: Rilindja, 1994. Rrustemi, Blerta, and Granit Kurti. “Le Tartuffe de Rahim Burhan au Kosovo.” Au sud de l’est: Les cultures des Balkans, no. 5 (2009): 53–58. Sokoli, Qemajl. Monografia e Teatrit Kombëtar të Kosovës 1945–2005. Pristina: Autori, 2006. Zejnullahu, S. Gazeta Bota e Re, 1991. http://www.constitutionnet.org/ country/constitutional-history-kosovo.

War Discourse on Institutional Stages: Serbian Theatre 1991–1995 Ksenija Radulović

The subject of this work is the dominant, institutional form of theatre1 in Serbia during the wars in the region of former Yugoslavia (1991– 1995): and thus, the focus will be on plays which dealt with the war in an indirect or direct manner, and were realized in institutional theatres in Serbia. This text will deal with three plays staged by the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade, artistically the most prestigious theatre in the country, and one play by the newly founded Kult Theatre. The first group of plays comprises William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, directed by Dejan Mijač (1994); The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus, directed by Gorčin Stojanović (1994); and The Powder Keg by Dejan Dukovski, directed by Slobodan Unkovski (1995). In addition to these, we will focus on the above-mentioned Kult Theatre, whose first opening night was also the first performance of the first contemporary Serbian drama to deal with the current wars: this was the play entitled Tamna je noć [Dark Is the Night], written by Aleksandar Popović, the author of classic works of the post-World War II Yugoslav and Serbian avant-garde, and directed by Egon Savin in 1993.2

K. Radulović (*)  Dramatic Arts, University of Arts, Belgrade, Serbia © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_7

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In our analysis, we will first turn to the plays of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre. The staging of Troilus and Cressida in the summer of 1994 was a co-production of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre and Grad teatar Budva [Budva Theatre City Festival]. The second partner in the co-production was a summer cultural festival in the tourist town of Budva, a popular resort on the Montenegrin Adriatic coast. During the 1990s, and later, this was a common form of cooperation between Belgrade (Serbian) theatres and summer festivals in Montenegro. The usual model for this co-production meant that the first opening night took place d ­uring the summer in Budva, with another in autumn in Belgrade, and the plays would then continue to run on Belgrade stages. The selection of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida was part of a very interesting ­repertoire trend in the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, which was headed by Jovan Ćirilov at the time. This consisted of first performances of classic plays of world literature, plays which had never been performed in Serbian (and very often, not in Croatian, Bosnian, or Montenegrin either). The play was directed by Dejan Mijač, a leading Serbian theatre director, and one of the most successful directors in the former Yugoslavia. Troilus and Cressida opened on August 5 on the stage in the Citadel (fortress) in Budva, and it was first performed in Belgrade on December 3 that same year. This play, “neither comedy nor tragedy,”3 is regarded by some scholars as the least Shakespearean of all the playwright’s works. It partly deviates from the rule that order must be unconditionally restored at the end of the play (order-disorder-order), since some elements are not completely restored to a harmonious condition— discontented Troilus prepares for revenge, which hints at the possible resumption of hostilities. The events in the play focus on two elements: the Greek siege of Troy, and the love between the young hero and heroine, Troilus and Cressida. In his staging of the play, the director was inspired by some of the writer’s interventions which make the play different from the original ancient myth: the ironic shading of the characters, and the infrequent cynical or mocking commentaries. In addition, a lot of room was given to the characters whose actions were not inspired by “higher goals” such as the will of Gods, or noblesse oblige, but resulted from personal inclination or character traits. Thus the story of the seventh year of the siege of Troy becomes the backdrop against which “the other side of the war” is presented, a stage where we can see the personal tragedies of the people, the scared and innocent victims, sly and deceitful actions, and the dark side of human nature. The director does

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not perceive the phenomenon of war as a result of rational motives and interests by the conflicting sides; war is waged “to lend legitimacy to the crime.”4 This is why special prominence in the play is given to the sarcastic Greek Thersites, a comic servant/fool in the Greek army, who sheds light on many uncomfortable truths which are tolerated only because they are not presented in a more serious form. The beginning and end of the play (its “frame,” which is an important element of plays directed by Mijač)5 belong to Thersites, played by one of the most prominent Serbian and Yugoslav actors, Vojislav Brajović. The scene is set as a kind of historical dump with visible debris of war. From the very first scene, among the various metal fragments and debris, an old battered dumpster stands in isolation (Fig. 1). It should be noted that during this period (late 1980s and the 1990s), a dumpster was often an element of scenery or a metaphor for Serbian reality in theatre (Klaustrofobična komedija [The Claustrophobic Comedy] and Kontejner

Fig. 1  Troil i Kresida [Troilus and Cressida], Yugoslav Drama Theatre, Belgrade, 1994 (Photo courtesy of Srđa Mirković)

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sa Pet Zvezdica [Five Star Dumpster] by Dušan Kovačević, Family Stories by Biljana Srbljanović, etc.) At the beginning of the play, Thersites comes up from a sewer and speaks the verses of the Prologue; he then throws aside his helmet and pushes the dumpster off the stage. In the final scene of the play, after the end of the decisive battle, he puts the salvaged objects from the battlefield in the same dumpster, with the cry “We buy scrap metal!”6 Moreover, from the very beginning, anonymous witnesses and victims of war, women and children are present on the stage. The pinnacle of the absurdity of war is reached in the scene where Achilles and Hector face off, where Hector is really killed by children, young “Praetorians” trained for this, which renders his death even more absurd. Young men were the first and most numerous victims of the war in the 1990s: many of them found themselves on the battlefield due to mobilization/ drafting, and others took this step on their own, influenced by media manipulation. In one of the scenes, a director’s trick reveals the true nature of wars waged in the late twentieth century: Thersites is center stage with bright blue lights on him, using a megaphone for a live commentary of the fierce clash between the two armies. The fool is thus given the role of a “presenter” on a war stage, and the nature of contemporary warfare is thus tightly connected with strategies of media manipulation, and a particular “show,” given the manner in which the media functions in this contemporary globalized world. War is no longer waged but broadcast. Reporters of big global media platforms move from one battlefield to the next, “the newer” and “the more attractive” one. In this era of high-tech civilization, Hector’s death becomes the object of (falsified) sensation: the Trojan hero dies at the hands of mindless youngsters, at a moment when he is resting, unarmed and half-dressed. After this, his actual opponent Achilles reports at the top of his lungs: “The Great Achilles has killed Hector!” In this play, just like in its original text, most of the Greek and Trojan characters are shaded with a certain irony. For example, the cuckolded Menelaus is depicted as a bloated, slow alcoholic; Patroclus is effete and has homosexual pretensions towards Achilles; and Helen is not just frivolous, but also a hysterical and spoilt mistress of her court. Renowned critic Vladimir Stamenković writes that the director “still has mercy left for the helpless and the harmless, for the young and in love. He sees them as victims of a history that collapsed, of a world that is vicious and cruel.”7 He also stresses the amazingly contemporary quality of Shakespeare’s play, its “being frighteningly up-to-date.” According

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to Stamenković, this play is a historical representation of an era where everything can be bought and sold, even patriotism and honor. Stamenković also points out that there is a combination of burlesque and grotesque undertones in the presentation of the war on one hand, and, on the other, mysterious undertones that might well belong in a ballad in the depiction of the unfortunate lovers. In this manner, the comic is followed by the cruel, and the audience is provided with a critical distance from the comic elements, concludes the critic. The first performance of The Last Days of Mankind belongs to the same repertoire trend in the Yugoslav Drama Theatre as Troilus and Cressida. For this occasion, the formidable eight-hundred-page-long play by Karl Kraus was translated into Serbian for the first time (it was translated by Matilda Trifunović). Karl Kraus, however, was not completely unfamiliar to Serbian and Yugoslav audiences. The works of Karl Kraus had i­nfluenced Zagreb modernist literary circles even before World War II, especially authors of the so-called literary left-wing. In addition, some echoes of Kraus can be found in the works of Belgrade Zenitists, as specific expressions of Serbian modernist literature from the same period. Although literary works by Kraus had not been translated into Serbian until The Last Days of Mankind had its opening night in 1994, some important texts about the author had been published in magazines. Finally, in 2001, a publication entitled Figure leksičke sumnje [Figures of Lexical Doubt] was published, a collection of essays by relevant foreign authors on different aspects of Kraus’ opus (edited by Obrad Savić). The book was published by Beogradski krug [The Belgrade Circle], which was the name of a group of Serbian intellectuals who had publicly opposed the wars and nationalist policy since the very beginning of the 1990s wars.8 Kraus’ magnum opus play was translated in its integral form for the purposes of its Belgrade performance. The play was directed by Gorčin Stojanović, and given its dramaturgical development by Nenad Prokić. It was first performed on September 23, 1994. On the Belgrade stage, this dramatic collage by Kraus on the ­tragedy of World War I was a direct thematic and content association with the current war events in the region. The text of the play, which in its form and size was not meant to be staged at the moment of its inception (eight hundred pages of text in the form of dialogue-collage and documentary),9 was adapted by Nenad Prokić to conform to the standards of contemporary theatre. The scenery was a pompous baroque façade with balconies which could have been associated with both the inside of a theatre and a

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Fig. 2  Poslednji dani čovečanstva [The last days of mankind], Yugoslav Drama Theatre, Belgrade, 1994 (Photo courtesy of Srđa Mirković)

carnival (Fig. 2). The critics also included descriptions of the scenery in their reviews: When the curtain lifted, most of the audience probably had their breath taken away by the impressive scenery created by Todor Lalicki. This kind of Babel Tower, an edifice of marble and tacky gold-leafing, with satellite dishes broadcasting CNN news sprouting thickly from it, houses a veritable hive, overcome by war fever in all its parts: from the basement which houses the lowest classes, public opinion, the black market and the army, via the higher floors where the nobility and generals are depicted, and finally to the top with the Austrian Emperor himself. The scenes change at a rapid and well-paced rhythm, sometimes ironic and sometimes poignant, illustrating the destruction of entire classes of the society, their unbridled passions and tragic fates where “the bad become worse and the good lose faith.”10

A prominent performance was given by ballerina Sonja Vukićević in the demanding role of Angelus Novus, “the angel of history.” In the first part of the play, Angelus Novus, with wings outspread and sporting an

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army helmet, accompanies and provides a commentary to the events on the stage with her motions, while in the second part “when the magnificent edifice of the Austrian Gotham city is a mere skeleton of broken illusions and collective zeal,”11 the angel has the pivotal role. The critics also remarked: “Their own disbelief that a foreign playwright might have written something that most directly concerns our region, mentality and the current events plaguing us must have been the greatest source of excitement for a large part of the audience.”12 The Last Days of Mankind was also strongly remembered for its direct mention of several towns in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina which had suffered destruction with civilian sacrifices by Serbian military formations (1991–1995): Dubrovnik, Vukovar, Goražde, Srebrenica, Sarajevo. At the time of the premiere, Srebrenica was one of six internationally protected “safe areas” in Bosnia. But a year later, during the Srebrenica massacre (1995)—which is known as the worst war crime in Europe after the Second World War—a few thousand Bosniak civilians were killed. The authors of the play took the stance described by the Brechtian quotation: “Let others speak of their shame, I speak of my own.” The Last Days of Mankind also made it into the festival selection of Bitef, the most important international theatre festival in the region, which has been held in Belgrade since 1967. The third play from the Yugoslav Drama Theatre repertoire at the time that we will examine in this text is The Powder Keg, which was first performed on March 18, 1995. The play was written by Dejan Dukovski, then a young (b. 1969) playwright from Macedonia, a former Yugoslav republic. The Macedonian director Slobodan Unkovski, one of the leading theatre artists of former Yugoslavia, greatly contributed to the success of the play. The Powder Keg is a play of eleven parts connected by principles of circular dramaturgy. Relatively short scenes replace each other at a rapid pace, and the key theme of these dramatic segments is violence: each scene is a short story with two or more characters, where one of the participants of the previous scene participates in the next, in which the character either commits or suffers acts of violence committed against him/her. The play is littered with quotes from popular culture, such as famous films or the TV series Otpisani [The Written-Off], one of the most popular TV series ever shown in Yugoslavia, the subject of which is the fight of members of an illegal resistance movement against the fascist occupying forces in World War II. References to the above-mentioned

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series (with many humorous details) were used as a kind of collective memory, not only for the people from Serbia, but also from the whole of Yugoslavia. The two main TV-stars from Otpisani also took part in the performance (Vojislav Brajović and Dragan Nikolić). In terms of its dramaturgical model, the text by Dukovski comes close to the film Pulp Fiction directed by Quentin Tarantino (1994): an omnibus narrative, based on a story of violence. However, in structural terms an interesting comparison can be made between this play and Reigen [La Ronde] by Arthur Schnitzler, with an inversion of subjects—love (Schnitzler) and hate (Dukovski). This was also remarked upon by the Italian Liberazione newspaper critic, Mariateresa Surianello, when The Powder Keg had a visiting performance in Rome in 1996: [It is] a grotesque chain of causality of everyday cruelties, written by young Macedonian author Dejan Dukovski and modeled after Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, where the author meticulously replaced the subject of love with hate. Just like a series of heterogeneous love relationships were used by the Viennese author to conduct a subtle analysis of the inveterate decadence of its society, so did Dukovski, a hundred years later, explore the very soul of the Balkan people, not putting emphasis on the guilty, but on the contrary, creating an endless switching of the roles between the victim and the executioner.13

Although its topic is not the war in direct terms, Dukovski’s play is a parable of the Balkans as “the powder keg,” a region where violence and war happen almost incessantly. Violence is perceived either as a remnant of the past (the characters have hurt each other in the past, and it is now time for vengeance, equally as brutal as what came before) or an ­expression of the mentality of the people. This mentality is depicted as violent, savage, and irrational above anything else. The violence in the play is both physical and mental, and it happens in cycles. With this topic of brutal violence, the characters themselves speak of the Balkans as “the asshole of the world.” Here we must bear in mind the nature of the wars waged during the 1990s: although they were waged among nominally democratic societies at the end of the twentieth century, the methods used to wage them were frequently extremely brutal. Living in a world of violence, either committing or suffering violence, the characters dream of leaving and going to a more beautiful world where everything is different, brighter, more colorful. In the characters’ minds, this world is symbolically the West, and it is represented

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as a desire to go to America (or at least Argentina) where “you drink whiskey and the music plays.” The critics correctly concluded that in this play “both the comic and the tragic features of the Balkan mentality shine through with the same energy,” while the play “furiously gains momentum from laughter to tears.”14 Although he believes that the play is a faithful reflection of the chaos we are living in, and which did not start recently, Vladimir Stamenković remarks that “Dukovski shows us the tragicomedy of the new-fangled world, which was not invented by the Serbs—even though its epicenter is here at the moment—but has spread all over the globe. In such a world, man is an unauthentic creature and is unable to understand his own essence, trapped in banality and exposed to violence he also generates in turn.” This renowned critic is of the opinion that the playwright made a travesty of the content taken over from trivial literature (films and TV series), providing a critical step back from it, in two ways: through a circular plot, and by using humor. This is achieved so that “as a rule, what appears first is the dramatic element, and the comic comes into being either through a brutal negation or a deliberate twisting of this tragic parameter. Thus we finally arrive at a play where the local elements do not stifle the universal, and where we arrive at the general through the individual.”15 The imagination of director Slobodan Unkovski, his meticulous and analytical reading of the text, and his work with the actors were a significant contribution to the success of The Powder Keg. The critics also mentioned “his magical director’s style”16 and his wit, finding a deeper meaning in many scenes, and the way he revealed the hidden potentials of the play. The play has a fast pace, the scenes change with sharp cuts between them, and the modern visual design contributes to the overall impression. More importantly, a host of young actors had important roles in the play. The participation of actors from the middle and older generations was of great importance, especially that of Vojislav Brajović, a leading actor of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, in the role of retired policeman Dimitrije. This character ends the play: in the short final scene, Dimitrije struggles to say something, but fails to do so. And even Dimitrije himself does not know what he intended to say, what he could say at all. Just as there is nothing to be said about such great tragedy and the endless cycles of violence that would not be meaningless. The Powder Keg lasted on the repertoire for as long as eleven years, and was even performed at the Bitef festival, with visiting performances in other countries in Europe. Here we will mention just a few typical

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remarks by foreign critics: “A common theme for all scenes is violence in all its possible, even apparently innocent forms, which by the end of each scene culminates into real psychological or physical terror. Unkovski directs such scenes vehemently and lucidly, making them all more or less neurotic, and furnishing them with associations and quotations, using a comic and sarcastic irony as their foundation”17; “You kill in any possible way: with a vacuum cleaner or a cup, with a knife or a shard of glass. You kill in any possible location. On a bus or at the tennis court, in a train compartment, or in the street. You kill with one motive only. To solve a problem quickly”18; “Dejan Dukovski’s play is a vivisection of a nation. It touches on the most painful subject of contemporary Yugoslavia, the moral and psychological downfall of the society, which caused the cruelest war in Europe since the time of Hitler.”19 Vladimir Stamenković sees the fact that the audience can both identify with the events and characters and stand aside and observe them as one of the most important qualities of The Powder Keg. In this way the audience “have an insight into the dark side of human nature, the evil which, under the influence of social conditions, multiplies and overwhelms the entire society.”20 What went down in the records was a performance of the play during the civil protests against the regime of Slobodan Milošević in the winter of 1996/1997, when the actors invited members of the audience to take to the stage. They improvised a protest walk around the stage, including a particularly cathartic moment when actor Vojislav Brajović revealed he was wearing an Otpor t-shirt.21 The first drama text in Serbian which directly dealt with the topic of the wars that occurred after the break-up of socialist Yugoslavia was Tamna je noć [Dark is the Night] by Aleksandar Popović, one of the most important Serbian dramatists—Kult teatar [the Cult Theatre] opened with the above-mentioned premiere on June 23, 1993. That year was one of the hardest in the history of the country: there was war in the region, young men were mobilized and taken to the front, and there was immense poverty in the country itself, with unbelievably high hyperinflation, and city streets were awash with crime. Thus Tamna je noć was held to be almost cathartic in effect, even though it was not described as the highest of artistic achievements. The events in Tamna je noć take place during the period when the play was written and performed, and they are directly connected to student protests in Serbia during the summer of 1992.22 The student rebellion

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against the Milošević regime was relatively widespread and long, but, like some other larger-scale and massive protests in Serbia in the 1990s, it did not yield concrete results. The play shows us the life of an average family during these events. The father is a surgeon (always exhausted, since the wounded are transported from the front to Belgrade by helicopter daily and he operates on them all day long), the mother is a typical product of state-run media manipulation, their son Nenad is a student waiting to be drafted and taken to the front (these mobilization drives most often happened at night, with no warning), and their daughter is finishing secondary school. An important character in the story is the student Mane, the son’s friend and the daughter’s boyfriend, who returns to Belgrade after being mobilized and fighting on the front, and is now disabled, having lost a leg. The dramatic effect is enhanced by the fact that the very same day when Mane returns from the war with one leg, his friend Nenad receives his mobilization orders. What is worse: to kill or to be killed? To run away or to stay? These are the questions the young characters ask themselves. And even if they are not left disabled now, there is no guarantee that some new Balkan wars do not lie in store for them in the future. Both young men were given their draft orders after police and state TV cameras had recorded them as participants in student anti-government protests. In terms of genre, the play has some ­farcical elements, but gradually turns into a tragicomedy, with its final scene becoming an eerie tango of death, the characters dancing a kind of dance macabre. This final scene, according to critical opinion, is what raised the play to the level of a tragedy. This tragedy takes place on the 11th floor of a typical post-World War II socialist high rise block, in the flat of an average family, where the dining room is the center of action. In one corner there are food supplies—flour sacks and bottles of cooking oil—an everyday sight in every Serbian family home of the time. Shops were empty, the currency completely devalued by hyper-inflation, and employed citizens (like the surgeon father in the play) occasionally received flour, cooking oil, or meat instead of their usual salaries. “The dramatic persona that moves the plot forward in every way is—THE WAR,” writes Ognjenka Milićević. Each of the characters makes his or her choices depending on the level of danger to him/her or their nearest and dearest: the beloved boyfriend, brother, son, friend… The author marvellously shows the results of the action of this invisible character through another scene, one of the shortest

118  K. RADULOVIĆ but extremely impressive. It is breakfast time: each of the characters drinks their morning coffee and is thinking aloud, in a monologue, paying no attention to the others, as if they weren’t there. The family system has fallen apart—it is not discord, it is complete disintegration, the family is broken to bits…23

Egon Savin directed the play with skill and experience, and the actors Predrag Ejdus (father) and Jelisaveta Sablić (mother) played up the comic and farcical effects. The focus was also on the irrational, absurd behavior of the characters in circumstances when “even sane people cross the boundaries of normal behavior, if they have been through a long period of economic and moral abuse.”24 The critic Vladimir Stamenković remarks that in this play, what is tragic is expressed in the form of buffoonery, and this kind of dramaturgical procedure enables us to see reality without pathos, and with bitter irony. The actors who played the roles of young people received special critical acclaim: Tamara Vučković, Dragan Mićanović and Nebojša Dugalić. On that small and narrow stage of Kult teatar (a part of the entrance hall was adapted to serve as the stage, with the audience in galleries), the scenery and the costumes were a simulation of reality, just as the characters faked a real life.25 Even though this was not among the best or most important plays in the huge opus of Aleksandar Popović, and even though it was also not a play of exceptional artistic merit, Tamna je noć nonetheless has an important place in the recent history of Serbian theatre. This was the first attempt for a play to lend artistic form to the “raw” reality during the wars in former Yugoslavia, without the benefit of delay. This was a simple and credible drama, whose bitter humor and a certain cathartic effect contributed to the reception of the play, which was a unique phenomenon. “The attention with which the audience followed the action held the tension of those in an enclosure: the suppressed breathing, a brief moment of forced laughter, a painful sigh, the closed throat, and then in the cathartic tango scene, the overwhelming tears that nobody was embarrassed about.”26 The hundredth performance took place after a few months, and within 18 months the play had been performed two hundred times. Many towns in Serbia sent invitations for visiting performances. Its run on the repertoire was accompanied by anonymous threats, a telephone tip that a bomb had been planted in the theatre (the play was still performed after the police had checked the venue). Tamna je noć frequently had visiting performances abroad, in Canada, America,

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and in European cities, where audiences from the entire region of former Yugoslavia could see it.27 At the visiting performance in an old Russian Orthodox Church in Greenwich Village, Ellen Stewart, actor John Hopkins, and theatre critic John Simon were also present. After its theatre run, the play was made into a film, also entitled Dark Is the Night, directed by Dragan Kresoja. Finally, even though plays which dealt with the topic of war did not predominate on Serbian stages in the early 1990s, we can conclude, based on the above examples, that some theatre circles did not ignore the tragic events happening around them. At the same time, light and entertaining plays had their place on repertoires of Serbian theatres at the time.28 Detecting the reasons why there was not a greater number of performances that reflect the wars in former Yugoslavia, as well as the reasons why these plays were not performed at the very beginning of the war, seems to be exceptionally complex. Most key institutions in Serbia— including those in the sphere of culture—were led by people who were close to Milošević’s regime. The whole society was sharply divided—the opposers of the regime were not only in the minority, but also directly labeled as “traitors of the national interest.” Among others, certain technical or financial aspects could be added to this list of reasons: for instance, from 1992 to 1994 Serbia endured hyperinflation (the second-highest and the second-longest in world history), therefore the very life as well as professional work had become a kind of improvisation. The performances described in this paper were particularly important for the above-mentioned minority of citizens who consistently struggled against official policies. As brave symbols in a time of destruction, these plays still remain a significant part of the recent history of Serbian theatre. After the signing of the Dayton Accord in late 1995, which marked the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the international community termed Slobodan Milošević a factor of peace and stability in the Balkans. However, this did not mean that the dominant nationalist discourse was relegated to the past. In the late 1990s, a new repertoire trend emerged in the Serbian theatre, marked by the increased frequency of staging more plays by Serbian or foreign authors which dealt with war in a direct or indirect manner. Most of these plays contained a critical depiction of the horrors of war, and the consequences of nationalist policies and media manipulation. The plays we have examined here were the first, and at the time relatively isolated but valid artistic reactions to the war. All of them have in common that they were an artistic

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response to the horrors of the reality of war, and that they represented a sort of resistance to the war-mongering nationalist policies and media manipulations.

Notes







1. The state-funded theatre as the basic theatre model in former Yugoslavia and later in Serbia. 2. Let us also mention that the first and so far only comprehensive research into the theatre in Serbia in the 1990s was published as a feature article: “Pozorište u Srbiji [Theatre in Serbia], 1990–2000,” Teatron magazine, no. 118 (2002) and no. 119–120 (2002). 3. See Jonathan Bate, “Introduction to Troilus and Cressida,” in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, eds. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmusen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1. 4. Dejan Mijač, “Pozorište, ipak, živi” [Theatre, still, lives], interview with Dejan Mijač, Pobjeda, July 30, 1994. 5. See Ksenija Radulović, Korak ispred [A Step Ahead] (Podgorica: Oktoih and Theatre City Budva, 2000). 6. A traditional cry of street vendors and merchants. 7. See Vladimir Stamenković, in Grad teatar Budva 1987–1996: Prvih deset godina, eds. Jovan Ćirilov and Feliks Pašić (Budva: Grad teatar, 1998), 85. 8.  There were other, similar associations and groups at the time (Žene u crnom [Women in Black], Centar za antiratnu akciju [The Centre for AntiWar Action], etc.) 9. A large portion of the play’s text was based on headlines and quotes from Viennese newspapers; Kraus saw the media as the means for disseminating stupidity and lies. 10. Petar Grujičić, “Rat–otac svih stvari” [War–the Father of All Things], Nin, September 30, 1994. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. See in: B. B., “Deset godina predstave ‘Bure baruta’” [Ten Years of the Powder Keg], Glas javnosti, June 14, 2005. 14. Milutin Mišić, “Rediteljske čarolije” [A Director’s Magic], Borba, March 21, 1995. 15. Vladimir Stamenković, “Sintetički svet” [The Synthetic World], Nin, March 24, 1995. 16. Mišić, “Rediteljske čarolije.” 17. Blaž Lukan, “Nasilje svih vera i ubeđenja,” Delo, May 13, 1998. 18. Ulrich Bumann, “A Gravedigger Best Knows How,” General Anzeiger, June 8–9, 1996.

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19. Roman Pawlowski, “Krapa w Toruniu,” Gazeta wiborcza, 1998. 20. Ibid. 21. Otpor [Resistance] was a student and civil movement which opposed the politics of the current regime. 22. See also Silvija Jestrovic, chapter “City-as-Action,” in Performance, Space, Utopia–Cities of War, Cities of Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 17–55. 23. Ognjenka Milićević, “Rat kao dramsko lice” [War as a Dramatic Persona], Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (I), Teatron, no. 118 (2002). 24. Vladimir Stamenković, “Pravo stanje” [The Real State of Affairs], Nin, July 9, 1995. 25. Aleksandar Milosavljević, “Noć u balkanskoj krčmi” [One Night in the Balkan Tavern], Politika, August 11, 1993. 26. Milićević, “Rat kao dramsko lice,” 28. 27. There was a huge wave of immigration from Serbia and other former Yugoslav republics during the 1990s. A large number of mostly young and educated people left Serbia then, and the immigration trend has continued unabated. 28.  For more on this, see Aleksandra Jovićević, “Društvena stvarnost i beogradska pozorišta (1991–1995): Trenutak srećnog samozaborava.” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (I), Teatron, no. 118 (2002): 42–49.



Works

cited

B.B. “Deset godina predstave Bure Baruta.” Glas javnosti, June 14, 2005. Bate, Jonathan. “Introduction to Troilus and Cressida.” In William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmusen. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007. Bumann, Ulrich. “A Gravedigger Best Knows How.” General Anzeiger, June 8–9, 1996. Ćirilov, Jovan, and Feliks Pašić, eds. Grad teatar Budva 1987–1996: Prvih deset godina. Budva: Grad teatar, 1998. Grujičić, Petar. “War, the Father of All Things.” NIN, September 30, 1994. Jestrovic, Silvija. Performance, Space, Utopia—Cities of War, Cities of Exile. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Jovićević, Aleksandra. “Društvena stvarnost i beogradska pozorišta (1991–1995): Trenutak srećnog samozaborava.” Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (I), Teatron, no. 118 (2002): 42–49. Lukan, Blaž. “Nasilje svih vera i ubeđenja.” Delo, May 13, 1998. Medenica, Ivan, ed. Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (I), Teatron, no. 118 (2002a). ———. Pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000 (II), Teatron, no. 119–120 (2002b).

122  K. RADULOVIĆ Mijač, Dejan. “Pozorište, ipak, živi.” Interview with Dejan Mijač. Pobjeda, July 30, 1994. Milićević, Ognjenka. “Rat kao dramsko lice.” Teatron magazine, no. 118, Belgrade, 2002. Milosavljević, Aleksandar. “Noć u balkanskoj krčmi.” Politika, August 11, 1993. Mišić, Milutin. “Rediteljske čarolije.” Borba, March 21, 1995. Pawlowski, Roman. “Krapa w Toruniu.” Gazeta wiborcza, June 1, 1998. Radulović, Ksenija. Korak ispred. Podgorica and Theatre City Budva: Oktoih, 2000. Surianello, Mariateresa. “The Powder Keg in Rome.” Liberazione, November 4, 1996. Stamenković, Vladimir. “Sintetički svet.” Nin, March 24, 1995. ———. “Pravo stanje.” Nin, July 9, 1995.

PART II

Shifting Stages

Theatre on the Front Lines: Ad Hoc Cabaret in Croatia, 1991–1992 Jana Dolečki

If you’re a theatre, a cabaret, what are you performing? We’re performing war. And we are playing war.1

Throughout history, as a system relying very much on its social and political context, the theatre has shown itself to be significantly affected by acute social and political circumstances, such as war. Besides having a strong impact on existing theatre systems and their conceptions, organization and functioning, wartime also initiated some distinctive theatrical phenomenon. One such format deeply conditioned by the practicalities of wartime reality were provisional traveling theatre groups, p ­ erforming for soldiers and other audiences on the front lines, either providing them with the sense of “normality” and “ostensible escape” that they very much craved in times of combat, or presenting them with direct ­propaganda needed for continuing the fight.2 During the first two years of the so-called war for Croatian Independence (1991–1992), one of these theatrical ventures toured the battlefields of Croatia, presenting comical and satirical material created specifically for the audiences on the first line of fire. The name of this J. Dolečki (*)  University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_8

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collective was Ad Hoc Cabaret, and it gathered some twenty actors, writers and other artists from Croatia who considered this kind of artistic engagement to be their professional and moral duty in response to the intense conditions of wartime. Defined by its creators as a provisional theatrical endeavor, limited to the duration of this specific war, the example of Ad Hoc Cabaret nevertheless proves to be pertinent in the overall discussion about the interplay of politics and theatre, as well as about the challenges theatre as a cultural system faces in these and similar moments of acute sociopolitical crisis. By examining Ad Hoc Cabaret’s repertoire and other relevant material, such as founding documents, testimonies from its creators, associates and audiences,3 as well as available media reports following the activities of the group, I plan to examine this position and, moreover, explore the topic of the responsibility of theatre and its makers when abruptly confronted with personal and professional ethical challenges. Furthermore, special attention will be given to an analysis of the repertoire genre, questioning the specific type of humor and satire that epitomized their staged material.

Ad Hoc Cabaret: “Theatre as a Weapon” It is September 1991. The forces of the Yugoslav People’s Army (YPA) are entering deeper into the territory of the newly proclaimed Republic of Croatia. The conflict is brought directly to the state’s capital, as Zagreb suffers its first air strike by the Yugoslav Air Force. Violent incidents are intensifying, with more and more casualties, and parts of the country are being cut off from each other as the YPA takes control of highways and naval ports. Croatian TV is transmitting live from the battlefields, schools and kindergartens are closing throughout the country, citizens are afraid of being forcibly mobilized for combat, and the overall atmosphere of fear and uncertainty is starting to prevail over everyday life. It is in the midst of these events that a group of prominent artists from Croatia, already experienced in writing and producing cabaretlike theatrical material,4 conceived a project called Ad Hoc Cabaret. According to its founders, the project was initially planned as part of a television program with the goal of transmitting cabaret texts and performances to a wider audience, especially to those deprived of any type of cultural production due to the physical and organizational conditions of war. However, thus envisaged, the project failed to gain patronage and support from Croatian Television.

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Not giving up on the idea, in the next few months, the group gained more members (actors, painters, playwrights) and was very quickly transformed into a traveling theatre collective. They were initially funded by the Zagreb City Fund for Culture with a symbolic amount of 400,000 Croatian Dinars,5 and were helped by some donors and sponsors6 as well as the newly founded organization Croatian Art Forces.7 The choice of the name for this group related not only to the exclusive genre of their repertoire (cabaret) and the immediate nature of their action (ad hoc), but the groups’ founders explained that its abbreviation actually stood for “Anti-dramatic Croatian Liberation Cabaret,”8 thus pointing even more precisely to their envisaged priority engagement and their aesthetic objectives. Soon enough, this affiliation toward the state system was even further stressed as they were given the direct patronage of the official Croatian Army. As Tahir Mujičić, one of the initiators of the group, declared: The number or locations of our performances were not the result of our will or decision–we just fulfilled our combat and war duty. More precisely: every one of us would get a notice to report to a certain place, and only our sergeant would get the envelope with the notice stating our destination.9

Not only was the Croatian Army in charge of deciding on the places and times of their performances, it also supplied the group with two old army trucks that were soon transformed into moving theatre stages. Props, such as army uniforms and evidently the guns as well, were apparently also provided by the officials. In other words, a certain “dependence” of this theatrical project on the Army, and thus the official narrative of the war, was more than obvious—a fact that will, as I will go on to show, also be reflected in many other features of their functioning. Founded as a traveling theatre collective, suitable for direct and active artistic engagement during wartime, their main role as a theatrical system was, in their own words, “a sedative one, creating an impression of normality,”10 meaning that they tried to recreate this notion of “normality” by providing a certain cultural content for those that were, in that given moment, living their everyday lives outside the “regular” forms of existence. This “reproduction of normality” was a general characteristic of institutional theatre in Croatia during the first years of the armed conflicts—even

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the theatres on the very frontlines (such as the Croatian National Theatres in Dubrovnik, Šibenik, Zadar or Osijek11) were staging plays in the midst of heavy bombardment during the first years of the war. These and similar examples of continuous theatre life were not only introduced and maintained by governmental administration as instruments of preserving a certain “regularity” for the national community—they were simultaneously conducted as symbols of resistance addressed to the enemy, following the official wartime narrative of Croatian culture bravely resisting the deadly threats of its opponents. This aforementioned regularity was, however, manifested through the continuous functionality of theatre systems and not so much by the content they were offering. A more attentive analysis of wartime theatre repertoires shows that there was nothing “usual” and “regular” in terms of the material that was staged.12 Although some official theatres presented what one would call classical dramatic texts, thus reclaiming this abovementioned normality, most of the repertoires clearly reflected their perturbed realities—either by staging historical and other texts reproducing the new nationalistic concepts of identity or by presenting or dealing with the conditions of the war.13 Nevertheless, as mentioned, the vast majority of theatres in wartime Croatia continued with their activities. Arguments for keeping theatres working were numerous, ranging from those imposed by the official systems of power to those which were very personal (relating to personal understandings of moral and artistic duty). It is important to say that, at the beginning of the war, the overall cultural scene in Croatia almost unanimously joined the official demand for a certain national unity imposed by the nationalistic nature of the conflict. As one could testify, the official state theatre was no exemption to this rule—in its repertoire, it followed the national championing of the “new”14 Croatian identity, helping to create and sustain the national mythology proposed by the official state. Unlike some other territories of the disintegrating Yugoslavia, where the question of the “moral responsibility” of drama artists in times of war became a publicly debated issue (most notably in Serbia, where numerous artists and cultural workers openly disengaged from their artistic activities, considering these inappropriate in times of direct conflict and overall suffering),15 the consensus on this question in Croatia was reached quite early in the conflict. Despite a few exceptional and heavily publicized cases of artists overtly stating their disagreement with the rising conflict and its nationalistic

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nature (some of them expressing this by continuing to work in Serbian theatres),16 the vast majority of the theatrical community engaged in efforts to consolidate the national body on the verge of a destructive war. The most evident example of this happened in September 1991, when almost 250 artists signed registration forms for the Croatian Artist Squad, soon to become the part of the official Croatian Army Forces, demonstrating their unquestionable willingness to “make their intellectual and physical powers available for use by the Homeland.”17 In other words, by this act, artists from all areas of national cultural production solemnly swore to their combat duty and ultimately even undertook the official weapons-training process organized by the army. By declaring their readiness to fight in the actual conflict, these artists denounced the significance of their artistic profession over their duties as citizens of a country at war. As for the Ad Hoc Cabaret group and its members, they offered their own answers to the question of what an artist should do in times of real suffering and utter confusion. Analyzing the testimonies of those connected to this theatrical project, one can see that their reasons for joining this venture were almost unanimously described as their way of defending their homeland in the context of army mobilization. Tahir Mujičić, writer and original founder of the group, stated that he “knew that we all had to actively participate in defending our homeland, each with their own weapon,”18 while one of the most prominent actors of the group thought that “everyone’s duty was to confront the enemy with what he or she knew or did best,” and that “resistance to the enemy should be provided by all means and in all fields.”19 Moreover, their engagement was clearly based on what the founders and associates of the company saw as their duty, and not so much on some inherent need or ambition to simply create art and continue with their regular professional activities. The priority of thus perceived “professional obligation” over the artistic nature of their effort is confirmed by Mujičić himself, who claims that in the context of war “art should be set aside, and our profession should be used for defense!”20 This concept of understanding theatre as a weapon was further emphasized by the example of the Ad Hoc Cabaret constituting document, sent to all Croatian cultural institutions and the Croatian Ministry of Defense in 1991. This document was loaded with war rhetoric and conflict metaphors, expressing a request to consider the group as “solely and exclusively a war, combat action,” its members as “true fighters”

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whose spoken words “are weapons far deadlier than those of enemies and occupiers!”21 This overlapping of reality and its theatrical representation, and the constitution of “actors-warriors,” gained additional significance by their use of official Croatian Army uniforms as costumes, as well as the fact that the whole ensemble underwent professional training for handling weapons provided by the state Ministry of Defense. A theatrical system so much defined and conditioned by systems of power, such as an Army, during an ongoing war can hardly escape the “duties” that this context implies. On the most general level of official representation, Ad Hoc Cabaret was fulfilling the role of a self-defining cultural mechanism that was “showing to ourselves, Croats, but also to the unfavorable world, what distinguishes us from them.”22 With this war being fought parallel to the process of defining a new national culture, the official state was producing narratives of cultural superiority in comparison to the barbaric enemy fought on the front-lines. The significance of this cultural position and the demand for its international resonance was further confirmed when, in December of 1991, the Croatian Ministry of Culture and Education arranged for Ad Hoc Cabaret to perform in Vienna, in front of the Viennese Opera, displaying it as an example of an engaged cultural resistance.23 Of course, this kind of presentation intended for the European public had very clear goals of reclaiming positive moral values in opposition to its enemy in the war, and directly echoed the official state narratives describing Croatia as a helpless victim of Yugoslav and later Serbian aggressive territorial aspirations. On another, more internal level, Ad Hoc Cabaret represented a venture characterized by a very firm social engagement in relation to specific audiences composed of soldiers, army officers, the wounded and refugees. In their constitutive document, the group’s founders already proclaimed the direction in which their staging of the wartime reality would head: Ad Hoc wants to be direct and deadly applied theatre. Funny and mobilizing, patriotic and motivating. Ironic and witty, harsh and merciless. “White and Croatian,” and “black and anti-chetnik!”24 It wants to relax and encourage our front-line soldiers!25

And this is exactly what they did. Speaking in numbers, they staged more than 25 shows in different war zones on the territory of Croatia, performing in army barracks, hospital shelters, town squares and other improvised spaces. Alongside organizational and infrastructural elements,

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this work of moral mobilization, which was “created out of necessity,”26 namely the context of a raging war, was also activated by and through the main repertoire of the group. And this repertoire was based exclusively on humor and satire.

How to Laugh in/at War: On the Humorous Approach to Wartime Reality As already mentioned, despite or perhaps because of the horrifying experiences, comedy was still being staged in theatres in Croatia throughout the war. Providing a certain platform for escaping the horrors of the everyday fighting, it is not surprising that even theatres on the first line of defense (as in Zadar, Osijek or Dubrovnik) were staging comedies or similar genres to large audiences throughout the conflict. Besides wartime theatres and the public, even writers did not abandon writing comic texts—out of 105 texts dealing with war or its aftermath written between 1991 and 2011, almost one-third of them were comedies.27 During the initial period of conflict, 1991–1995, some 15 or more comedies were written by numerous authors, directly reflecting their wartime experiences28 in a more or less humorous manner. Creating and presenting a repertoire almost exclusively built on humor, Ad Hoc Cabaret and its creators certainly held a very prominent place in this statistic. From the available material collected in a monograph that archives the endeavor of Ad Hoc Cabaret in its totality, we could comprehend that their repertoire was actually condensed in the form of one play under the name Bratorazvodna parnica,29 consisting of a prologue, eight monologues and three short skits. Due to the episodic nature of the texts (something typical for cabaret formats), the play itself was not always staged in its totality—as can be concluded from the various archival material, these episodes were played either in a different number or in a different order, according to specific situations. However, as the material presented in the eponymous book documenting their activities shows us, the aforementioned play and its elements were not the only repertory material they staged. Their performances sometimes also included patriotic songs which were popular at the time,30 pieces of classical music, as well as the Croatian national anthem, Lijepa naša domovino.31 The short prologue of Bratorazvodna parnica was meant to give an explanatory introduction to the theatrical engagement of the group

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itself, and in it, the authors aimed to explain the difference between fighting and staging a war, relating their theatrical activities to the definition of theatre as a simulacrum of reality. In this introductory text, a reporter visits an unnamed Croatian town that has been destroyed in the war and meets a group of actors preparing to perform on the main square. Upon asking them if the guns in their hands are real, they respond that these are actually “theatre props,” and that the ruins around them are just “stage props,” that the “dead people are in fact puppets” and that they are only “staging a war.”32 Emphasizing this difference between the reality of fighting a war and playing it on stage, the authors presumably wanted to differentiate themselves from the actual fighters to whom their repertoire was actually addressed, as well as to underline a certain impotence of art, which in this context, can only simulate the given reality. The play itself starts with interchanging stage sets depicting the historical context, accompanied by various musical numbers—from Bach, to the former Yugoslav national anthem, ending with the Croatian national anthem. With this backdrop, two characters, Vragoja and Anđelko,33 start shooting at each other in a manner not explained by the stage directions. Their ongoing conflict is stopped by the voices of three members of the Troika, the European ministerial triumvirate34 that was actually presented in the form of oversized caricature-puppets. In this skit, the conception of the Troika was heavily influenced by the public opinion in Croatia at the time—at one point in the skit, the three puppets put on traditional Serbian hats and start to dance the Serbian folk dance kolo, expressing their pro-Serbian political attitudes via the chosen musical material.35 They were portrayed as being falsely impartial in the conflict, echoing the opinion that by demanding a cease-fire, EU officials were actually not allowing the state of Croatia to defend its newly-won independence on its own terms and were thus allowing the actual conflict to continue. Mirroring the public perception of the Troika as being pure bystanders and judges of the nascent conflict, their puppets are placed in the first row of the audience, as they demand all parties included in the conflict to present their testimonies. The subsequent content of the play actually unfolds as the answer to their request. The eight monologues that were included in the play were built around eight different characters and, as the authors explained, each of them held a specific significance. Four of the characters presenting these monologues came from different parts of Croatia (Dalmatia,

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Zagorje, Dubrovnik, etc.), thus reflecting the idea of national unity propagated in times of war on multiple levels.36 Interestingly enough, not all of these characters were actually shown as reflecting the concept of brave, nationally conscious soldiers and fighters that would be fighting off the enemy—quite the contrary. For instance, Matek Glembajec from Zagorje37 is depicted as still believing in the idea of Yugoslavia, thus betraying his own nation, while Fridolin Agramer is portrayed as an all-knowing coward and deserter. On the other hand, the two female characters presented in the play (the mother of the soldier Matek, Štefanija Glembajec, and Petrunjela from Dubrovnik), were introduced as role-models of proactive engagement in the context of a raging war. In her short monologue, Štefanija writes her son Matek, who is trapped in the YPA barracks somewhere in southern Macedonia, ordering him to return to Croatia and fight the real war back home: So I’m saying this to you once again … get out of this army … and join us here, where your people are, where your homeland is. With motherly kisses and that beautiful song of ours—it’s not time to sleep, it’s time to fight a war! Your homeland, God and Croats!38

With appropriated “masculine” characteristics used for obvious comic effect (she smokes, she spits, she swears extensively and is ready to kill if it is asked of her), she explains how the whole family joined in the fight: even “the old grandma took down two T-55 tanks with a bazooka.”39 In a similar register, Petrunjela, a former receptionist at the Hotel Imperial and an active soldier on the Dubrovnik battlefield, states her vision of defending her city: This Republic and this town, as well as any town in this Republic, defends itself with those which are the best, most human and most manly things we have—with heart and reason! With knowledge and talent! With effort and faith! … With a verse, an image, with music and words, but also with mines and grenades!40

Four other monologues of the play are actually not presentations of different Croatian regional specific, but introduce characters of other ethnicities. In his monologue, the Kosovar Adesni Aljevi answers a letter from Matek’s mother Štefanija, explaining that her son was unfortunately

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killed by Serbian separatists inside the YPA, but promises her that the Albanians from Kosovo will revenge her son fiercely and soon enough, “leveling their monasteries to the ground.”41 By introducing an Albanian character, followed with all the accompanying ethnic stereotypes that were meant to generate humor, the authors chose to reflect the political situation of that time, in which the Kosovo Albanians were seen as victims of Serbian terror and were thus given the status of war allies and co-sufferers. Another ethnic character present in the play with his monologue is Huseinaga Hairlihadžimulajusufbegović, a Muslim from Bosnia, stating his awareness of the potential threat that YPA poses to Bosnia and Herzegovina once the war in Croatia ends. Also represented in an extremely stereotypical manner, Huseinaga shoots Serbs in their backs while on their way through Bosnia to the Croatian war fronts, reflecting the cliché of Muslims being reluctant fighters. The two remaining monologues from the play were given by two Serbian characters—a soldier, Pera Ražnatović,42 and the “wartime artist” Bata Životinja. The two remaining parts of the play were constructed as short dramatic sketches with few characters, some of which had already been presented in the monologues. Na Mihajlu43 brought famous characters from various dramatic texts by Dubrovnik authors, such as Marin Držić and Ivan Gundulić, now trying to defend their city, echoing Petrunjela’s aforementioned call for a cultural intervention against the approaching enemy. Describing the enemy as not being “people of theatre and art,” they call their fellow citizens to fight them off with “weapons, cold as well as warm!”44 The other skit was inspired by the character of Good Soldier Švejk and his main personal traits of naivety, simple-mindedness and resourcefulness. The skit takes place in the Yugoslav Army offices, where a medical jury consisting of Serbian captains is trying to find out whether three soldiers, a Croatian (Gumbek), Slovenian (Janez) and Bosnian (Huso), are apt for military service. The play also features a short epilogue in which the characters of the previous skit realize that the members of the Troika who were originally meant to provide their final decision on the outcomes of these presentations are actually fast asleep. The characters in the epilogue, bearing the names defined by their regional or national affiliation (Dubrovkinja, Zagorac, Zagrepčanin, etc.)45 thus representing a collective national character, consult with each other about what to do with the EU representatives and present different ideas—some of them suggest they should

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be taken to the front-lines to experience the war from the front row of real action, some that they should be expelled back to Europe, some that they should just go across the border to Serbia. Finally, one of the characters, Zagorac, states that one could now see that “Europe is actually not there where one would think it is … it has always been here, it is and will always be, among us and in us.”46 The play ends with a humorous traditional song from the Croatian region of Slavonia, with lyrics expressing a critical attitude toward the international community. The final stage directions describe the following ending: The Croatian flag rises. First a red, then white and then blue rocket are fired, and at the same time we hear Lijepa naša, Ode of Joy, Zarathustra and Toccata and Fugue in D-minor.47

As one can see, the most prevalent characteristic of the repertoire presented by Ad Hoc Cabaret was its humor, or more precisely, a specific type of satirical and farcical humor suiting its designation as cabaret. These humorous elements are to be found in the depicted plots merging together unpredictable and thus comic situations (a former receptionist turned warrior, a famous Yugoslav actor on the set of a new VietnameseCuban production, etc.). However, building the dramatic material on monologues, the authors of the skits focused on positioning humor in the text itself, or moreover, in its way of presentation. Starting from the titles of the episodes and the names of the characters, the comic element was present on the level of the text itself—jokes, word-play, comic textual references and playful allusions are omnipresent throughout their repertoire. On another level, the humor of the presented skits and monologues was intentionally built upon the specifics of the speech. More precisely, each monologue presented on stage was given either in a dialect considered to be intrinsically funny,48 or in a highly accentuated form of specific lingo, delivered with the obvious intention to entertain by formative exaggeration. This was especially apparent in the monologues delivered by characters representing other ethnic groups, such as the Kosovo Albanian Adesni Aljevi or Haso, the Muslim from Bosnia and Herzegovina. For example, in the first case, the authors took one of the characteristic consonants of the Albanian language and integrated it into the Croatian idiom, in an effort to generate a certain comic element. The same goes for the monologue of the Bosniak Huso, whose language is particularly marked by typically Bosnian terms and expressions, some of

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which were hyphenated to the level of meaninglessness. The Slovenian character Janez and the two Serbian characters were no exceptions to this kind of linguistic treatment. This accentuated characterization of the language was actually used in accordance with the overall approach applied by the authors, representing the aforementioned characters in an obviously stereotypical manner. The Bosnian Muslim Haso is thus depicted as a lazy soldier, reluctant to chase his enemy, waiting for him instead in the comfort of a local bar,49 constantly drinking home-made coffee and smoking tobacco; the Albanian from Kosovo is presented as a vindictive dupe, bragging about his relatives selling ice-cream in Istria,50 etc. The Serbian characters of Pera Ražnjatović and Bata Životinja were also constructed around certain stereotypical patterns, mostly reflecting contemporary paradigms and conceptions fitting the war narratives, especially those aiming to define and represent the enemy. In his monologue, the soldier Pera Ražnjatović recounts his war adventures in a direct address to the audience. He is depicted as a boastful aggressor (the word hrvatski [Croatian] is crossed out from the name of the Croatian town Hrvatski Leskovac written on a sign behind him); a bloodthirsty, irrational brute (talking about killing the chief of the army canteen for over-salting their food); ill-mannered (he sips while he eats his beans, he farts and curses excessively); arrogantly nationalistic (claiming that Serbian beans are the best dish in the world); and simply morally scornful (depicting his rampages of killing babies and children). In another monologue by a Serbian character, Bata Životinja is actually presented as a caricature of the famous Yugoslav actor Velimir Bata Živojinović, known by his nick-name Životinja (animal in SerboCroatian), whose anti-Croat stance at the outbreak of the war was highly debated in Croatia. In his extremely scatological harangue, Bata Životinja recalls the times when he used to work with other Croatian artists, denounces his former friends and colleagues and endorses new allies,51 vulgarly bragging about the film stars he had slept with during this time, threatening all his potential enemies with enacting obscene acts on them or simply killing them.

Mobilizing Humor: Effects and Consequences As we have seen, the Ad Hoc Cabaret group strived to subject its immanent reality to a comical treatment, utilizing the advantage of cabaret as a scenic genre apt to reflect its own socio-political context in a very

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prompt manner. But how did this humorous approach relate to the specific audiences it was addressed to—the soldiers, the wounded, refugees and other protagonists of the battlefield’s front-lines? Could we presume that this approach was not used solely with the purpose of providing amusement, but also to administer very specific conceptions of reality to its audiences? On the first level of its potential social impact, humor and laughter as its overt expression provide a social comic relief to different social groups, helping its members to relax, reducing their fatigue and thus making them more motivated for their tasks. Focusing on audiences that experienced the trauma of war in a direct manner (soldiers, wounded, refugees), the authors of Ad Hoc Cabaret were very much aware of this function of their project, and witnessed this “therapeutic” role of humor on their tours. In their own words, they were considering themselves to be “a part of the Croatian Army military sanitation” presenting their performances as “micro therapy sessions.”52 However, the type of humor fostered by Ad Hoc Cabaret was not only meant to provoke simple amusement and a break from the everyday duties of combat, but was also aiming at a certain mobilization. Based on the repertoire they proposed, this was mostly achieved by using humor in depicting the characters of their skits—more precisely, by using humor alongside the very much present differentiation between the nationalized Other (or the enemy in the context of war) and the nationalized Us. On one hand, the disparaging humor used for describing the “primitive Serbian enemy”53 was intended to elicit amusement through the denigration, derogation, or belittlement of a specific target. Depicting the enemy, in the case of Ad Hoc Cabaret, was very much being done via these models of humor aiming to produce “a sense of sudden vicarious superiority” by exporting a particular unwanted characteristic of “some other group,” “laughing at their folly, perhaps glad or relieved that it is not our own.”54 Laughing at Serbian characters such as Pera Ražnjatović and Bata Životinja, at their traits of vulgarity and backwardness, the audiences facing the actual enemy on the front probably felt a greater sense of superiority to their opponents in conflict. By additionally mocking and ridiculing the enemy with this type of humor, the authors of the material were aiming to denounce them and make them less nefarious, bringing them down to a level where they could be deplored with greater ease and less guilt. A considerable part of wartime propaganda is usually based on these processes of depicting wartime competitors as

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less worthy human beings (or utterly inhuman) in order to justify their annihilation and the need for the war itself, and public space in wartime Croatia was full of examples manifesting this. For instance, in the wake of the war, the official Croatian press described the enemy thus: The hostile “them” were labelled either as the abstract but omnipresent “aggressor” or as the stereotypical “Chetniks” and “Serbo-communists.” Other derogatory references … included “the bloodthirstiness of the domestic Serbo-chetniks” … “Serb cannibals” and “brutal Serb extremists.”55

This omnipresent construct of the enemy was echoed in Bratorazvodna parnica, especially in the monologues given by Serbian characters. At one point, in his monologue, Pera Ražnjatović explains: In the evening, we came back to the circle around the stew, tired as donkeys. We have slaughtered some babies, some casualties, whatever… What? Why are you acting surprised? It had to be done. Penalty patrol. Because if you don’t kill the child, it will kill you—once it grows up.56

One side of the theoretical definition of humor explains that this kind of disparagement serves as a cathartic process, as it allows the temporary cleansing or reduction of hostile energy that builds up in dramatically saturated situations such as war. But on the other hand, some theories and research have shown that “exposure to hostile humor actually increases expressions of aggression,”57 meaning that, in this light, the presentation of the enemy in its most grotesque form would somehow motivate the audiences to fight their ascribed enemies with more vigor and conviction. We cannot “measure” the ways in which this type of humor activates and mobilizes its audiences (meaning whether they are more reluctant or more convinced to continue fighting upon seeing this performance), but we can resort to the available testimonies declaring their reactions.58 In one of these statements, a photographer and a high ranking officer of the Croatian Army, Vinko Šerbek, remembers the following: Watching my friends perform, I gained hope and motivation, I felt encouraged. The tired soldiers’ reactions to the theatre played on the front-lines were also my reactions. I was heartened, I rose my head up high and I continued ahead along with the others.59

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In another testimony by one of the founders of Ad Hoc Cabaret, one can also envisage the atmosphere, the expectations and the impact of the material shown for the audience of active soldiers: A strong impression was given in the last scene, when actors come onto the stage in silence. While the Croatian anthem is playing, they stare still at the soldiers and they raise two fingers in the air. The victory sign. As if drawn by wire, the hands of all those in uniform rise up, and this scene is the most beautiful one … if someone would give an order to move, I think all of them would march off to a dangerous onslaught as one. This shows this wondrous spiritual wound and the saturated energy of people who are breathing with the same lungs and carry the same wish in their hearts.60

As we can read from this account, on another level, humor and laughter function as a tool for immanent and spontaneous unity, solidifying social structures. The type of disparaging humor that was used when depicting the enemy not only establishes its hostile position toward others but additionally “increases morale and solidifies the group to a greater degree.”61 In the case of Ad Hoc Cabaret, this was not only considered as an outcome of their theatrical engagement but also their starting point and, to a certain extent, its conditioning. Their engagement as well as their repertoire were firmly dedicated to bringing about the vision of a unified national body, and this was not only proven in the aforementioned testimonies of the authors, but was also recognized by the official state itself. When asked to comment on the actions of the Ad Hoc group in one of his interviews, the contemporary Croatian president Franjo Tuđman confirmed that this type of engagement by artists was just “another proof of the national unity and resurgence of the Croatian people,” defining this as “the unity of all social layers, classes and generations of Croatians and Croatian citizens.”62 Thus, the defined social bonding in the context of promoting national unity was very much required on all levels of political and social activities, and the Ad Hoc group was not reproducing and staging these concepts exclusively against the image of an abhorrent and thus conquerable enemy. As we can see, the representations of the protagonists of this national unity were also employed with this intention, either by presenting concrete examples of the ideal protagonists of a certain national consciousness or by showing the examples of “failed” fighters for national independence.

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On the one hand, with skits constructed around the image of “straying soldiers” such as Matek (still fighting in the wrong army for the wrong reasons) or Fridolin Agramer (who knows everything about how to fight this war but is reluctant to actively engage in it), the authors applied disparaging humor to the members of their own national group. This kind of positioning of humor facilitates and controls the behavior in the group—by showing how one soldier should not behave, and by mocking him, the group is setting the rules and norms of its ideal appearance and thus preventing further demoralization and disintegration of the group (Fig. 1). On the other hand, and in clear opposition to the ideal version of cabaret and satire that ridicule and criticize everything but “put nothing else in the place of the object attacked,”63 Ad Hoc wartime cabaret did, however, include the image of the “positive model” in its repertoire. By including the roles of Štefanija (the mother encouraging her son Matek to come home and fight the real war), Petrunjela (the

Fig. 1  The actor Mladen Crnobrnja in the play Bratorazvodna parnica. Ad Hoc Cabaret theatre group, 1991 (Photo courtesy of Darko Bavoljak)

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receptionist from Dubrovnik Hotel calling for an armed and cultural offensive against the enemy), as well as a few characters borrowed from the history of Croatian literature (in the skit Na Mihajlu), the authors obviously intended to introduce a positive image of the national collective, constructed around traits of heroism, cultural superiority, a feeling of moral responsibility and a willingness to fight. Despite the fact that these concepts of national identification, orated mostly by women, could in some ways be perceived as comical by its audiences64 and thus open to disparagement, its ideological and moral message still resonated more strongly than its comic elements formally allowing them to be laughed at. In addition, the comical approach used on some of these representatives of the national collective (mocking their naivety, backwardness or cowardice) was in fact not used as a mechanism of critical deconstruction challenging the ruling political or social structures and imposed collective identities, but probably provoked a more sympathetic relation toward those members of the same collective that were still reluctant to engage in the real fight. This type of affirmative humoristic form that does not question but rather reaffirms the narratives of official systems of power has occurred throughout history. Labeled as “positive cabaret”65 or “positive satire,”66 it seems to have appeared predominantly during times of strong ideological conditioning and political totalitarianism, where criticism of the system was more or less openly prohibited. Although the Croatian government did not openly censor its national cultural production during the war years, the context of acute national homogeneity somewhat intrinsically dictated new “rules” of producing and presenting national culture in which the institutions and subjects of power were not allowed to be questioned. In fact, the only readable example of using the “satirical blade” of cabaret as a tool of direct political critique was that addressed to the international community and its political representatives, presented in the dormant characters of the Troika. But the political significance of this openly staged judgment of the international community only resonated with the efforts of “self-victimization” that the nationalistic Croatian government made use of on the internal and international level. In an effort to confirm the universality of their satire and their correspondence with the “rules” of the genre, the authors of Ad Hoc Cabaret often expressed their dedication to the chosen genre by stating how this ridicule of the international community was not exclusive

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and that they were also pointing the “deadly weapon”67 toward agents of state power, such as the president Franjo Tuđman. But in the available research material, one could find just one small remark concerning Tuđman, uttered by the omniscient Fridolin Agramer, saying that “Francek68 always scores by penalty shots, and tries to bribe the referee … But who ever won the game with such a referee trio as they given us?”69 What seemed to be a satirical remark confronting the actual political reality is neutered by ‘detecting’ the real agents responsible for Tuđman’s conduct,70 criticizing his more defensive combat approach at the beginning of the war as well as his notable diplomatic missions and negotiations with the international community. Although the authors themselves defined Ad Hoc Cabaret as political cabaret open to criticizing all symbols of authority and other ruling concepts such as the prevailing nationalism, it turns out they failed to do so. In turn, through their repertoire, they produced theatrical material that hardly ever used humor to dispute the prevailing values and conceptions, but did, in fact, reaffirm them in line with the official narratives. Ad Hoc Cabaret actively staged its repertoire until January 1992, fulfilling the concept of its creators as being a temporary theatrical adventure directly connected to the times of conflict and thus no longer needed in peacetime. Although the authors and creators of the group acknowledged that after the implementation of the Vance peace plan in January 1992,71 the conflict did, however, continue on various fronts, they located the end of their cabaret in the fact that this context of “war nor peace” was not so “good for cabaret” and that the “feeling of enthusiasm born in troubling times was broken to pieces.”72 But one could also imagine that the brutal reality of combat was perhaps becoming too “grotesque” to be tackled through a cabaret perspective—the satirical presentation of wartime thus became somewhat redundant and futile. This is maybe why Ad Hoc Cabaret eventually moved their activities to a more formal setting, more precisely to the Satirical Theatre Jazavac in Zagreb, where in 1992 they performed their frontline skits for some six months under the name of MiM Cabaret, in an “attempt to partially and temporarily conserve the Ad Hoc Cabaret.”73 Although the time of their self-dissolution was still marked by heavy fighting on different fronts (the war in Bosnia was just about to start in

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1992), the members of the Ad Hoc group decided to justify the termination of their activities by stating that this type of theatrical engagement did not make sense in this “free, independent, sovereign and democratic Croatia,”74 thus linking the conditions of their existence even further to the creation of the nation-state as the decisive moment for their dissolution.

Conclusion The state of war very often leads to a highly complacent image of national power, a celebration of national identity and the exaltation of patriotic devotion and the willingness to make actual sacrifices. As already mentioned, during the first years of the war in Croatia, the vast majority of cultural institutions and subjects joined the efforts of constituting a new national culture that did not criticize or question the positions of power. The case of Ad Hoc Cabaret, a theatrical project directed to the most particular wartime audiences, was no exception, as it reproduced the official political and social narratives by celebrating mutual national consciousness, expressing patriotic devotion and a willingness to fight in actual combat. Using humor and satire as their main repertoire guidelines, they offered their audiences “temporary, creative distractions” as “a possible strategy for surviving extremely traumatic experiences,” but were at the same time reinforcing “the ideological values”75 that were the main motivators for the real fight. Although declaring a therapeutic impact as their privileged significance, this venture did much more in the sense of contributing to war mobilization, reinforcing the sense of national unity and producing a self-assertive image of the new national collective. Under the pretext of providing audiences with certified artistic content and segments of national cultural heritage, in reality, they were more involved in disseminating official ideological patterns and propagating certain values relating to a defined political cause.

Notes

1. “Ako ste kazalište, cabaret, što igrate? / Igramo rat. I igramo se rata.” Igor Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92 (Zagreb: AGM, 1995), 188. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. Due to the extremely playful use of words in all the material

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created by the Ad Hoc Cabaret, I have left the quotes in the original for further comparison. 2. I refer to a wide range of documented cases of theatre groups, initiatives or individuals active on the combat-lines—from the organized theatre tours for soldiers by state theatres and private tours during the World War I, through agitprop theatre for soldiers during the Spanish civil war and many cases of theatrical entertainment provided for soldiers during the World War II, all the way to contemporary theatre taking place in recent war and conflict-zones such as Iraq, Afganistan, Palestine, etc. 3. The material used in this paper is mostly based on the documents presented in the seminal monograph (Igor Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92) as well as available media documentation. 4. The founders of the collective were Tahir Mujičić (writer and director), Boris Senker (writer, theatrologist and University Professor) and Željko Senečić (stage designer and painter). The trio (with the sporadic engagement of a third author, Nino Škrabe) had already written numerous plays together since the early 1970s, focusing mostly on the genre of cabaret. 5. Approximately 55 euros in today’s value. 6. The list of donors and sponsors is however not published or mentioned, neither in the book nor in the available media material. 7. This was a cultural project formed by a partnership between the Croatian Union of Dramatic Artists and the Ministry of Culture, aiming at artistic production that would promote ‘the truth’ about the war in Croatia internationally. 8. Hrvatski oslobodilački Cabaret (HOC) in Croatian. 9. Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92, 15. 10. Ibid., 15. 11. Sanja Nikčević, “Odjeci Domovinskog rata u hrvatskom kazalištu i drami,” Hrvatska revija 15, no. 3 (2015): 28. 12. Of course, this notion of “normality” could be questioned from another perspective by saying that the Yugoslav supra-national identity was never “normal” to its people and, thus, this perturbed normality of the 1990s was exactly the kind these nations had been searching for during the existence of Yugoslavia. 13. In comparison with the previous forms of “normality,” the important thing was also that which was not staged (e.g. plays or texts from Serbian or Montenegrin authors). 14.  Whether this identity propagated as of the 1990s was new or rather “renewed” is debatable, in the sense that it owed a lot of its characteristics to the Croatian national identification already stated in previous historical epochs with declared aspirations for national independence (most notably and controversially, the period of the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945).

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15. The most famous case relating to the theatrical community being that of theatre scholar and professor at the Belgrade Academy of Dramatic Arts, Mirjana Miočinović, who in 1991 voluntarily resigned from her teaching position, not wanting to continue being part of public and cultural production in a state participating in a war. 16. The cases of Mira Furlan and Rade Šerbedžija, actors from Croatia who continued to work in Serbia at the beginning of the conflict, favoring their artistic over their national identification and thus “earning” their expulsion from the contemporary Croatian cultural scene. 17. The terminology officially used in the published declaration of this army group. See Valentina Ptičer, and Dubravko Slović, “Zapovjednik satnije ‘Hrvatski umjetnici’: I Dragutin Tadijanović je htio u rat!” Večernji list, May 16, 2014. 18. Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92, 22. 19. Tomislav Štriga, actor, as cited in ibid., 27. 20. Ibid., 31. 21. Ibid., 43. 22. Ibid., 36. 23. According to testimonies, the group played in the freezing cold on the same military trucks and in the same army uniforms with which they toured war zones throughout Croatia. During the visit, the artists officially presented the vice-chancellor Dr. Erhard Busek and Vienna’s mayor Helmut Zilk with a graphic book created by designers and painters from the Croatian Art Forces Collective. Analyzing the available documentation of the event, one can see that the group was not very satisfied with the organization of the performance, blaming the organizers for the lack of information on the performance itself as well as for the lack of audiences. 24. Chetniks were members of a Serbian nationalist guerilla force formed during World War II to fight against the forces of the Axis and its Croatian collaborators, Ustashas. However, they primarily fought against Partisans, who were the Yugoslav communist guerillas of the time. In the 1990s the term was restored, especially in Croatia and Bosnia, and was used to describe the paramilitary Serbian forces that operated alongside the YPA on some battlefields. 25. Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92, 43. 26. Ibid., 22. 27. Sanja Nikčević, “Komedija u domovinskom ratu ili borba humorom za tjelesno i duševno zdravlje,” Dani hvarskog kazališta 40, no. 1 (2014): 377. 28. Ibid., 378.

146  J. DOLEČKI 29.  Wordplay based on the expression “divorce lawsuit,” where the word “bratorazvodna” was used instead of “brakorazvodna,” leading to a neologism meaning divorce between brothers—referring to the previ­ ously brotherly relationship in the context of Yugoslavia. 30. Such as the song “Hrvatine” [Big Croats] by Đuka Čaić. Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92, 104. 31. “Our Beautiful Homeland,” the official anthem of Croatia, composed in 1846 and used as a national anthem during the Nazi regime, but also used as the hymn of the Republic State of Croatia as of 1972. 32. Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92, 188. 33. Vragoja (meaning devil in Croatian) bears traits of a Serbian soldier, while Anđelko (meaning angel) is clearly his Croatian antipode. 34. This European ministerial triumvirate that represents the EU in its foreign affairs was composed at the time of Jacques F. Poos, Hans van den Broek and Gianni de Michelis, and was designated to create and oversee peaceful solutions for the nascent conflicts in Yugoslavia. 35. Although it is difficult to translate due to the versified language, in one of these songs the three characters state that all parties involved in the conflict should re-unite. Furthermore, they forbid the Croats to prepare trees for hanging the Serbs, even if they have done bad things to them. Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92, 197. 36. Ibid., 34. 37. The population of Zagorje, a region in the north of Croatia, is used in classic and popular culture for comic purposes, stereotypically presented as being hard-working but mostly backward. 38. “Zato ti još jenput javlam … da se mam skineš … i da mam prejdeš sim, k nam, di je celi tvoj narod i cela tvoja domovina. Z majčinskom pusom i onom lepomnašom, ni vreme za spati, zdaj je ratovati, domovina tvoja, Bog i Hrvati!” Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92, 217. 39. “A babica iliti stara mamica je z svojom bazukom skinula tenkova T-55 komada dva.” Ibid., 217. 40. “Ova se Republika i ovaj Grad, i svaki grad u njoj brane onijem najboljijem, najljudskijem i najmuškijem što imamo—srcem i pameću! Znanjem i talentom! Marom i vjerom!” Ibid., 280. Situated on the border of Croatia and Montenegro, the city of Dubrovnik soon fell under siege by the YPA. As of October 1991, the city was cut off from other parts of the country and suffered heavy bombardment. Being home to some of the great poets and authors writing in the Croatian language (Ivan Gundulić, Marin Držić, etc.) and to one of the most famous open-air theatre festivals in this part of Europe, Dubrovnik became a symbol of both national and cultural resistance very early on in the conflict.

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41. “Jer i njemaju onji njeki spomenjici i kulturna baštinja.” Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92, 223. 42. The name alludes to the infamous Željko Ražnatović, a professional soldier and the commander of the Serbian paramilitary forces called the Serb Volunteer Guard. In November 1990 he was arrested by the Croatian police, charged with conspiracy to overthrow the newly-formed Croatian state, and sentenced to 20 months in jail. He was released from Zagreb prison in June 1991 due to a settlement between Croatia and Serbia (allegedly, Serbia paid one million German Marks for his liberation). 43. An allusion to the famous sonnet written by Ivo Vojnović in 1892, depicting the decline of the aristocracy in Dubrovnik. Sv. Mihajlo (St. Michael) is the name of the city cemetery in Dubrovnik. 44. “Nijesu ti to ljudi od teatra i od umjetnosti …Treba na njih oružjem, i hladnijem, i vatrenijem!” Igor Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92, 234. 45. A woman from Dubrovnik, a man from Zagorje, a man from Zagreb, etc. 46. “Evropa ni tam gdi si misli da je … Neg je … Evropa navek bila, je i bu, pri nami i u nami.” Ibid., 284. 47. “Diže se hrvatska zastava. Opali prvo crvena, pa bijela, pa plava raketa i čuje istodobno ‘Lijepa naša’, ‘Oda radosti’, ‘Zaratustra’ i ‘Tokata i fuga u d-molu.’” Ibid., 286. 48. This is especially accurate for the Zagorje dialect spoken by soldier Matek. This simple, gullible peasant was very much traditionally used as stock character of comedy, both in classic and in popular culture. 49. In former Yugoslavia, jokes about Bosnians were the most “standard,” depicting their protagonists as naive, simple and backwards. 50. As of 1945, a large number of Albanians from Kosovo left their region for other, more prosperous parts of Yugoslavia, many of them inhabiting the northern Croatian region of Istria. Working mostly in the pastry business, the main stereotype concerning them became the ice-cream reference. 51. Interestingly enough, in his monologue he refers to the famous actress from Croatia, Mira Furlan, who eventually fled the country due to death threats and public accusations of her traitorous conduct (she continued to work in Belgrade as the war started). Depicting her as his friend and stating that “she is actually not Croatian,” Bata was only echoing the factual controversies of that time. Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92, 268. 52. Ibid., 99. 53. Ibid., 61. 54. Christie Davies, Ethnic Humor Around the World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 22.

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55. Pål Kolstø, Media Discourse and the Yugoslav Conflicts: Representations of Self and Other (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009), 35. 56. Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92, 203. 57. Mark A. Ferguson and Thomas E. Ford, “Disparagement humor: A theoretical and empirical review of psychoanalytic, superiority, and social identity theories,” Humor–International Journal of Humor Research 21, no. 3 (2008): 287. 58. Of course, one has to bear in mind that all testimonies available were presented in the eponymous book portraying the Ad Hoc endeavor in a highly positive light, so this material should be considered prone to a certain manipulation by their authors in the context of the time and place of its creation. 59. Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92, 236. 60. Ibid., 68. 61. Jakub Kazecki, Laughter in the Trenches: Humour and Front Experience in German First World War Narratives (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 112. 62. Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92, 100. 63. Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 6. 64. Comical also in the sense of disparity between the shown content and the reality in which the women fighters were an anomaly (only 5% of women actively participated in the armed conflicts during the war in Croatia). 65. See Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, 246. 66.  See Sven Behrmann, Politische Satire im deutschen und französischen Rundfunk (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 146. 67. The term in the original is “ubojito oružje.” Tahir Mujičić, as cited in Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92, 108. 68. Nickname used colloquially for Franjo Tuđman. 69. “Furt ide na bod iz penala, i kupit suca … Pa ko je kad dobil tekmu s takvom sudačkom trojkom kakvu su nama dali?” Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92, 247. 70. In addition, in another interview, Tuđman himself apparently expressed his regret of not being able to see one of the Ad Hoc Cabaret performances, knowing that he had also been a subject of their comic interpretation. Cited in ibid., 101. 71. The plan was initiated by the special envoy of the UN designed to implement a ceasefire, demilitarize parts of Croatia that were under the control of Croatian Serbs and the Yugoslav People’s Army (YPA), allow the return of refugees, and create favorable conditions for negotiations on a permanent political settlement of the conflict resulting from the breakup of Yugoslavia.

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72. Mrduljaš, Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92, 22. 73. Ibid., 313. 74. Ibid., 319. 75. Michael Balfour, “Performing War: ‘Military Theatre’ and the Possibilities of Resistance,” Performance Paradigm 3 (2007): 5.

Works

cited

Balfour, Michael. “Performing War: ‘Military Theatre’ and the Possibilities of Resistance.” Performance Paradigm 3 (2007). https://research-repository. griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle/10072/19421/45238_1.pdf?sequence=1. Accessed October 11, 2017. ———. Theatre and War: Performance in Extremis, 1933–1945. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. Behrmann, Sven. Politische Satire im deutschen und französischen Rundfunk. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002. Belamy, Alex J. The Formation of Croatian National Identity: A Centuries-Old Dream? Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. New York: Scholar’s Choice, 2015. Billig, Michael. Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour. London: Sage, 2012. Bürgschwentner, Joachim, Matthias Egger, and Gunda Barth-Scalmani, eds. Other Fronts, Other Wars? First World War Studies on the Eve of the Centennial. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2014. Collins, L. J. Theatre at War, 1914–18. London: Macmillan Press, 1998. Davies, Christie. Ethnic Humor Around the World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Dinesh, Nandita. Theatre and War: Notes from the Field. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016. Ferguson, Mark A., and Thomas E. Ford. “Disparagement Humor: A Theoretical and Empirical Review of Psychoanalytic, Superiority, and Social Identity Theories.” Humor–International Journal of Humor Research 21, no. 3 (2008). Jelavich, Peter. Berlin Cabaret. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Kazecki, Jakub. Laughter in the Trenches: Humour and Front Experience in German First World War Narratives. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Kolstø, Pål. Media Discourse and the Yugoslav Conflicts: Representations of Self and Other. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Krivanec, Eva. “Staging War. Theatre 1914–1918.” Online International Encyclopedia of the First World War. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online. net/article/staging_war_theatre_1914-1918/2014-12-18. Accessed February 2, 2018.

150  J. DOLEČKI Lubkemann, Stephen C. Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Mrduljaš, Igor. Ad Hoc Cabaret: hrvatsko ratno glumište 1991/92. Zagreb: AGM, 1995. Nikčević, Sanja. “Komedija u domovinskom ratu ili borba humorom za tjelesno i duševno zdravlje.” Dani hvarskog kazališta 40, no. 1 (April 2014). ———. “Odjeci Domovinskog rata u hrvatskom kazalištu i drami.” Hrvatska revija 3 (2015). Ptičer, Valentina, and Dubravko Slović. “Zapovjednik satnije ‘Hrvatski umjetnici’: I Dragutin Tadijanović je htio u rat!” Večernji list, May 16, 2014. https://www.vecernji.hr/premium/zapovjednik-satnije-hrvatski-umjetnici-i-dragutin-tadijanovic-je-htio-u-rat-936483. Accessed February 2, 2018.

Within and Beyond Theatre: President Tuđman’s Birthday Celebration at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb Lada Čale Feldman

No discussion of the material status, cultural and ideological function, or choice of topics and repertoire of mainstream Croatian theatre in the 1990s would be accurate and complete if it limited itself to mere statistical analysis, or to other standard approaches to theatre history that focus exclusively on aesthetic events produced within the walls of theatre buildings, even if the context of their production and reception were duly taken into account. On the other hand, no discussion of Croatian political propaganda in the same period would be accurate and complete if it limited itself to studying the standard means of conveying political, if not war-mongering, messages—posters and banners, rallies, newspapers, radio and TV broadcasting. The ubiquitous political performativity in 1990s Croatia notwithstanding, theatre itself—as a metaphor, a national tradition and a concrete institution (the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb)—managed to serve the purpose just as well with its unique, if L. Č. Feldman (*)  Department for Comparative Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_9

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somewhat dusty, magic and power, proving once again that in the arts of representation—no matter how archaic their apparatus may seem—one must look for “the real origins and organs of social control.”1 After all, wasn’t this institution construed for that purpose right from the start, that is, from its social enlisting and conceptual grounding in the cultural discourse of the late nineteenth century? If we are to judge recent analyses, particularly those pertaining to the theatre in a “changing Europe”2—the discursive formation of “the national stage” is inextricably linked to “a utopian figuration of the nation united in the theatre”3 as a space that fully or, should we say, doubly realizes the Althusserian definition of institution which Kruger invokes, insofar as it literally lends material existence to the ruling ideology. The word “literally,” of course, points to the fact that theatre is not only a material metonymy of the state but also a literal stage for the production of ideological illusions, for the actual embodiment of its chimeric performances. The g ­ enealogy of national theatres in political crisis tends to reconfirm itself in the renewed sacredness of the institution that arises each time a national crisis reappears. Such a crisis certainly did reappear with the outbreak of war in exYugoslavia, all the more so since the war was so adamantly justified by formerly suppressed and now reawakened “national interests.” It is not my aim here to return to all the complex ramifications and terminological offerings of the thorny issues regarding the pretexts and profound causes of, or the motives for, the war—its cultural aspects were already promptly addressed critically by the team of the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research to which I belonged at the time4—but to hint at the structural predestination of the symbolic role that the Croatian National Theatre was given in such circumstances. Indeed, what i­mmediately resurfaced on its stage was precisely the question of time, of the topoi of historical imagination, of the very narrative shape of history, as well as of “the rites” and “the rights” of cultural memory.5 If one were to single out the most striking feature of the postcommunist reversal of the Croatian fate which most abruptly affected the mental life of all the citizens of the newborn Republic of Croatia—now devoid of its former official socialist attribute—it would be the sudden radical change in the (re)construction of cultural memory. At the beginning of the 1990s, you could hear youngsters in the tram complaining that their history class’ subject matter had changed within the span of several weeks: not only did the war provoke a disruption in the course

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of history, turning former “brothers” into ferocious enemies, but the very textbooks on history seemed out of date, both in their selection of relevant material and in the grotesquely obvious senselessness of the ideology that governed its presentation. The promising future of a classless society became a frightening nightmare, now that the grounding blocks of Yugoslav supranational harmony were shattered to pieces. Television, at the time, offered a quite different picture, more “real”; and yet, as TV war-reporters stated while reporting from the locus of the war-reality, unbelievable as a movie. If these unfortunate events, as one can today safely diagnose, required “a different articulation of culture and a reinterpretation of European history,”6 then we can only imagine the intensity of the wartime need to reorganize the national cultural memory so that the current war could acquire a place in a historical narrative. This meant inventing a new historical sense, a new range of narrative sequences which would be capable, as Uspenskij suggests all historical accounts are, of attributing to the reselected historical events new “temporality, causality, coherence, unity, teleology and value.”7 Historical narratives usually do so, Uspenskij emphasizes, following the same logic that governs our instantaneous rearrangements of dreamsequences according to the quality of the final trauma that woke us up,8 just as the war seemingly woke Croats up from Yugoslav multinational unity. No wonder, perhaps, that the reality to which they awoke would have so promptly rhetorically turned into the realization of “a century-long,” if not “millenarian Dream,” the dearest trope used in speeches delivered by the HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union) candidate for the first President of democratic Croatia, Franjo Tuđman, who was elected to fulfill the Croatian dream-wish on August 18, 1992. Putting aside, however, the actual foundations and reliability of the historical narrative that replaced the previous official version, let us focus on the aforementioned role theatre played in that reconstructive process, with a “player-king” appearing at the center of its performances. Having imposed himself as the most reassuring caretaker of the damaged body of the Croatian polity, promising its rebirth and resurrection, he had already clearly profited from the various performative forms that arose with the newly gained right to gather, celebrate and protest in public spaces.9 However, the fact that the newly-elected Croatian President could not have satisfied his appetite for performing on the squares and streets of Croatian cities, that he was so keen on occupying the premises of the National Theatre in Zagreb—and, what is more, on occupying it in

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multiple functions (as spectator, actor and, in a sense, playwright)—is all the more peculiar if we have in view the somewhat diminishing power of theatre as a propagandist medium in the era of postmodern democracies, given the improved, more efficient and all-encompassing strategic performative technologies of governance, such as television, and, currently, Facebook. The irony being that, while seemingly challenging the ancient sovereign’s hegemonic prerogative to embody his subjects—a prerogative so poignantly connected in Shakespeare’s tragedies to the power of the common player10—contemporary (western) societies still thrive on inherited modes of “spectatorial citizenship” and function as “ocular democracies,”11 in which rational political deliberation, decisions and people’s actions must give way in awe of the leader’s spectacular appeal. However, it is important to note here that theatre as a social institution figured prominently in Croatian cultural counter-memory during the reign of the communist regime. This counter-memorial impulse is visible in the willingly cryptographic intellectual and cultural production of that period: confronted with the possibility of censorship and the imprisonment of its carriers, this production harbored its own anxieties over the chapters of national cultural memory that were erased from the communist metanarrative of “brotherhood and unity,” which was daily inculcated primarily by state television as the most influential medium of transferring party messages.12 Theatre was all too often used as the privileged metaphor for the usurped public space and the silenced political body of the nation: hence the frequency of the play-within-a-play procedures in the late twentieth century Croatian drama13 in which, symptomatically, theatre was primarily discussed as a vehicle of the perception of history and the relevance of cultural memory. As opposed to comparable tendencies in European playwriting, the striking feature of Croatian authors was a lack of interest in History with a capital H, and a concern for specific issues and moments of national history, which was more and more perceived critically in a postcolonial vein as a distant, peripheral echo of the undefined historical center. This obsessive employment of theatrical imagery either exalted or, in more artistically engaging cases, deconstructed several constant topics of Croatian collective consciousness: the trauma induced by the persistent lack of political independence, the clash between the heroic mythology and the reality of crude historical slavery, the suffering under everrecurring and ever-changing ideological oppression and an inextinguishable sense of belonging to the cultural margins of Europe, the negligible waste of its glorious humanist ideals.

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It is this overwhelmingly counter-ideological tradition of scrutinizing both the performative efficiency and the insubstantiality of shifting political projects, using and abusing the national stage with arbitrary costuming and the rotating of divisions of power roles, that was appropriated but at the same time devastatingly literalized by the new ruling political party in the nineties. The Croatian National Theatre, perceived during the communist regime as a metonym of national cultural heritage repressed by supranational ideology, now became a site for almost explicit nationalist propaganda. Its repertoire relied either on the nineteenth century romantic historical tragedy, exalting patriotic historicism and inciting the Croatian people not to endanger its homogeneity by any petty private concerns, or on newly-written plays and adaptations of novels that retold ad nauseam the episodes of national political history.14 Moreover, the political elite, led by a President who was a professional historian and, coincidentally, a great theatre fan, frequently and pompously attended these performances, which seemed to have been produced and delivered above all “for his eyes only.” Indeed, can a theatre scholar help herself if sudden historical associations spring to mind? Perhaps not immediately the well-known sequences from Klaus Mann’s and Istvan Szabo’s Mefisto, but rather the very origin of the theatrical apparatus in renaissance and baroque performances, delivered primarily for “the eye of the prince,”15 the eye situated at the most privileged point, from where it can take control over the whole stage setup, the whole image, the entire world. However, the peak of this mutual illusionistic enhancement was reached on May 14, 1997, on the occasion of the celebration of President Tuđman’s 75th birthday, enacted on the stage of the Croatian National Theatre just a month before the second presidential election in democratic Croatia.16 This was a curious anachronistic event, inscribed in what Mark Franko would certainly call the tradition of “the symbolic tension between the pastoral and the bellicose images of the king,”17 a characteristic of French absolutism and of its collusion with the power of theatrical displays. Let us, however, first return for a while to the Yugoslav communist tradition of mass-celebrations of the birthday of Josip Broz Tito, the lifelong President of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, the charismatic leader of Croatian provenance whose legacy hovered over President Tuđman’s public figure like a ghost from which he simultaneously wished to distance himself and yet to which he liked to turn in search of useful performative tips.18 Though

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one must note here that Tito did once celebrate his birthday—his 85th—in the little baroque theatre in Hvar,19 the state celebration of this numinous occasion regularly took place in a football stadium on May 25. Assuming the form of an annually recurring official holiday, it took over the agricultural tradition of spring festivities, thus marking both the seasonal change and the ever-recurring ideological rejuvenation of the Yugoslav social body, explicit in the name of the holiday: The Day of the Youth. As a public performance taking place in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, it was broadcasted on all six national television channels. The course of the celebration itself obeyed the framework of mass gymnastic displays, “a cross between sport, entertainment and ritual,” as Christel Lane put it in her study of Soviet rituals,20 with its controlled, carefully coordinated body movements which presented both horizontally and vertically the “living pictures,” such as a five-cornered star, verbal political messages, names or themes developed progressively through several dramatic sequences. They emphasized the mobilization of the masses, the self-control of each constituent individual and the subjection of the individual to the collective pursuit. The symbolism of these events operated in such a way as to evoke impressions of timelessness and immutability as well as feelings of awe and adoration. However, with all the great “degree of congruence and wide applicability,” this symbolism can only be effective, as Christel Lane rightly remarks, “at the cost of historical depth and of vertical multivocality.”21 It is in this respect that the celebration of President Tuđman’s birthday in the Croatian National Theatre could have been understood as representing a performative response, as if striving to compensate for this lack of historical depth and vertical multivocality of particular national voices, only to reach the same goal of mythic stasis and national univocality. Because the concept of the nation is the outcome of a particular historical situation and economic development—thus an idea of modernity and progress—and yet also an idea heavily relying on all the previous sequences of history in order to absorb them into a mythical world based on unchangeability, the reconstruction of the repressed narrative of national cultural memory entails in itself an internal struggle and a paradoxical time-structure. This paradox, in the case of the reconstructed narrative of Croatian history, consisted in the clash of a mythical ever-recurrence of trauma, aggression, repression and slavery, and of the contemporary bliss of political independence which was said to have been achieved, in spite of the huge human and material cost,

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under the rule of President Tuđman, who had already on various public occasions proclaimed himself to be a human replica of the nineteenth century national leaders and the successful resurrector of their aborted efforts. I argue that this paradoxical time-structure was most strikingly epitomized in the curious intermedial clash of the President’s 75th birthday celebration. This consisted of a performance given in the President’s honor, under the title Seh križneh putov konec i kraj [Of Ways of the Cross the Final End] which in itself suggested the incongruence between, on the one hand, the medieval mansiones-dramaturgy mythically ruling the sacrificial logic of the Croatian national narrative, and on the other its actual “final end,” promising and announcing a better future. As was the case with the celebration of Tito’s birthday, this public event was a “media event” as well,22 that is, a political ceremony of unique, ritual importance, which had also to be communicated to the entire nation via a preplanned TV transmission that would assure both the organic solidarity of the nation and the charismatic, rather than rational-legal, legitimation of the President’s authority. However, the theatrical performance itself also included a video-section consisting of recordings of President’s Tuđman’s ritual performances of power, that is, political rallies of his party—particularly that at which he was shot at—the inauguration of his presidency, followed by his appearances as commander-in-chief in military parades immediately preceding and during the war, and other rituals performed on the occasion of each of the steps of Croatia’s formal international recognition. This show-within-themedia-show provoked a bizarre interruption in the performative course of the celebration, but neatly fitted the framework of the TV transmission, smoothly collapsing into it. In this way, the replacement of the open space of the stadium, as used by Tito during the socialist period, with a typical nineteenth century reconstruction of the “Italian baroque box,” the container of the millennium-old classical repertoire, ensured the continuity of the “‘historical depth” from the dawning of the Croatian nation in the ninth century kingdom, via the sale of parts of its territory to Venetians, Hungarians and Austrians, via its romantic national resurrection and visions of pan-Slavic brotherhood, engendering the end of the AustroHungarian empire and the establishment of the two Yugoslavia before and after the two world wars, to the present. The medium of television, in contrast, guaranteed the firm anchoring in the actual moment,

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simultaneously providing an opportunity for the entire Croatian public to join the theatre audience of this memorable event and to enjoy “its proclaimed historicity”23 even if comfortably seated in their own private homes, arguably thus “transformed into a political space,”24 albeit one in which one prefers “a politics of the preverbal to dialogue and debate” and “charismatic leaders and spectacular displays of unity.”25 But what exactly did the aforementioned mansiones of the Croatian tragic destiny consist of? The simple linear dramaturgy juxtaposed episodes of the heroic past as they were narrated or sung about by some of the most renowned Croatian writers and poets such as, among numerous others, Vladimir Nazor and Miroslav Krleža. All these authors were represented on stage by a single actor, Zlatko Vitez, seated in front of a desk situated on the left—accidentally or not, also a script-writer and director of the whole performance, as if thanking the President for the functions he was assigned to fulfill, having been Minister of Culture (1994–1995) and, at the time of the celebration, the Adviser for Culture to President Tuđman (1996–1998). While being in charge of the event, Vitez appeared to be governed in his historical conscience by the supreme historiographic work of the period, the study Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti [Roadless Tracts of Historical Reality], written by the President himself26 and also quoted during the performance. This narration, issued by “the king” himself, with no need of obeying historiographers who would work in his favor, had to be visually corroborated in the central space of the stage, so that a “presencing effect” could be produced— what Louis Marin, in the case of absolutist representations of power, called a conscious encoding of the reception of each and every aesthetic gesture through the mutual simulation of text and image, with no internal resistances challenging this reciprocal confirmation.27 There, a series of male heroic figures, from the first king Tomislav via the last king, the “cursed” Zvonimir,28 to the rebellious count Petar Zrinski and Ban Josip Jelačić, to the more recent twentieth century national politicians such as Ante Starčević, Frano Supilo and Stjepan Radić, the most important figure before the socialist President Tito—who was mentioned but conspicuously absent from the stage—appeared in monumental repose, played by well-known Croatian actors who passionately recited parts of their visionary national projects. These were, unfortunately, as the narrative suggested, crushed by ever-repeating doom since all these ­ historical figures supposedly ended their lives due to malicious projects carried out by various political enemies of Croatian freedom and

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independence. Following the well-known political myth of conspiracy, these malignant forces were explicitly linked with the surrounding European capitals conspiring to enslave the Croatian people, from Budim and Pešta, Vienna and Rome to The Hague, Geneva and Strasbourg, now demanding the heads of contemporary Croatian generals, and perhaps the head of the state himself, solemnly assisting his royal self-portraiture. In this all-male cast, women did appear, but only as allegorical figures representing the mute focus and the desubstantialized locus of political desire, thus providing the pastoral remembrance of “the millenarian dream” to the actuality of history’s cruel engrenage. As if having descended from the famous pastoral picture Hrvatski narodni preporod [The Croatian Renaissance] by Vlaho Bukovac (1896)—which represents the baroque writer Ivan Gundulić dreaming about his encounter with the leaders of Croatian Illyrianism and figures on the main curtain of the Croatian National Theatre29—these allegorical female figures appeared as ballet dancers dressed in white. They danced around the individual performers with the Croatian flag in their arms, repeatedly covering all the male bodies that had sadly to vanish from the historical stage, in a long procession somewhat troublingly announcing that the present “king that never dies” was preceded by “the king that always dies and suffers death more cruelly than any other mortal.”30 Some reputed female opera singers also sang opera airs in the same national tune: these were combined with monologues and parts of poems, which, cut from their original context and therefore involuntarily contributing to the gloomy vision of the Croatian past, expressed a unanimous craving for a messianic rescue. The gloom and doom were accentuated by the overall darkness and mist, which surrounded the performers. The mist was actually the leading word preceding the syntagm of the title in a phrasing taken from The Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh by the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža, which the actor on the left side of the stage kept repeating: “Through all this mist I saw of ways of the Cross…,” and the sentence was always interrupted, until the crucial moment of the performance, when the title syntagm could have finally been finished by the triumphant “… the final end!” epitomized in the arrival of the Messiah, now celebrating his 75th birthday. The performative clash between “the king’s two bodies,”31 the immortal and the natural, only doubled the paradoxical time structure, which we have already discerned within the logic of any national narrative: the immortal body of the king stands here for the historical

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continuity of the national liberating projects which his natural body— now celebrating its 75th birthday and thus proving both his mortality and his physical resilience—seemed to have finally fulfilled, summing up all the productive initiatives to produce actual political independence, confirmed by the international recognition of the Croatian state. Who was then to represent the manifold social body unified in its love of the sovereign, receiving and multiplying his happy seed in itself, as, according to Mark Franko, did the choreography of androgynes in ballets glorify Louis XIII?32 Curiously enough, the performance in the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb explicitly split this body into two, and interestingly, gender unified, parts. The suspicious, cynical, deliberationwanting public mind was represented by the two aged male figures, seated in the front box on the right (or on the left, if one took the perspective of the performers). They intermittently interrupted the course of the performance with their mocking, harsh, critical remarks, in a manner quite obviously—and ridiculously—alluding to the internal audience of The Muppet Show. Despite its apparent aim to produce humorous release and perhaps a tint of auto-irony, the procedure seemed to have also been designed to discard in advance any discontent with the celebration by insinuating that such comments should be treated as senile babbling. As for the other, more welcoming part of the imaginary political audience, it was envisaged as corresponding to the President’s caring anima, rather than to his boisterous animus, judging from the Jungian distinction that the President of the Parliament Vlatko Pavletić explicitly drew in his celebratory speech address.33 Desubstantialized as the previously mentioned female ballet dancers surrounding each link of the male historical chain, the allegory of the Croatian Nation appeared as a single female figure, not a ballet dancer, but an actress, who was granted the right of three symbolic appearances: at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the entire performance. It is this central figure that carried maximum dramatic and ideological weight, summarizing on her part all the performative strands of the celebration which did its best to produce a perfect, extreme, uncanny otherness to all that is precious to postmodern theatre—a total lack of, or rather, denial of bodily movement, facial expression, tension or provocation, as if on the way to becoming a graveyard monument. Dressed in black as a grieving mother, the actress literally represented a m ­ onument: a barely living and breathing cast of a sculpture by Ivan Meštrović, entitled Povijest Hrvata [The History of Croats]. Her real name was Ena

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Begović, and at the time she had already gained prominence i­nterpreting romantic heroines in the nineteenth century repertoire, typical national symbols of erotic and ideological desire, such as the protagonist of Dimitrije Demeter’s Teuta (1844, first performed in 1864). In propagandistic video clips of the ruling party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), she also figured as the emblematic Blonde Beauty who sheds tears over a “wounded Croatia,” a land devastated by the thunder of destruction and the lightning of bombs, as well as the devoted fiancée embracing the Croatian warrior on his coming home amidst the meadow full of flowers.34 Following those “video roles,” as well as her acceptance of the President’s offer to feature on the HDZ election list, it was only natural that she was also the one who, in this performance, appearing now in a light-colored dress, stood in its majestic finale in front of the chorus and congratulated the Leader, as if grotesquely repeating Marilyn Monroe’s famous “Happy birthday, mister President” addressed to John Kennedy. The mutual confirmation of performative procedures, as I insisted above, produce the perfect symmetry of power and representation, characteristic of the absolutism that Louis Marin detected in his The ­ Portrait of the King. However, the incursion of video-excerpts in this field not only doubled but also substituted the real body of the sovereign, watching the performance in his box, by its screen-image in ­prerecorded actual performative actions, already displayed numerous times for the eyes of the Croatian audience. This uncanny doubling not only added to the wholesale tautology of this (im)possible theatrical world but also produced a bizarre effect of mutual cancellation. Upon the ending of the video-intermission and the return of the TV event to the dark hole of the theatrical stage, the screen-image of the President was doomed to join the company of historical ghosts, as well as the exhausted body or ­perhaps even a corpse of the Croatian people, epitomized in the millenniumenduring dreamlike beauty of the petrified Nation. Thus, the ontologies of the actual birthday ceremony and of the video-transmitted scenes were reversed, destroying each other in the process, provoking chiasms of entitlements to memory and presence, life and death: instead of corroborating each other’s “stories,” the “live” performance, so burdened with historical depth, dead and petrified human flesh, inevitably denounced the contingency of the recent “presentness” and the artificial mediation of the TV screen, on which the bodies of the President and his followers appeared alive and ­cheering; acting the other way around, the TV transmission swallowed

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the live performance from within, inserting the display of the videotape in its course and declaring the absolute power of television over nonregistered historical events, bound to be reproduced by actors as hollow, brain-drained, immobilized surrogates to “real” historical figures acting on their own behalf. In this chiasmic performative mise-en-abîme, or should I say historicalontological abyss, the myth of the eternal return of trauma and the myth of the final arrival of the Messiah strangely overlapped through competing performative media of the nineteenth century monumental stage, rearrangeable videotape and preplanned live TV event. While endeavoring to confer with the President all the roles at its disposal—that of the major script-writer, major historical character, major political performer and major spectator—the performance, on the stage and on the two screens, only managed to reflect total discursive confusion in the representational economy of memory and history. This kind of economy, which imagines that a petrified grieving mother in black can be brought to performative life as a virgin soul resurrected from the video-clip, surely is productive of something: after all, the only figure in this performance which could have proudly stood for what it “truly” represented—the multilayered illusion— was this gendered allegorical figure of traumatized yet endlessly rejuvenating charismatic “flesh,” as Santner35 phrased the phantasmatic supplement haunting the “royal remains,” that shifted into the life of the Nation and the body of the People once actual monarchies were decapitated. Feminist critique would perhaps have tried to awaken the actress to “reality,” to appeal to her own artistic, private, bodily experience, to incite her to refuse both the mournful petrification and the flattering media image, but that would have been quite a different story.36 Undoubtedly, the criticisms encountered both by the President and by the organizers of the event, that is, by the director, the script-writer and the actors that consented to play along, apparently proved that Croatia was a modern democratic country, open to multiple visions of its current fate, whose intellectuals are capable of grasping what was promptly denounced as the ruling structures’ penchant for “folklore.”37 What remained to be seen, however, was the extent to which such an abuse of the theatrical space both stemmed from and in return affected Croatian theatrical culture as a whole. Just as it is difficult to find reliable academic sources today testifying to the above-described celebratory occasion as the propagandist event par excellence,38 so also both theatre practitioners and theatre scholars in Croatia still seem to ignore the

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implications of the performative mind-set such abuse implied and was actually founded on. Four years had to elapse for an adequate answer, and it came in the shape of a seminal performance produced by the Zagreb Youth Theatre, directed by the Croatian director Branko Brezovec, who based his deconstructive attack denouncing “the fraud of the Croatian super-icon”39 on the short story by, again, Miroslav Krleža, under the title Veliki meštar sviju hulja [The Great Master of All Scoundrels] (Fig. 1). First published in 1919, the story belongs to the writer’s early expressionist cycle Hiljadu i jedna smrt [A Thousand and one Deaths], which otherwise revolves around three obsessive motives of modernization: the city, the railway and journalism. The first epitomizes the new spatiality reordering modern sensibilities; the second stands for the unstoppable speed of apparent progress, crushing its social victims; and the third the inefficient critical perspective of the intellectual proletariat, to which Ljubo Kraljević, the protagonist of the chosen novella, belongs. Obsessed by the individual fates of various cohabitants of the house in which he is lodged, torn apart by his moral conscience and the urge to

Fig. 1  Veliki meštar sviju hulja [The Great Master of All Scoundrels], Zagreb Youth Theatre, 2001 (Photo: Sandra Vitaljić, courtesy of the Zagreb Youth Theatre ZKM)

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survive, he is the central intelligence of the nightmarish universe ruled by the “Great Master of All Scoundrels,” the unknown Someone, the undertaker in whose interest men and women of both “blood-soaked” Europe and Kraljević’s Croatia during the World War I are sacrificed. One hardly has to explain the parallels Brezovec had drawn between the two historical situations and the two wars, beginning with the acronym of the Chief Undertaker’s firm which Krleža repeats as if hypnotically, Croatian Funeral Services (Hrvatski pogrebni zavod–Ha-pe-ze), that, in Croatian, strangely and prophetically rhymes with the acronym of the ruling party in the nineties, Ha-De-Ze (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, Croatian Democratic Union), whose President equally mystifies the audience of his addresses with the same rhetoric as that used by Krleža’s Chief Undertaker. Upon entering the inn to encounter “his people,” it is he who, in the novella, promises to the pauperized citizens of Zagreb the same “final victory” by dropping names from the same historical line of illustrious Croatian kings, only to incite the masses to go to war so that he can count on more victims grained in his funeral mill. While profiting from the recognizable analogies and the stylistic exuberance offered by Krleža’s text, Brezovec created not only a visually appealing, embodied parody of all the aforementioned topoi, but also played with his own iconoclastic inversion of the ordered, monumental juxtaposition that reigned during the President’s birthday celebration: The sets lined along the side of the stage represent the facades of houses on Kaptol, the heart of Zagreb–the capital of all Croats, headed in perspective by the front of the Cathedral, the locomotive of the post-communist spiritual renewal. The sets are folding, rising and moving while the whole exhausted train is bound for the bowels of the enormous infernal machine, built of spectacular constructivist stage sets. Simultaneous representational explosions result in the composition of grotesque tableaux vivants, images of a demonic, insane hornet’s nest hidden behind the torn facades. The legs of the bridge open up like the jaws of the imaginary dinosaur Croatian history; the two-storey skeleton of the house of the Croatian Undertaker chases and tramples the Croatian panopticum, while Croatian flesh obediently rides the treadmill into the meat-mincing machine, to be burned in the horrible furnace. A piano falls from the sky and crashes into the ground with a terrible sound, Grotesque wigs, masks, beaks, prostheses, tubes, various devices, horses’ heads, death certificates are being grafted onto the normal civil uniforms – of soldiers, officers, firemen, clerks, maids, priests, guards, milkmaids, missionaries, butchers,

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waitresses. The shaking, thrusting, twisting, breaking and wearing of the body in the exhausting repetitive sequences of choreography destroys the narrative score and the decorative function of unbound scenic movement. The music parasites on hymns, toast songs, military and funeral marches, ethno melodies and instruments, and then becomes a lyrical picking on the zither, turning into yodelling, animal groaning, or a combination of the sounds of jungle, space, stadium, machine, rain; and so it swells, blares and thunders unbearably, breaking into the clashes of horrible tones, the bangs of the cymbals and the howls of the Grand Master. The nightmare iconoclastic hypermetastasis finally devours the sets of the train-nag while the entire stage seems at the same time to be shuddering, shrieking and grinning expressionistically.40

Rivaling Krleža’s avant-gardist accumulation of shocking images and sounds loudly epitomizing “the fundamental biopolitical fracture within” the body of the People41 with his own mixed reminiscences to “the arsenal of Meyerhold, Piscator, Brecht, and Artaud,”42 Brezovec’s willingly cacophonous performance also targeted Croatian theatrical amnesia. For Brezovec, Croatian theatrical culture is not only all too ready to anaesthetize its most daring writer by neutralizing his merciless analyses of the Croatian petty-bourgeois mentality as the unacknowledged generator of war, but is also, in doing so, oblivious of and unjust to its own critical, alternative genealogy, as a source from which to build a position that would refuse the jeremiad on “the millenary dream.” As if prophesizing the days to come, Krleža in his short story at one moment describes the confusion running within Kraljević’s head by representing it as a transmedia collage of fragments from speeches by national ideologues and “colored reproductions of glorious historical events,”43 specifically mentioning, among others, the politician Ante Starčević and the secessionist painter Vlaho Bukovac, both of whom would later be performatively quoted during the fateful birthday celebration. Functioning now itself as an arsenal of subsequent anachronistic quoting, the celebration reappears within Brezovec’s performance, albeit this time as debris in the chaos of other reminiscences, a fragment which has lost its initial purpose: female allegorical figures seem now to be dizzy and disoriented, wandering around lying bodies and trying to gracefully skip over them, while the howling of living dogs in the cage accompanies the musical score (by Antun Toni Blažinović). Brezovec’s performance was not the only one to allude to the above-described birthday celebration as a cultural disgrace, putting into question not so much the aesthetic standards to which it conformed,

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but rather the professional ethic and political awareness of all involved, especially actors. In their performance of Euripides’ Bakhe at the Split Summer Festival in 2008, both the director Oliver Frljić and the dramaturge Marin Blažević also decided to point to the utter instrumentalization to which these performers agreed to subordinate themselves while having supposedly willingly performed for free. However, in its endeavor to completely distance Bakhe from such blatant abuse, the artistic procedure used by Frljić and Blažević was explicit: individual performers of the now notorious birthday celebration appeared in the very heat of their impassioned recitations on the screen, in a video-excerpt inserted at the end of Frljić’s and Blažević’s performance and framed by the running title Xenophobic machine. Given the rest of the performance, which probed the investment and the effect of four contrasting versions of the actors’ immersion in the famous report by Euripides’ Messenger, this kind of direct quoting was a legitimate choice, but it was not as artistically or intellectually intricate as the complex, both literarily mediated and viscerally explosive critical encounter with the theatrical warpropagandist legacy envisaged by Brezovec. That being said, one must also acknowledge that Oliver Frljić repeatedly returns to the neuralgia of the cultural function of the national stage, and to the active role both some of its actors and some of its directors played in the reproduction of ‘hate speech’, as was again explicitly visible in his Trilogija o hrvatskom fašizmu [Trilogy on Croatian Fascism] in 2014. We may now safely say that he is the only artist in the Croatian theatre that still does not want the shameful side of “the Croatian theatre in the 1990s” to be erased or tamed under more noble rubrics, topics and issues pertaining to the same period. As theatre researchers, by their sheer silence, tend to be implicated in the ideological biases and distortions plaguing the (re)production of cultural memory, let me just state that my contribution to the collection in which this paper is to be published was motivated along the same lines.

Notes

1.  Tom Conley, foreword to The Portrait of the King, by Louis Marin (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), VI. 2. S. E. Wilmer, ed., National Theatres in a Changing Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 3. Loren Kruger, The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).

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4. cf. Lada Čale Feldman, “The Theatralisation of Reality,” in Fear, Death, and Resistance: An Ethnography of War, Croatia 1991–92, eds. Lada Čale Feldman, Ines Prica, and Reana Senjković (Zagreb: Matrix Croatica and IEF, 1993). 5. cf. Tim Raphael, “The King is a Thing: Bodies of Memory in the Age of Reagan,” TDR 43, no. 1: 46–58; Tim Raphael, “Mourning in America: Hamlet, Reagan, and the Rights of Memory,” Theatre Journal 54, no. 1 (2007): 1–20. 6. Barbara Sušec Michieli, “The Disappearing Balkans: National Theatres and Geopolitics,” in National Theatres in a Changing Europe, ed. S. E. Wilmer (London: Palgrave, 2008), 196–203. 7. Boris Andreevič Uspenskij, Storia e semiotica (Milano: Bompiani, 1988), 18. 8. Ibid. 9. cf. Čale Feldman, “The Theatralisation of Reality,” 5–23; Lada Čale Feldman, “The Image of the Leader,” Collegium Anthropologicum, no. 19/1 (1995): 79–90; Reana Senjković, Lica društva, likovi države (Zagreb: IEF, 2002), 77–101. 10. cf. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 24–41. 11.  cf. Jeffrey Edward Green, Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 12. cf. Boris Senker, Hrestomatija novije hrvatske drame II. Dio. 1941–1995 (Zagreb: Disput, 2001). 13. cf. Lada Čale Feldman, Teatar u teatru u hrvatskom teatru (Zagreb: Naklada MD i Matica hrvatska, 1997); cf. Lada Čale Feldman, “The Context Within: Play Within the Play Between Theatre Anthropology, System Theory, and Post-colonial Critique,” in Play-Within-the-Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, eds. Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). 14. cf. Dubravka Crnojević-Carić, “Toplo okrilje međa,” Republika, no. 7–8 (1998): 136–146; for the “romantic medievalism” and the “discourse of war” in nineteenth century Croatian tragedy, see Natka Badurina, Utvara kletve, o sublimnom i rodnim ulogama u hrvatskoj povijesnoj tragediji u 19. stoljeću (Zagreb: Disput, 2014), 61–105. 15. cf. Sabbatini as quoted in Roger Savage, “The Staging of Courtly Theatre 1560s to 1640s,” in Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivities in Early Modern Europe, eds. J. R. Mulryne, Helen Watanabe O’Kelly, and Margaret Shewring (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), 5–6. 16. The last time the Croatian National Theatre had been usurped for a similar ritual was during the so-called Independent State of Croatia, when, on July 14, 1944, a celebration of President Ante Pavelić’s birthday occurred in its premises (cf. Snježana Banović, Država i njezino kazalište (Zagreb: Profil,

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221)). Pavelić, however, did not attend the celebration, which somewhat changes the performative conditions of the kind of propaganda theatre that took place at that time, in comparison to the situation in the nineties, which, with all the anachronicity that was displayed during the performance itself, must be viewed from the perspective of the post-Tito epoch. 17.  Mark Franko, “Double Bodies: Androgyny and Power in the Performances of Louis XIV,” TDR 38, no. 4 (1994): 71–82. 18. cf. Lada Čale Feldman, “The Image of the Leader,” Collegium Anthropologicum, no. 19/1 (1995): 79–90. 19. cf. Reana Senjković, Lica društva, likovi države (Zagreb: IEF, 2002), 126. 20. Christel Lane, The Rites of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society—The Soviet Case (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 225. 21. Ibid., 227. For a more comprehensive and thorough account of the way Tito’s birthday was celebrated in communist Yugoslavia, see Branislav Jakovljević, Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–91 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 34–38 and 75–82. What I find particularly intriguing, given the aforementioned celebration in the baroque Hvar theatre, as well as the argument I am about to pursue with respect to Tuđman’s era, is the fact that Jakovljević titled the section on Tito’s Belgrade birthday celebrations “Socialist Baroque.” He borrows the notion of the baroque as a “historical complex” from Spanish literary critic Jose Antonio Maraval, precisely because he insists that it is “a more complex and far-reaching phenomenon than a historical period or an artistic style,” pertaining to all “postrevolutionary societies,” keen on “keeping in check the revolutionary energy that brought it into being” and therefore being “in permanent crisis.” (Jakovljević, Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–91, 73). 22. cf. Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 23. Ibid., 32. 24. Ibid., 23. 25. Ibid., viii. 26.  cf. Franjo Tuđman, Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti, Rasprava o povijesti i filozofiji zlosilja (Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Matice hrvatske, 1989). 27. cf. Louis Marin, The Portrait of the King (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 55–56. 28. Both historiography and theatre used and abused the so-called ‘curse of Zvonimir’s curse’—a legend according to which his death marked the forthcoming thousand years of suffering awaiting Croats, doomed never again to enjoy their political independence as a nation. For more, see Natka Badurina, Utvara kletve, o sublimnom i rodnim ulogama u hrvatskoj povijesnoj tragediji u 19. stoljeću (Zagreb: Disput, 2014), 202–203.

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29. For its own historico-phantasmatic content, see Tatjana Jukić, “Ilirizam i tumačenje snova: Gundulići Vlaha Bukovca,” in Komparativna povijest hrvatske književnosti, Zbornik radova XIV. Romantizam-ilirizam-preporod, eds. Cvijeta Pavlović, Vinka Glunčić-Bužančić, and Andrea MeyerFraatz (Split and Zagreb: Književni krug Split, Odsjek za komparativnu književnost Filozofskog fakulteta Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, 2012), 311–328. 30. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 30. 31. cf. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. 32. cf. Franko, “Double Bodies: Androgyny and Power in the Performances of Louis XIV,” 24–75. 33. cf. Vlatko Pavletić, “Velikani cjelokupne hrvatske povijesti: Tuđmanova politička doktrina,” speech by the author at the birthday commemoration on the occasion of Franjo Tuđman’s 75th birthday in Zagreb, May 14, 1997. Državnost. časopis za politiku, znanost, kulturu i gospodarstvo 1, no. 1 (1997): 7–18. 34.  cf. Reana Senjković, Lica društva, likovi države (Zagreb: IEF, 2002), 152–153. 35. Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 36. cf. Lada Čale Feldman, “‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore: An Actress and Her Doubles Between Postcommunism and Posthumanism,” Frakcija, no. 20/21 (2001): 94–111. 37. cf. Senjković, Lica društva, likovi države, 297–310. 38. The exception being Senjković (ibid.) 39. Marin Blažević, “DIRECTOR vs ACTOR or Matula vs Brezovec,” Frakcija, no. 20/21 (2001): 127. 40. Ibid., 127. Words in Italics are quotes from the short story. 41. Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 81–82. 42. Blažević, “DIRECTOR vs ACTOR or Matula vs Brezovec,” 127. 43. Miroslav Krleža, “Veliki meštar sviju hulja,” in Hiljadu i jedna smrt i druge novele (Sarajevo: Oslobođenje, 1973), 118.

Works Cited Badurina, Natka. Utvara kletve, o sublimnom i rodnim ulogama u hrvatskoj povijesnoj tragediji u 19. stoljeću. Zagreb: Disput, 2014. Banović, Snježana. Država i njezino kazalište. Zagreb: Profil, 2012. Blažević, Marin. “DIRECTOR vs ACTOR or Matula vs Brezovec.” Frakcija, no. 20/21 (2001): 125–143.

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Crnojević-Carić, Dubravka. “Toplo okrilje međa.” Republika, no. 7–8 (1998): 136–146. Čale Feldman, Lada. “The Theatralisation of Reality.” In Fear, Death, and Resistance: An Ethnography of War, Croatia 1991–92, edited by Lada Čale Feldman, Ines Prica, and Reana Senjković. Zagreb: Matrix Croatica and IEF, 1993. ———. “The Image of the Leader.” Collegium Anthropologicum, no. 19/1 (1995): 79–90. ———. Teatar u teatru u hrvatskom teatru. Zagreb: Naklada MD i Matica hrvatska, 1997. ———. “‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’: An Actress and Her Doubles Between Postcommunism and Posthumanism.” Frakcija, no. 20/21 (2001): 94–111. ———. “Tiranija tijela: Feralove fotomontaže.” In Femina ludens. Zagreb: Disput, 2005. ———. “The Context Within: Play Within the Play Between Theatre Anthropology, System Theory, and Post-colonial Critique.” In Play-Withinthe-Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, edited by Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner, 285–296. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Franko, Mark. “Double Bodies: Androgyny and Power in the Performances of Louis XIV.” TDR 38, no. 4 (1994): 71–82. Green, Jeffrey Edward. Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Jakovljević, Branislav. Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–91. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Jukić, Tatjana. “Ilirizam i tumačenje snova: Gundulići Vlaha Bukovca.” In Komparativna povijest hrvatske književnosti, Zbornik radova XIV. Romantizam-ilirizam-preporod, edited by Cvijeta Pavlović, Vinka GlunčićBužančić, and Andrea Meyer-Fraatz, 311–328. Split and Zagreb: Književni krug Split, Odsjek za komparativnu književnost Filozofskog fakulteta Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, 2012. Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. Krleža, Miroslav. “Veliki meštar sviju hulja.” In Hiljadu i jedna smrt i druge novele, 45–128. Sarajevo: Oslobođenje, 1973. Kruger, Loren. The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Lane, Christel. The Rites of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society—The Soviet Case. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Marin, Louis. The Portrait of the King. Translated by Martha M. Houle. Foreword by Tom Conley. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988.

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Pavletić, Vlatko. “Velikani cjelokupne hrvatske povijesti: Tuđmanova politička doktrina.” Speech by the author. Birthday commemoration speech on the occasion of Franjo Tuđman’s 75th birthday in Zagreb, May 14, 1997. Državnost. časopis za politiku, znanost, kulturu i gospodarstvo 1, no. 1 (1997): 7–18. Raphael, Tim. “The King is a Thing: Bodies of Memory in the Age of Reagan.” TDR 43, no. 1 (1999): 46–58. ———. “Mourning in America: Hamlet, Reagan, and the Rights of Memory.” Theatre Journal 54, no. 1 (2007): 1–20. Santner, Eric. The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Savage, Roger. “The Staging of Courtly Theatre 1560s to 1640s.” In Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivities in Early Modern Europe, edited by J. R. Mulryne, Helen Watanabe O’Kelly, and Margaret Shewring, 5–18. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2004. Senjković, Reana. Lica društva, likovi države. Zagreb: IEF, 2002. Senker, Boris. Hrestomatija novije hrvatske drame II. Dio. 1941–1995. Zagreb: Disput, 2001. Sušec Michieli, Barbara. “The Disappearing Balkans: National Theatres and Geopolitics.” In National Theatres in a Changing Europe, edited by S. E. Wilmer, 196–203. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Tuđman, Franjo. Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti, Rasprava o povijesti i filozofiji zlosilja. Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Matice hrvatske, 1989. Uspenskij, Boris Andreevič. Storia e semiotica. Milano: Bompiani, 1988.

Testimony Snježana Banović Snježana Banović

Director and Professor, Zagreb

Panel Discussion at the MESS Festival, Sarajevo (October 7, 2016) It’s very complicated talking about theater in times of war from this distance. In those prewar days, I was just about to finish my studies at the Zagreb Academy of Dramatic Arts, and my first work after the Academy was a performance of the play Filip Oktet i čarobna frula [Philip Octet and his Magic Flute] written by the Croatian author Pavo Marinković. This play was a sort of persiflage based on the original Sophocles drama Philoctetes, written in late 1989, when you could already see the emancipatory nationalist movement in Croatia and predict the direction in which politics were heading. Marinković sub-­ consciously reached for Sophocles, and in the end he wrote an anti-war drama. However, actual events during that time were precisely the opposite of his text: the political environment was quite pro-war. We began to work on the play in the autumn of 1990, and I remember how we fooled around with the topic while things were happening

S. Banović (*)  Academy for Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_10

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around us—like the return of the monument of Count Josip Jelačić to the main square in Zagreb, which suddenly ceased to be called “Republic Square”. With the elections of May 1990, when the Croatian Democratic Union came to power alongside Franjo Tuđman and his totalitarian vision of a unified, pure Croatia, I remember that this play reached a certain point of seriousness—we decided to put real camouflage uniforms on the soldiers, and suddenly this Philoctetes who refused to go to war ceased to be presented as a fairy-tale character, gaining instead the status of a national traitor, a victim of the system for refusing to go to war. A very weak anti-war movement existed in Zagreb at that time, but it lay totally outside of mainstream state politics. Some of us were active in this anti-war campaign: in 1991, we tried to distribute an anti-war petition throughout the region. We even tried to put some of these efforts into our play as a documentary background. So we were trying to find a way to deal with this matter, but perhaps not bravely enough. I personally think that the play could have been much braver. The opening night was planned for January 1991, but we had to postpone it as road barricades appeared right in front of the Theater & TD in Zagreb, where the premiere was planned. The army was not using the roads, but an atmosphere of fear was constantly being created in this way. It was in this atmosphere that we were working on the play, and in this atmosphere that the new management of the theater was established. I realized that, somehow, we had started working on one show and ended up doing a completely different one. Filip Oktet played in Zagreb only a few times, but it was welcomed in Dubrovnik with great emotion in 1992, when the city was liberated. I remember that the audience cried in the dark, and we all walked through the darkened city after the show, with the serbian army still on the hills above. The play started as some kind of an innocent performance, and within two years it had grown into some kind of antiwar revolt. During the war, the Croatian government very much counted on conformity and opportunism from artists. In Croatia this could, to a certain extent be considered a historical characteristic: that we always return to our history and behave opportunistically toward our present ignoring the future. At the time, the most obvious example of manipulation came from Croatian national television, which was dealing in propaganda and teaching that the Croats were above everyone else. But at the same

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time, this type of message emanated from the other cultural institutions as well. If you didn’t wear camouflage uniforms to theater rehearsals; if you weren’t a member of the HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union Party) and even National Security Service (SOA); if you weren’t ready to conform, you wouldn’t be able to contend the role as a theater director in Zagreb and in other big Croatian cities, for instance. There was no much room for civil society at that time. There was also a strong anti-Serb campaign, and there was a huge demographic change in the first few months of the war as Zagreb lost a vast number of Serbian citizens. We were suddenly back in the nineteenth century, as all our kings regained their streets and squares. The theater repertoire changed as well. Suddenly romantic dramas written by Illyrians were playing on all Zagreb’s stages: Teuta by Dimitrije Demeter, for instance. Interestingly enough, it seemed as though the directors of these pieces had forgotten that these Illyrians wrote in a pan-Slavic manner, envisaging this south-Slavic identity space as being unified and not divided. So there was this type of very dangerous manipulation going on, and this could also be seen largely in the repertoire of the Croatian National Theatre, which produced a great number of romantic plays about these Croatian kings. Alongside this return to the nineteenth century and the creation of this “pure Croatian” repertoire, we also returned (and are still returning) to the time of the World War II and the fascist Independent State of Croatia (NDH), which is even more dangerous. On April 11, 1991, one day after the anniversary of the establishment of the NDH, the Croatian National Theater in Zagreb staged Ognjište [The Hearth], a play written by a ustashy leader and fascist minister of NDH Mile Budak and directed by extreme right-wing director Jakov Sedlar. The show went on numerous tours around the globe, playing for the Croatian diaspora, and featured all the stars of Croatian theater. This was a kind of peasant repertoire with an NDH twist, which I found utterly surreal.

Culture of Dissent, Art of Rebellion: The Psychiatric Hospital as a Theatre Stage in the Work of Zorica Jevremović Milena Dragićević Šešić

Introduction1 Between 1991 and 1995, Belgrade’s theatre professionals faced ­numerous dilemmas: whether to fight nationalism and pressures against non-Serbian artists; whether to leave state-controlled institutional theatres and create their own workspaces; and whether to stop participating in public life or just “be actors,” performing in the comedies and vaudevilles that dominated Belgrade’s repertory theatres. Numerous artists and intellectuals withdrew from active participation in theatre life in both institutionalized and alternative theatre. After the removal of Vida Ognjenović as the director of the National Theatre in Belgrade in 1993, the theatre manager and five of its top actors left, and its core audience began boycotting it. At the same time, several artists left the KPGT, the most influential alternative theatre in Yugoslavia in the 1980s, expressing their dissent towards the political involvement of its founder and manager, Ljubiša Ristić. Among them was dramaturge Zorica Jevremović,

M. Dragićević Šešić (*)  University of Arts Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_11

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who, in April 1992, organized an exhibition and a whole program devoted to Bosnia (Bosnia–Human Traces) at the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade. Thereafter, she went into a peculiar “inner exile” at the Laza Lazarević Psychiatric Hospital from 1992 to 1995. Aside from DAH Theatre performances,2 that was the most engaged form of theatre practice in Belgrade at the time. Jevremović’s alternative theatre took place in the M, L and F wards of the hospital, where she led various artistic workshops, gathering an artistic ensemble composed of professional artists, amateurs (doctors and their families) as well as patients. Theatre productions and performances took place in different spaces both inside and outside of the hospital. Each show gathered around a 100 spectators who were invited to interact with the actors. This complex experience ended in 1995 after being forbidden by the hospital director, who feared its public exposure. In the following paper, I will try to assess the meaning and importance of this alternative theatrical project developed within a culture of dissent (sharing a sense of shame and guilt). Supported by civil society movements as well as the intellectual and artistic communities that were unable to find a place within the official system, these and similar theatrical experiences have been an attempt at recreating “normality” within a closed and frustrated society facing wars, refugee flows, media wars and hatred. At that time, there were no public spaces for expressing dissent in Serbia as a “re-etatization” of the cultural system took place in the summer of 1992 with the passing of a new law that abolished the rules regarding Yugoslav self-governed culture. Radio B92 was the only free platform for gathering peace activists and independent intellectuals in Serbia, whereas visual artists used their private homes as exhibition spaces (i.e. the Private–Public exhibition by Milica Tomić), musicians turned to jazz clubs and restaurants, young students of architecture used an abandoned sugar factory for their complex Project X (where they questioned crucial issues of contemporary social life in Serbia through performances, installations, colloquia and roundtables) and Jevremović began using a psychiatric hospital as a performance space—a paradigm of that period in Serbia. Closed institutions, such as psychiatric hospitals, became free platforms for patients (many of whom were suffering from war trauma), theatre artists, doctors and nurses for discussing and expressing their traumas and dilemmas within a society strongly divided on both ideological and social levels. The following research will thus combine

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interviews, performance analysis, narrative analysis, the analysis of Jevremović’s autobiographical testimony as well as my own notes as a spectator–participant not committed to any discursive formations or practices.

Theoretical Background Theatre work outside of major public institutions rarely enters into cultural memory.3 However, in the twentieth century, it was artists, artist collectives and theatre groups that changed the aesthetics of theatre performances, and furthermore, challenged social ethics and a sense of justice, dealing with controversial issues beyond the diversified scope of official cultural policies and the politics of memory and oblivion. In his seminal text, Paul Connerton describes the seven types of forgetting that are performed in societies for various reasons.4 He begins with repressive erasure, generally used in totalitarian or authoritarian societies, in which memories are deliberately sent to oblivion and replaced by new, often invented ones. Prescriptive forgetting is also a deliberate act performed by the state “in the public interest,” as a method of patronizing a society that is considered incapable of getting rid of traumatic memories of the past. Forgetting as a necessity for a new identity is a form of consensual, shared policy applied in societies that want to forget their (usually negative) pasts. Structural amnesia is applied by societies, groups and individuals in order to erase socially and culturally humiliating or irrelevant information (that does not fit their desired identities). Forgetting as annulment is usually a reaction to an information overload, thus it is not intentional. Forgetting as a planned obsolescence happens more out of negligence or disrespect for the facts and data (forgetting as a norm) in Southeast Europe. Forgetting as humiliated silence often comes after events in which one society has been humiliated without protest (thus not having any significant memories as a victim or a hero). However, this list is not exhaustive enough to cover other possible reasons why societies often decide upon a consensus between public opinion and authority in order to commit certain events to oblivion. Forgetting as confused silence is always applied when there is no debate or clear statement about past events. Forgetting as shameful silence is one of the most important reasons for oblivion,5 and it seems that it may be the key reason why the work of Jevremović—as well as the lives and traumas of psychiatric patients—is erased from collective and cultural memory.6

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During the second half of the twentieth century, art expanded beyond the walls of institutions, thereby finding the most suitable places for its expression in public spaces or later in non-theatrical and non-cultural buildings and organizations. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city, and with a desire to communicate with different communities, especially those deprived of human rights and subjugated to social injustices, “artivists”7 have been experimenting with participatory approaches for creating new artistic forms through projects that have usually not been accepted within the establishment or within hegemonic frameworks. The main research question is thus: Can the theatre project at the Laza Lazarević Hospital be considered a chronotope,8 expressing how the configurations of time and space are represented in Jevremović’s work, but also a metaphoric chronotope for the whole country as a psychiatric hospital in the 1990s? The following research will thus also rely on Michel Foucault’s relations between madness and civilization, the use of bio-power (as a technology for managing populations), govern/ mentality, the “negative structures” of society (excluded classes), the psychiatric hospital as a heterotopia (a space outside of everyday practices), and so on. At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable.9

Leprosy played a specific role in European consciousness, and its disappearance was a physical and psychological phenomenon. The leper was excluded from “normal” society, and society thus defined itself through its exclusion. The abnormal and the frightening were excluded, and the healthy and safe were accepted. Leprosy existed in a particular “space” within society. This space was both real and imaginary. Buildings were erected to house the excluded lepers, but they also existed in a certain cultural space at the margins of the “normal” community. The “wastelands” that Foucault describes are partly a creation of the mind. However, they were eventually repopulated by the mentally ill, who replaced the lepers as an excluded class. The stigmatization and discrimination that contributed to the “spoiled identity”10 of individuals with psychiatric issues became characteristic of

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modern society. These practices and narratives have also been used to a lesser degree with patients suffering from cancer and AIDS, in which these narratives often resort to military metaphors, victimization and guilt. However, this situation has begun to change recently.11 As a result of having mentally ill relatives, the families of psychiatric patients have experienced tremendous shame in society. They thereby frequently isolate their own members within the walls of their homes or in distant psychiatric hospitals. Psychiatric institutions became spaces for the incarceration of all those who are different that society wants to exclude: erotomaniacs, artists that positioned themselves as critical dissidents (e.g. in the USSR) and in some cases even individuals that families wanted to deprive of their inheritance. In his seminal work, Marat/Sade, Peter Weiss situates important social debates within the walls of a psychiatric hospital, giving the patients a chance to explore and present their views. Thus, the subtitle The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade leads us directly to contemporary applied theatre and drama studies and practices. Recent developments in the theory of drama and theatre studies, and in applied theatre theory specifically, have brought the notion of invisible or ineligible audiences under scrutiny.12 Numerous traditions of political and engaged theatre, along with recent efforts linked to theatre anthropology and theatre for development, have developed new reflections on the role of theatre in contemporary society. Further reflections on the role of theatre in contemporary society have been made by various traditions of political and engaged theatre along with recent efforts linked to theatre anthropology and theatre for development. Primarily due to the development of cultural policies that demand the realization of the right of access to culture, theatre workers had to step beyond the walls of institutional theatre and address ineligible audiences—worthless, unimportant, undesirable, inaccessible and unrecognizable audiences.13 Concurrently, drama therapy had been developing for different reasons: as a medical and social tool for healing and integration. These two approaches overlapped and interlaced in different moments of applied theatre history, specifically in the work of Augusto Boal,14 whose theory and practice focused on the oppressed, non-audiences which he stimulated toward using theatrical techniques for liberating themselves. He approached and worked with oppressed people in deprived suburbs and slums, factories and psychiatric hospitals. His efforts were not part of the

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usual normalization processes, such as efforts of inclusion and integration under hegemonic social values, but rather those of liberation and of gaining self-confidence. Applied theatre, an umbrella term that describes a wide diversity of theatrical processes that go beyond conventional theatre, offers numerous possibilities for analyzing those experiments in society which use different methods (devised theatre, verbatim theatre, inclusive theatre, drama in education, theatre in education, drama therapy, theatre for development, confrontation theatre, memory theatre, immersive theatre, among others). Precisely this openness of the term will be of crucial importance for this study as Jevremović has not theorized her own process. Being hybrid and complex, sometimes comprehensive, political and inclusive and sometimes very specific and different from usual (publicly funded) practices, her approach calls for multiple perspectives in its description.

Context In Serbia, during the 1990s, the sociopolitical situation and the dissolution of Yugoslavia imposed numerous challenges on the cultural system, especially regarding former-Yugoslavs and intercultural dialogue. Psychiatrists like Jovan Rašković and Dušan Kecmanović even described Serbian people and Serbianhood using psychiatric vocabulary prior to the war and the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and their statements flooded the media. New frontiers, migrations of artists and intellectuals, nationalization of cultural policies in newly independent countries and also the nationalization of repertories in public cultural institutions (symbolized by the rejection of the staging of a performance of Miroslav Krleža at the Belgrade Drama Theatre and the infamous interrupted Belgrade premiere of the Sveti Sava [Saint Sava] performance by Zenica National Theatre, written by Siniša Kovačević, and directed by Vladimir Milčin) demanded that every citizen should take a stand and decide to which extent they would take part in the ongoing social processes.15 There were several possible solutions: exile,16 withdrawal from public life, escapism that would allow the creation of a parallel society through media and cultural events,17 political engagement within the political structures of the majority as well as opposition or social engagement through activism either on an individual level or on the level of civil society.18 All of these solutions were also the case within cultural systems in which every agent has to find or redefine their own position.

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Thus, artists who were active in the independent scene or who belonged to a public cultural network in the 1980s chose different perspectives. The Pralipe Theatre from Skopje went into exile (Mühlheim), actor Bekim Fehmiu withdrew from public life, dramaturge Dubravka Knežević stopped writing and later went into exile, whereas the majority of state-owned theatres opted for escapism.19 Ljubiša Ristić even participated in the creation and management of a political party that belonged to the majority, while his friends and “comrades” mostly went into political opposition (most of the members of The Association of Drama Artists supported the Democratic Party in opposition). Another group opted for social activism within civil society, creating the Belgrade Circle as well as other NGOs, referred to as the Other Serbia Movement (Borka Pavićević, Jelena Šantić), while Zorica Jevremović opted for individual social activism after founding and withdrawing from the Belgrade Circle, developing numerous projects in the Student Cultural Centre and then later in psychiatric hospitals. Jevremović started her artistic career while still student of dramaturgy. The performance of her drama Oj Srbijo, nigde ‘lada nema [Oh, Serbia, Nowhere to Hide from the Sun] at the Belgrade theatre Atelje 212 premiered on April 27, 1977. Disappointed with staging of her play in a nationalistic way, and thus feeling manipulated, she withdrew from the public cultural system and joined several important independent artistic movements of the 1980s. Within the New Sensibility movement, which offered Belgrade audiences several important projects and the first readaptation of postindustrial heritage (The Skadarlija Brewery), she created her own path by developing a children’s street theatre with Roma children along with other children from the neighborhood. It was a rare example of the theatre of animation and social intervention in Yugoslavia at that time. In the second half of the 1980s, she worked with the most important theatre group of its time: Kazalište Pozorište Gledališče Teatar (KPGT).20 At the beginning of the war, and during the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Jevremović immediately took an activist approach and organized for Zdravko Grebo’s exhibition of maps of Sarajevo to be shown at the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade (March 1992). Only a few days after the first barricades were put up in Sarajevo, Jevremović invited artists to bring their artworks dealing with Bosnia, along with citizens of Belgrade to bring their memories to the Student Cultural Centre, so that the exhibition could be created in a participative manner with a series

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of panel debates following them, some of which were in the form of lecture-performances. Her video, Autovideography (1996), which followed those projects, related to the events both outside (war and political crisis) and inside (workshops about maps and borders with different groups of children and their parents) was one of the rare moments when she went beyond the performative format.21 Disgusted with the behavior of her theatre colleagues, and seeing the extent to which victims of the war were marginalized and hidden from the public eye (e.g. being put away in psychiatric hospitals), she went to the Laza Lazarević Hospital in 1993, where she created the Pocket Theatre M, which lasted until 1995, when the hospital director censored a planned public event. She continued her work with the Autonomous Women’s Centre Against Sexual Violence by developing a new theatre space, entitled Feminist Theatre—Way 5A. Isolated from the theatrical community, she continued her public engagement by collaborating with several autonomous (or semi-autonomous) organizations such as the Drama Faculty’s Institute for Theatre, Film, Radio and Television (within the research project Flows of Theatre Communication), the weekly Vreme, the monthly Republika, publishing her drama texts in books22 as no one wanted to put them on stage,23 and publishing several books as a semiologist and cultural analyst.24 Although the 1990s was a period of intensive “history creation” in Jevremović’s reflections and writings, it was a privileged time for a dialogue with the past, writing about all those phenomena that she believed had a certain impact on the state of the arts at the time. Her articles and essays about theatres as political factories of socialist Yugoslavia, and others such as “Nedostaje mi Mira Trailović” [I Am Missing Mira Trailović] or “Ram za sliku Ulrike Majnhof ” [Frame for the Picture of Ulrike Meinhof]25 question not only historical facts but also people’s memories of the events that shaped their values and narrowed their horizons. Art concerning psychiatric hospitals or set within them both not only intrigues but also intimidates people (as shameful silence obliges). The fact that it has only recently become a topic of public discussion within films that artists and authors, such as Camille Claudel or Petar Kočić, lived out their last days in psychiatric hospitals (in France and Serbia respectively), is significant.26 The transition and wars brought psychiatric hospitals to the center of attention again, though only for a short time.27 Documentaries about psychiatric hospitals in Bosnia (linked to the

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unsolved mysteries of the patients)28 and photojournalism about Gornja Toponica in Serbia and numerous others in Kosovo (e.g. the work of British photographer George Georgiou),29 the Bulgarian movie Georgi and the Butterflies,30 among others, revealed the shameful situation. However, they unfortunately had no impact on raising public awareness around these issues.

Why Choose a Psychiatric Hospital? In the first ranks, among fighters for the national cause, were the authors and drama artists, striving to explain the importance and meaning of the moment through their statements… They became experts in medieval history […] While the war machine pumped hard, many died in Croatia and Bosnia—our psychiatrists, those who were not members of the parliament—remained silent […] Orthodox priests joined authors and ­ psychiatrists by repeating psychiatrist Rašković’s empty phrase with fer­ vour: Serbs are crazy people.31

Jevremović further explains that it was the time, the Zeitgeist: “I jumped from one madhouse into another one […] Those who were there chose madness to escape from the current social reality,”32 to enter a world where there was no pressure from the myths or “statehood ­nationalism”33 that prevailed in public discourses and the media. The extent to which the issue of madness had been debated in different parts of society is revealed in the fact that even the most important Serbian theatre arts review Scena published a thematic issue related to the psychodrama and the use of its dramatic elements in psychiatric treatment. In the National Assembly of Serbia, there were more physicians than economists or lawyers. Among those physicians, the number of psychiatrists dominated. Reflecting on that fact somewhat sardonically, Jevremović concluded that “the Marat-Sade madhouse was the inverse reality in which I lived.”34 Jevremović ventured into a psychiatric hospital as a paradigm of Serbia at that time. As mentioned above, psychiatrists already described Serbs using psychiatric vocabulary prior to the war and the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Radovan Karadžić, who happened to be a psychiatrist by profession, led the war in Bosnia in a very cruel manner. On the other side of the conflict, certain experts in public health, like Slaven Letica from Croatia, supported a war machine.

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The impoverished classes grew as Serbia was placed under UN embargo, and the so-called ineligible audiences and excluded classes began to comprise the majority of the population. Referring to Foucault, the excluded classes usually provide the “material” for psychiatric hospitals, and it was precisely the excluded classes from the bottom of Serbian society, forgotten and rejected, that constituted most of the patients at the Laza Lazarević Hospital. Thus, Jevremović shifted her theatre practice toward the asylum. In November 1992, she assisted performances prepared by patients and doctors. They recited, acted, sang: patients in their hospital gowns, doctors in their white scrubs—symbols of repression and hierarchy. The “reign of terror” of the superiors (medical staff) and the submissiveness of the oppressed (patients) reflected social reality in that microenvironment. She continued to follow those events in the hospital incognito until she decided to present herself to the doctors that led those events. After numerous negotiations, she received permission to enter the men’s ward M in February 1994, in order to start working in a more complex manner with the patients. She explained her approach to the interested community as “bodies next to bodies, bodies vis-à-vis bodies, bodies for bodies.” These corporeal workshops were followed by literary workshops, visual arts workshops, mural newspaper design, a rotating self-made library, among others. This became more about developing a sensitization and becoming acquainted with one another for creating trust and mutual confidence between Jevremović and her “team,” the patients and medical staff. These new “outcomes” were more challenging for patients than those that had been developed before, as they had “performed” in the way that school plays were typically organized. Here, the patients could test their own creative skills in a variety of art and media formats, whereas the previous events operated by the medical staff only allowed them to recite or sing other people’s work, rarely their own poetry.

Pocket Theatre M: An Attempt at Creating a New World Within the Walls of the Hospital Jevremović opened syncretic art workshops in different hospital wards: M, L and F (men’s, women’s and mixed gender). In the men’s ward, she mainly used visual art, literary and library workshops. In the women’s ward, she used visual art and literature. And in the mixed ward, she used

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the movement workshop along with a visual art workshop. Most of the workshops took place in the dining room between breakfast and lunch, where around thirty patients would gather to participate and discuss. On average, ten patients would rally around the actively participating group. Although the patients’ desires and emotions were often suppressed by the various medications they were taking, these workshops helped them to open up and express some of their hidden traumas and yearnings. “What desire can be contrary to nature, since it was given to man by nature itself?”35 In October 1994, Jevremović took a brave step forward: she created the Open Noon Workshops based on the work of the ensemble of Pocket Theatre M, as well as other patients, medical staff (those not wearing white scrubs), convalescents who had been dismissed for home treatment (still visiting the hospital on a daily basis) and many cultural professionals from Belgrade. The Open Noon Workshops introduced new areas of work, aside from the established workshops in visual arts, literature and movement, sound, journalism and speech practices. They were led by external experts, but the key hosts were convalescents. One significant fact is that the experts that Jevremović invited were practitioners who had been at the margins of the institutionalized art and theatre systems due to their disabilities. For instance, a sound workshop was led by a blind intellectual who had invented computer communication for the blind. The open atmosphere of these workshops drew even greater interest, which expanded into the neighborhood with some of the therapists bringing their own children. These intentionally very hybrid audiences, predominantly regarded as ineligible or invisible audiences, became more than active audiences— they became creators and actors at the same time. All of these workshop experiments were able to converge into one concrete project which could be shown to outside audiences and that could thereby boost the confidence of both the patients and medical staff. This project did not intend to ‘normalize’ or show the patients’ experiences as all being the same. Instead, it was meant to show their differences and the extent of their creativity through and within those differences. This principle also led to the project We Are Ludists—Let’s Play! in April 1994. We Are Ludists—Let’s Play! was led by Jevremović’s long-time collaborator and professional actress Zorica Jovanović, and included not only hospital patients but also psychologists playing themselves, relatives of patients and even a folk ensemble that was connected to one of the therapists in

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the department. The ‘plot’ of the performance was based on the people’s daily life experiences in the hospital, but the performative situation stimulated participants to include their poetry, everything they had ‘learned’ or developed within the workshops that preceded the event, discussions regarding the book Doctor Zhivago or the stories of some of their relatives and friends who came to visit them. Audiences actively participated, recognizing the actors that joined the group and some of the hospital staff, now in new roles. The premiere of the first “repertory piece,” an interactive performance entitled Bajka bluz [Fairytale Blues], took place in June 1994, in the hospital gym. The audiences reflected the diversity of the participants: theatre professionals from the alternative scene, children from the neighborhood, film actors, relatives of the medical staff and other hospital patients. The performance included planned moments intended for audience participation, and several people came up to the stage, among them Jevremović, to help those that may have been inhibited from continuing to participate by the new, frontal mise-en-scene. The participants wore specially created costumes that were inspired by different epochs and circus “styles” (for clowns). The performance was based on the conversations between two female hospital patients that played the roles of their plastic dolls, which was how they saw their lives—as being controlled by others. The text integrated verses from Hamlet, from Petar II Petrović-Njegoš’s epic poem The Mountain Wreath, their hospital experiences of exclusion, but also numerous allusions to the social situation of the time. In every “act,” different “actors” brought new challenges for the two “dolls”—the actresses, who at the end proclaimed that: “With you, we will never be alone not strangers in this city … with you we play our theatre … my Belgrade I build and defend … I know the path to the hearts of others … that is theatre’s power… let’s sing the Fairytale Blues together.” Moved by the success of the performances in April and June, the women’s ward L intensively continued developing their workshops over the summer (the task of the workshops was for the participants to draw their own homes). This led to broader reflections on processes of transition within a society in which social divisions grew, and furthermore, in which people’s homes became more and more impoverished, but restaurants and boutiques became more and more glamorous. This resulted in the performance Otvaranje restorana Viktorija [Opening of the Victoria Restaurant], which was closed to wider audiences. It was

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a critical commentary on similar events that actually took place which was transmitted through various media (e.g. TV channels such as Pink, Palma, among others). Everything was prepared during the workshops. Drawings were hung on all of the walls in the dining room. Every woman selected her own personality with an appropriate hairstyle, makeup and costume. It was the first time ever that a ward in the psychiatric hospital allowed the use of scissors, acetone and nail polish, and it all took place without any misuse of the items. The 1995 New Year’s performance, entitled Kraljica noći [The Queen of the Night], was prepared in three modalities: for patients who stayed in the hospital during the holidays, for the children of the medical staff (Fig. 1) and for the guest performance in a high school. The script and mise-en-scene were modified in each case. Patients that were part of those projects were extremely motivated, and rumors about the projects spread throughout the hospital. Thus, workshops moved to the

Fig. 1  Kraljica noći [The Queen of the Night], staged for children of the medical staff of the Laza Lazarević Psychiatric Hospital (Belgrade), 1994 (Photo courtesy of Zorica Jevremović)

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mixed ward F, where the workshops devoted to the body, corporality and movement were the most popular. The performance Promocija džepnog pozorišta M [Promotion of the Pocket Theatre M] took place already in April. The space was filled with performers, patients, children from the neighborhood, theatre professionals and other public figures. However, in spite of this attempt to memorize and make its own work and process public, the Pocket Theatre M never entered the collective memory of local theatre professionals, and certainly not the cultural memory of Serbia. Hospital spaces are typically clearly divided and devoted to different functions. This is even truer for psychiatric hospitals. Therefore, the diversity of the use of space that Jevremović achieved speaks volumes about the temporary confusion of the medical profession, which allowed more freedom inside of it than existed outside of it at the time. Performances and shows had taken place in numerous spaces: in the dining room of the women’s ward L, in the gymnasium in the basement, the daily hospital with its sporadic performances, as well as General Ždanova Street outside of the hospital—these were ultimately only rehearsals for two hours every day for a month and a half, as the street performance was forbidden a few minutes before its premiere. Dozens of passersby would watch the rehearsals, while around a 100 spectators assisted in the plays. Although each performance anticipated interactivity, no more than ten people from the audience ever dared to participate. Put u nemoguće ili potraga za boginjom Klio [The Road Towards the Impossible, or the Quest for Goddess Clio] was the last performance. It took the form of a procession led by the goddess Thalia. New participants (artists, singers, blind individuals, among others) joined the ensemble. The script Jevremović developed during rehearsals was in the form of a Greek tragedy, which used rhymes and had clear references to the societal situation at the time. As prophecies during the Greco-Persian Wars were unclear and confusing, Apollo led the Muses to Clio, demanding ‘real answers’ from the Goddess of History. However, as the title suggests, his endeavor was the road toward the impossible, a road that would never reach Hyperborea. The participants, the majority of whom were very young (including the local children and the doctors’ children), performed in the procession, walking out of the hospital’s reception building (symbolizing Delphi) toward the supermarket 100 meters away from the hospital (symbolizing Ultima Thule). All nine Muses, dressed in Greek costumes,

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followed Thalia, the goddess of theatre. Apollo was supposed to emerge from the audience (the random, typically invisible audiences mostly comprised of visitors from various local hospitals and taxi drivers waiting by their cars for customers). Apollo would enter Hyperborea as a sacred space (simultaneously a terra incognita as well as a space of eternal happiness), guiding the Muses throughout the history of the theatre until the contemporary days of the war. This even presented theatre designer Dušica Knežević with the opportunity to perform a traditional Indian dance, as well as for actress Mirjana Vukojčić to ‘represent’ Serbian medieval theatre, while the “European” seventeenth century was represented by Berenice, the eighteenth century by The Marriage of Figaro and the nineteenth century by Salome. The other roles, aside from Apollo and the Muses, included the theatre fireman (meant more as a traffic operator), a group of children from the neighborhood (part of Jevremović’s approach to theatre was ‘pozorište kvarta’ [neighborhood theatre36]), as well as a “guy with a baton”—a bully who dominated the streets of Belgrade at the time. Thalia had the last word in the performance in

Fig. 2  Zorica Jevremović quarrelling with the police that stopped the street performance Put u nemoguće ili potraga za boginjom Klio [The Road Towards the Impossible, or the Quest for Goddess Clio], 1995 (Photo courtesy of Zorica Jevremović)

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regards to Clio being late: “Zeus, are we not very late already? Or does the theatre no longer understand the Gods?”37 The project, although telling a tale of antiquity, represented a chronotope of Serbia at that time. It was supported by the fact that the ensemble was ultimately not allowed to move toward its imaginary Hyperborea (General Ždanova Street). Jevremović claimed that: “We spent a month and a half doing research. We had hundreds of viewers during the general rehearsals. Nevertheless, the premiere was cruelly cancelled by armed security without any recourse to action five minutes before it was scheduled to take place. They did not want us out of the hospital. The real police forces had won”38 (Fig. 2).

Conclusion While searching for material on this project, we faced the fact that there were no publications or even short studies written or published on the topic. It confirmed our hypothesis that applied theatre projects performed at the margins of society end up remaining at the margins of academia as well, thereby incapable of raising media attention or instigating public debate. Consequently, such projects can easily disappear into oblivion, as these types of theatrical activities have not yet developed a theoretical framework for their interpretation (forgetting as confused silence). This is especially the case since illness is usually addressed using military metaphors,39 and this entire project was in its essence an antimilitaristic endeavor. While the show was ultimately forbidden from taking place in a public space, the memory of the entire process, and, above all, its censorship should not be forgotten (this censorship has not yet been recorded among researchers that are specialized on this topic). As an activist, Jevremović bravely chose the most difficult spaces and the most difficult “audiences” (ineligible audiences). The stigmatization of psychiatric hospitals and of psychiatric patients kept the Serbian theatrical community at a distance to the extent that the majority of the community refused to even attend the performances upon receiving a direct invitation from Jevremović or other more established actors involved. They gave various pretexts, often claiming that the psychiatric hospital was a source of fear for them. Furthermore, using Foucault’s terms of heterotopia, govern/mentality (referring to processes of governing and a mentality of government), it was clear that psychiatric hospitals are still closed spaces that remain under control and that psychiatric patients are

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deprived of the right to the city especially when their use of public space becomes known publicly. This explains why the hospital director had no problem with patients rehearsing in the streets but forbade a public performance as it would then become a public fact that he allowed mental patients out of the hospital walls. Can we say that the Laza Lazarević Hospital was not only a heterotopia at that time, but a chronotope of Serbia as a country in isolation without a functioning airport, with strict visa regimes that limited the mobility of its citizens; and that the news and information that entered the country was regulated as much as it would have been in a mental hospital, as an attempt at avoiding the provocation of emotionally disturbed patients? Thus, our theatres entertained audiences while many television channels became broadcasters of escapist shows—from Latin American telenovelas to Serbian turbo-folk music videos. In a sense, real artists that would not participate in such escapist policies comprised an excluded class, just as forgotten as the mental patients. However, a closed institution such as the Laza Lazarević Hospital had temporarily become not only a refuge from war and its crimes. It was a free platform for a multitude of voices,40 mobilized through a collaborative process of theatrical creation, offering new forms of social agency that unfortunately had not been recognized and supported in society. This paper has assessed the meaning and importance of this alternative theatrical project developed within a culture of dissent. Without a place in the official system, these theatre experiences were not an attempt at recreating “normality” within a closed and frustrated society facing wars, refugee flows, media war and hatred. They were an attempt at using the applied theatre process for recreating public spaces as spaces of dissent and freedom.

Notes



1. This text was written as part of project no. 178012—Identity and Memory: Transcultural Texts of Drama Arts and Media (Serbia 1989–2014), University of Arts in Belgrade, financed by the Ministry for Education and Science of the Republic of Serbia. 2. For more on DAH Theatre, see Dennis Barnett, ed., DAH Theatre: A Sourcebook (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016).

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3. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, eds., Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, 2010). 4. Paul Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting,” Memory Studies, no. 1 (2008): 59–71. 5. Milena Dragićević Šešić and Milena Stefanović, “Trauma in the Institutional Memory—Tactics and Narratives of Oblivion” (paper presented at the 22nd Annual ENCATC Conference, Brno, Czech Republic, September 2014). 6. As Gluhovic writes, the suffering experienced by millions of victims at different times in European history has not yet become an integral part of a pan-European memory landscape, as many traumas are still taboos with which the arts are primarily engaged. See Milija Gluhovic, Performing European Memories: Trauma, Ethics, Politics (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2013), 13. 7. Aldo Milohnić, “Artivism,” Maska, no. 1–2 (2005): 15–25. 8. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 9. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2001 (1961)), 1. 10. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963). 11. Susan Sontag, Illness As Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978); and Susan Sontag, Aids and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988). 12. Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston, The Applied Theatre Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2009). 13. Darko Lukić, Uvod u primijenjeno kazalište (Zagreb: Leykam international, 2016), 9. 14. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (London: Pluto Press, 1979). 15. Borka Pavićević, “Kratka istorija kulturnog trovanja,” Vreme, December 19, 2013. 16. Dragan Klaić, Exercise in Exile, the Reshaping of an Expat at the Ikea-Table (Amsterdam: Cossee, 2004). 17. Milena Dragićević Šešić, “Autoritarni sistem, autonomija medija i civilno društvo,” in Potisnuto civilno društvo, ed. Vukašin Pavlović (Belgrade: Eko centar, 1995), 450. 18. Velimir Kazimir Ćurgus, Deset godina protiv: građani Srbije u borbi za demokratiju i otvoreno društvo, 1991–2001 (Belgrade: Medija centar, 2001).

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19. Aleksandra Jovićević, “Milošević i njegovi savremenici,” Teatron 27, no. 119 (2002): 116–117; and Aleksandra Jovićević, “Trenutak srećnog samozaborava: pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000, I deo—Društvena stvarnost i beogradska pozorišta,” Teatron 27, no. 118 (2002): 42–49. 20.  The name Kazalište Pozorište Gledališče Teatar (KPGT) uses all the forms of the word “theatre” that exist in the Southern Slavic languages. Croatian kazalište–kazati (to tell); Serbian pozorište–pozorje (place of happening); Slovenian gledališče–gledati (to see), and Macedonian teatar. It is symbolic that although all these words exist in all three languages, each culture has chosen a different word as the essence of the theatrical phenomenon. However, for the modern, experimental institutions, one word, teatar, has been chosen: Bitef teatar, Belgrade or Teatar &TD, Zagreb. In the early 1980s, theatre director Ljubiša Ristić (controversial for his political engagement) formed KPGT to contribute to “Yugoslavian cultural space” with actors, directors, stage designers, etc. from all over Yugoslavia. The group confronted nationalism and the ethnically divided culture that started to be widespread throughout the 1980s. The theatre has kept the name KPGT and some of its multicultural character to this today. 21. Milena Dragićević Šešić, “Borders and Maps in Contemporary Yugoslav Art,” in Redefining Cultural Identities, ed. Nada Švob Đokić (Zagreb: Institute for International Relations, 2001). 22.  Četiri predratne drame, 2001, second edition 2006; Balada o devojačkom odelu, 2006; Šaputave devojke, 2002. 23. Milena Dragićević Šešić, “Interkulturna medijacija–delovati različito u vremenu plime jednoumlja,” foreword to Balada o devojačkom odelu, by Zorica Jevremović (Belgrade: Dosije, 2006); and Milena Dragićević Šešić, “Teatralizacija istorije ili put u budućnost: dramsko delo Zorice Jevremović,” Kultura, no. 124 (2009): 209–220. 24.  Raspad sistema, 2000; Semiološki krugovi, 2001; Spotovi nostalgije, 2006; Pozorište kao stvaranje sveta, 2008. 25. Zorica Jevremović, “Pozorišne (političke) fabrike socijalističke Jugoslavije,” Kultura, no. 93/94 (1994): 95–123; and Zorica Jevremović, “Ram za sliku Ulrike Majnhof,” Pro femina, no. 7 (1996): 139–143. 26.  Camille Claudel (1988), directed by Bruno Nuytten; Camille Claudel 1915 (2013), directed by Bruno Dumont; Slepi putnik na brodu ludaka [Stowaway on a Ship of Lunatics], TV film by Goran Marković, RTS Belgrade 2016. 27.  Nutsas Skola [The Ark], 2000, directed by Merab Kokochashvili (Georgia).

196  M. DRAGIĆEVIĆ ŠEŠIĆ 28.  15 minutes—The Dvor Massacre (2015), documentary film directed by Georg Larsen, produced by Final Cut for Real (Denmark) and Nukleus Film (Croatia). 29. S. Babović, “Jedini dom za zaboravljene!” http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/ naslovna/reportaze/aktuelno.293.html:246048-Jedini-dom-za-zaboravljene. Accessed on March 5, 2017; and K.V. 2014, “JEZIVO: Ovako su 1999. izgledale bolnice u Srbiji! (FOTO),” Telegraf, http://www.telegraf.rs/vesti/936469-jezivo-ovako-su-1999-izgledale-bolnice-u-srbijifoto. Accessed on March 5, 2017. 30.  Georgi and the Butterflies (2004), written and directed by Andrey Paounov. 31. Zorica Jevremović, Pozorište kao stvaranje sveta (Belgrade: FDU, Institut za pozorište, film, radio i televiziju, 2008). Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Serbo-Croatian are my own. 32. Ibid., 10. 33. Ibid., 10. 34. Ibid., 10. 35. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2001 (1961)), 268. 36. A specific form of community theatre that she developed in the 1980s within the New Sensitivity movement in Skadarlija Street in Belgrade, based around the local brewery that New Sensitivity used for theatre projects. 37.  “Zevse, da ne kasnimo odavno svi? Il pozorište ne razume više ni bogove?” Jevremović, Pozorište kao stvaranje sveta, 302. 38. Jevremović, Pozorište kao stvaranje sveta, 306–307. 39. Sontag, Aids and Its Metaphors, 1988. 40. Jonathan P. Vickery and Mechtild Manus, eds., The Art of the Multitude: Jochen Gerz—Participation and the European Experience (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2016).

Works Cited Assmann, Aleida, and Sebastian Conrad, eds. Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, 2010. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel). Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press, 1979. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

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———. “Seven Types of Forgetting.” Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 59–71. Ćurgus, Velimir Kazimir. Deset godina protiv: građani Srbije u borbi za demokratiju i otvoreno društvo, 1991–2001. Belgrade: Medija centar, 2001. Dragićević Šešić, Milena. “Autoritarni sistem, autonomija medija i civilno društvo.” In Potisnuto civilno društvo, edited by Vukašin Pavlović. Belgrade: Eko centar, 1995. ———. “B-92 urbani radio–politika, alternativa, rok… I deo: Istorija burnih vremena.” Zbornik Fakulteta dramskih umetnosti 1, no. 1 (1997): 352–372. ———. “Borders and Maps in Contemporary Yugoslav Art.” In Redefining Cultural Identities, edited by Nada Švob Đokić. Zagreb: Institute for International Relations, 2001. ———. “Interkulturna medijacija–delovati različito u vremenu plime jednoumlja.” Foreword to Balada o devojačkom odelu, by Zorica Jevremović, 110–127. Belgrade: Dosije, 2006. ———. “Teatralizacija istorije ili put u budućnost: dramsko delo Zorice Jevremović.” Kultura 41, no. 124 (2009): 209–220. Dragićević Šešić, Milena, and Milena Stefanović. “Trauma in the Institutional Memory—Tactics and Narratives of Oblivion.” Paper presented at the 22nd ENCATC Annual Conference, Brno, Czech Republic, September 2014. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2001 (1961). Gluhovic, Milija. Performing European Memories: Trauma, Ethics, Politics. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963. Jevremović, Zorica. Pozorište kao stvaranje sveta. Belgrade: FDU (Institut za pozorište, film, radio i televiziju), 2008. Jovićević, Aleksandra. “Milošević i njegovi savremenici.” Teatron 27, no. 119 (2002): 116–117. ———. “Trenutak srećnog samozaborava: pozorište u Srbiji 1990–2000, I deo– Društvena stvarnost i beogradska pozorišta.” Teatron 27, no. 118 (2002): 42–49. Klaić, Dragan. Exercise in Exile, the Reshaping of an Expat at the Ikea-Table. Amsterdam: Cossee, 2004. Lukić, Darko. Uvod u primijenjeno kazalište. Zagreb: Leykam International, 2016. Milohnić, Aldo. “Artivism.” Maska 12, no. 1–2 (2005): 15–25. Pavićević, Borka. “Kratka istorija kulturnog trovanja.” Vreme, December 19, 2013. Prentki, Tim, and Sheila Preston. The Applied Theatre Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.

198  M. DRAGIĆEVIĆ ŠEŠIĆ Sokhi-Bulley, Bal. “Governmentality: Notes on the Thought of Michel Foucault.” Critical Legal Thinking. http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/ 12/02/governmentality-notes-thought-michel-foucault (accessed April 24, 2017). Sontag, Susan. Illness As Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. ———. Aids and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. Vickery, Jonathan P., and Mechtild Manus, eds. The Art of the Multitude: Jochen Gerz—Participation and the European Experience. Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2016.

Theatre of Diversity and Avant-Garde in Late Socialist Yugoslavia and Beyond: Paradoxes of the Disintegration and Cultural Subversion Ana Dević

Introduction This study aims to reconstruct the work of the KPGT theatre group1 as well as to analyze the challenges of this avant-garde theatre ­endeavour facing social and political context of war and its aftermath. KPGT, founded in the late 1970s in Ljubljana but being active across the territory of Yugoslavia until the 1990s, was a case of political ­theatre, critical of the crisis of socialism in the country and, notably, the ­nationalistic currents emerging in its politics. The study departs from several sources that empirically document the KPGT’s significance. The documentary-diary book by KPGT collaborator Dragan Klaić, professor of dramaturgy and cultural policies, is relevant, as it explains the links between KPGT’s activist and aesthetic raisons A. Dević (*)  Senior Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the KU-University of Leuven, Louvain, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_12

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d’être and its pan-Yugoslav multiethnic character.2 In Irena Šentevska’s important text on KPGT as “liberated territory,” the emphasis is on a unique and contradictory search for artistic autonomy that utilized and opposed the boundaries of institutional state-funded theatre, while pursuing a nomadic style of theatre collectivity.3 Filip Mladenović takes the case of KPGT primarily as an innovative form of stage direction integrating ballet and music in its approach to contemporary Yugoslav and classical drama. KPGT’s main targets were the political taboos of socialist Yugoslavia, while its goal was to expose the betrayal of the tenets of the Communist Revolution.4 All three stated authors, in different manners and degrees, explain the “material” that this Yugoslav ­alternative theatre processed and address three crucial concepts: cultural and political institutions that subsidized but also hampered KPGT’s work; the ideology of Yugoslav socialism, worn-out and dissipated from within; and everyday life in Yugoslavia, open to global cultural currents and featuring multi- and trans-ethnic identities.5 The work of Tomaž Toporišič is especially inspiring in terms of its theoretical and methodological cues for analyzing the tactics of p ­ ­olitical and politicized theatre.6 His analysis posits a disconcerting post-­ideological condition in contemporary theatre. Following Herbert Blau and ­ Hans-Thies Lehmann, he goes beyond the transformation of the Brechtian critique of bourgeois theatre and establishes the notion of postdramatic theatre, where art must continuously aim for and deconstruct the political.7 When we consider the work of the KPGT theatre—as an example of a theatre that “searched for itself ” through novel forms of aesthetics and an “obsession” with a leftist critique of the socialist revolution—we must admit, in retrospect, that their quest may have been misguided. This hindsight comes from the post-festum knowledge of the ways in which the Yugoslav state and society ceased to exist—through civil war violence, which was only marginally resisted by civil society. I take the deconstructionist method that the above authors propose as a warning that a utopian and marginalized condition of postmodern (postdramatic) arts does not guarantee a correct diagnosis of political conflicts or civil society resistance. The method I am using here is multi-sited: the chosen texts are from different time periods, made to encounter and conflict with one another, also exposing the (precarious) work of memory. My key sources are media reports and theatre journals, such as Scena [Stage],8 Teatron, and the online archive of newspaper texts about KPGT published since the late 1970s.

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KPGT as an Eventful History of Political Theatre Although after 1948, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia had denounced the institutions of censorship, previously copied from the Soviet Union, the onset of economic and political crisis in the early 1960s and the wave of student protests condemning corruption among the communist elites made the Yugoslav cultural scene a target of renewed political control. The Party did not intervene directly in decision-making processes in cultural institutions. It was now the duty of the “cultural commissions” and directors in publishing houses, cinema and theatre companies to react to “problematic” works and “signals” received from local Party headquarters.9 An anecdotal example of this less-than-formal censorship is the case of the premiere of Topla greda [Greenhouse] by Marjan Rožanc in Ljubljana in 1964, which was interrupted by a group of workers who had been bussed in from an industrial plant, shouting to the author: “Go and milk cows!”10 “Internal” censorship could also be conducted in such a way that the top management of a theatre would call an unwelcome play “weak in a literary sense.” Ljubiša Ristić and Dušan Jovanović’s first significant collaborations came from their growing up together as artists in Ljubljana. Ristić’s 1976 staging of Dušan Jovanović’s text Igrajte tumor v glavi in onesnaženje zraka [Play Tumor in the Head, or Air Pollution] in Celje linked the crisis of the wider society with the crisis in theatre itself. The play is about the rebellion of actors who expel their t­raditionalist colleagues from the theatre building, where a journalist and police ­ inspector are sent to investigate the conflict. The “avant-gardists” ­barricaded in their theatre soon fall victim to the pressures and conflicts from within, becoming exposed to mental control and violence from inside their “liberated” territory. With his next play to be directed by Ristić, Osvoboditev Skopja [The Liberation of Skopje], Dušan Jovanović attacked the mythologization of certain aspects of the Antifascist Struggle (as the Second World War was called in Yugoslavia). The plot concerns the last days of the fascist occupation of Skopje, in which ordinary people await the return of their Communist Partisan family members, while some strike deals with German officers in order to survive or rescue others. Apart from d ­ ealing with taboo topics of the Second World War, the attractiveness of the ­performance lay in a novel rendering of folk music by Leb i sol, a famous Yugoslav rock band, and the use of urban residential spaces as stages.

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Ristić staged Osvoboditev Skopja in the Center for Cultural Activities of the Union of Socialist Youth in Zagreb in 1978. The decision to stage the play in a government-funded center was part of a growing trend of “independent productions” seeking facilities, such as student cultural centers, that were under less control “from above,” taking fewer chances of being rejected (in state theatres, directors could be instructed “from above.”)11 On the other hand, many youth cultural centers, which had fallen into bad shape by the 1970s, found new purpose and benefits in such collaborations, as they could garner funds from ticket sales and from opening cafés and bookstores under their roof.12 Following the success of Osvoboditev Skopja, at the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF) and Sterijino Pozorje in Novi Sad, the two main Yugoslav festivals, Ljubiša Ristić took on the task of directing Missa in A Minor in the Slovenian Youth Theatre in Ljubljana, based on the novel A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by the renowned writer Danilo Kiš. At the time, Kiš was undergoing an attack by the literary establishment, under accusation of plagiarizing the novel. The main cause of Kiš’s persecution was his opening of another taboo topic: the purges of intellectuals in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and the latent anti-Semitism that accompanied them. While it may seem that after the Tito-Stalin split such topics would be welcome in Yugoslavia, the League of Communists took a conservative turn at the time. Kiš’s novel carried a universal message about the perversion of communist justice in all socialist states. Diplomatic relations with the USSR also played a role: after seeing Missa at the Sterijino Pozorje festival, the Soviet culture attaché cancelled the participation of a theatre ensemble from Riga at BITEF in Belgrade. As Heinz Kluncker reported in Theater Heute in 1982, the power of Missa lay primarily in its linking of the biography of a persecuted ex-­ revolutionary with the grand narrative of the Revolution, opening a tomb in which lay the betrayed ideals of all communist revolutionaries. One of the striking ways of presenting the communist revolutionary movement was the play’s multilingualism: Lenin spoke Russian, Clara Zetkin German; texts were authored by Mikhail Bakunin and Leon Trotsky, with appearances by Thomas Mann, Marlene Dietrich and Boris Pasternak. While Missa created an uproar at two major theatre festivals due to its fragmented expressionist style accentuated by visual and sound effects (“neo-baroque,” in Ristić’s words), the veteran of Yugoslav theatre juries, Slovenian critic Josip Vidmar, called Ristić (and Jovanović) “cultural terrorists.”13 The bulk of other critics, though, praised the

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play for its postmodern innovations in epic language and the framing of political taboos in socialist states (Fig. 1). Next came a new collaboration with Dušan Jovanović: his drama Karamazovi [Karamazovs] was a powerful dissection of another taboo topic, the post-1948 purges in socialist Yugoslavia. The premiere in 1981 marked the first appearance of the name KPGT on the play’s poster. The Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia formed an “ideological commission” to “consult” the KPGT about its intent to premiere Karamazovs across Yugoslavia. The Commission’s plan to use a soft approach in persuading Ristić to give up on the staging of the play was unsuccessful.14 The performance of Karamazovs in the National Theatre in Belgrade was, however, banned, i.e., it was rejected by the theatre authorities. Ironically, the publicity generated by these cases of censorship (nuanced, as they came from local centers of power) hindered, at the time, a thorough discussion of the troubled links between revolutionary socialism and the Second World War in Yugoslavia: The role of terror in the transition from the broken utopia to a reconstituted ideology was mainly forgotten in the debates about Karamazovs after the play was banned in the National Theatre in Belgrade.15

The next phase of KPGT was marked by an unexpected move—to an institutional theatre. In 1985, Ristić and Nada Kokotović, his partner and creator of “choreodrama” in Yugoslavia (one of the trademarks of KPGT plays) accepted to head the National Theatre in Subotica, a city in the Province of Vojvodina inhabited by a large Hungarian minority. The decision to offer the directorial post to the enfant terrible of Yugoslav theatre was a plan by local politicians to save the two drama ensembles—Hungarian and Serbian—which were both in a prolonged state of stagnation. Performances in Subotica spanned vast spaces, “occupying” the city center, the surrounding lakes, and revitalizing the decrepit beach buildings.16 In 1988, Ristić and Kokotović accepted directorial positions in the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad. The Subotica-Novi Sad theatre machine then initiated the YU-Fest festival initiative, a pan-Yugoslav network of theatre festival production teams, active during the summer months in several attractive locations. The idea behind these initiatives was that the concept of city-theatres would strengthen the multicultural cultural fabric, while attracting support from municipal authorities interested in touristic development.

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Fig. 1  The Stage of Political Drama, the cast of Missa in A minor on the cover of the prestigious NIN weekly magazine (Belgrade), June 21, 1981 (Photo courtesy of NIN magazine)

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KPGT as “Yugoslavia” in Serbia: The State of Exiles 1991 was the year in which the KPGT team fell apart, along with Yugoslavia. Several of the KPGT founding members emigrated; other collaborators went into internal exile, opposing nationalist politics. Ljubiša Ristić remained in Subotica until 1995, when the city authorities refused to renew his contract. The dispersal of the KPGT members proceeded in several stages. The onset of the war in Croatia prompted the departure of Ristić’s long-time partner Nada Kokotović, leaving the indelible mark of her choreographic method and the feminist contents of the plays she directed. Her last effort in the KPGT was the International Festival of Choreodrama and Dance Theatre, fatefully titled Emergency Exit. Kokotović settled in Cologne, founding the TKO Theatre in 1995, together with Nedjo Osman, another KPGT exile, formerly with the Roma Theatre Pralipe. Dragan Klaić left his Belgrade professorial post, emigrating to Amsterdam, where he headed the Netherlands Theatre Institute. The celebrated actor Rade Šerbedžija left Subotica, also feeling unwelcome in his native Croatia, and moved, first, to London, and then to Los Angeles. Haris Pašović, the multiple award-winning young director, left Subotica and joined Dragan Klaić in Amsterdam around the time of the beginning of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but, growing increasingly anxious over the siege of his native Sarajevo, succeeded in entering the city under shelling in early 1993. By mid-1992, KPGT was left in the hands of only one of its founders, Ristić, building a new cohort of actors and directors, some still students. The 1991–1992 theatre season of KPGT was dedicated to the plays based on Kiš’s texts, which were the trademark of the YU-Fest festival, running in Subotica, Belgrade and Novi Sad. In the atmosphere of major theatre festivals in Serbia being abandoned by participants from Slovenia and Croatia, and ethno-nationalist war-mongering, the decision to revive Missa in A Minor and stage four new plays based on Kiš was considered an act of antiwar and pro-Yugoslav engagement.17 Just two days before the start of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in April 1992, KPGT delivered the premiere of Ubu Roi, directed by Haris Pašović in a rundown courtyard in Subotica. Alfred Jarry’s text was inhabited by the characters of contemporary Yugoslavia, social marginals of all ethnicities, in an atmosphere of drunkenness, amnesia, rage, kitsch music, and violent nationalist messages induced by omnipresent media. The success of the play was intensified by Pašović’s decision to

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leave Serbia after the premiere, and the poignant messages of support that the Ubu team sent to their director, while nationalist journalists called Pašović a “Muslim patriot.”18 Further travails of Ubu continued, when in the fall of 1992 Ristić decided, against Pašović’s will, to play it at the BITEF festival, which had just become the subject of international sanctions against Serbia. This was the first sign of strong disagreements between Ristić and his (now former) collaborators over the question of whether one could run the KPGT theatre in Serbia, whose authorities played a decisive role in the wartime violence. When the news of the horrific ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims started to reach Belgrade in the summer of 1992, this question became inescapable for most of KPGT’s long-time participants, but not for Ristić. Borka Pavićević, along with many public figures from the humanities, found a solution in internal exile, starting the Center for Cultural Decontamination, an informal activist space and non-governmental organization funded by the Open Society Foundations (George Soros’ foundation). While several renowned theater critics and dramaturgists refused to take part in the BITEF-under-Sanctions, arguing that the festival would contribute to a false picture of “life as usual” in Serbia, thereby legitimizing Milošević’s regime,19 the bulletins of the ‘92 BITEF are a testimony to the ambivalence of some about whether or not to participate. Borka Pavićević and Mair Musafija wrote poignant pieces in defense of Haris Pašovic’s decision to boycott BITEF and the impossibility of maintaining theatre when one’s “life space is disappearing.”20 The disappearance of the cultural-cum-political space was further illustrated by the fact that BITEF ‘92, against its very mission, hosted only plays from Serbia: seven out of the ten selected were those of KPGT and the Subotica National Theatre. Ristić’s Battle of Kosovo, previously premiered at the Palić Lake in 1989, was brought to the terraces of the Kalemegdan fortress (Illustration 2.4.1). The imposing spectacle, set above two rivers, consisted of a huge ensemble, with a choir performing fine variations on medieval music composed by the talented Gabor Lengyel (Fig. 2). While the 1989 premiere was hailed by many as a “politically incorrect” marking of the sixth centenary of the mythical battle, in discord with the nationalist speeches of Slobodan Milošević, the 1992 Battle of Kosovo took place in an entirely different atmosphere. Most of Ristić’s old collaborators, KPGT co-founders, were long gone, and the milieu of theatre critics and audiences had changed as well. The 1992 performance

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Fig. 2  Boj na Kosovu [The battle of Kosovo], National Theatre Subotica, 1989. Picture from performance on September 18, 1992 performed at the Kalemegdan Fortress, Belgrade (Photo courtesy of BITEF theatre)

was the point when the Belgrade nationalist mainstream was both shocked by the fact that Ristić dared to touch the “sacred” epic theme (still considering him a “communist” enfant terrible), and the point when they started to recognize him as one of their own.21 The gap between the old core of KPGT, on one side, and Ristić with his new troupe on the other, widened throughout 1993. The next sequence of YU-Fest, called the Golden Age, was, as several observers commented, a rather cynical naming in the atmosphere of international isolation, mass impoverishment, and forced war mobilization. In the words of Ristić, however, the decision to dedicate the ‘93 KPGT season to the Spanish Golden Age was motivated by a desire to accentuate the contrast between the violent colonization of the “New World” and the theatrical renaissance of Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca, directed by young directors of the KPGT, Saša Gabrić and Kokan Mladenović. A further fascination with this theme

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was Ristić’s direction of Kristofor Kolumbo [Christopher Columbus], a play by Miroslav Krleža, whom Ristić considered an inspiring source of Yugoslavism and socialist progress (in the play, Columbus is tortured by his ship crew, who fail to understand the purpose of his heading to the unknown),22 and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, a reminder of the Spanish Reconquista and the exodus of Muslims and Jews. Arguably, the last KPGT output that was a reminder of the bygone age was Ristić’s 1994 staging of Antigone, written two years earlier by Dušan Jovanović, depicting the siege of Thebes as a war between two brothers, neither of whom can become a victor. Under the ruins of the city, accompanied by loud refrains of a song by the most popular band from Sarajevo, there emerges Antigone, the Phoenician refugee, wrapped in bandages from head to toe. The allusion to the real-life siege of Sarajevo was unmistakable. Following the performance of Antigone at the 1994 BITEF festival, Borka Pavićević stated that the performance was “a great moment for this city,” and that it was “a civic play, a play for peace.”23 For the occasion of its performance at BITEF, Dušan Jovanović came to Belgrade from Ljubljana, visiting (for the last time?) his longtime friend Ristić in the role of his stage collaborator. The staging of Antigone at BITEF took place in Šećerana, a dilapidated sugar mill in the industrial zone of Belgrade, a new temporary theatre zone, discovered and occupied by Ristić and the refurbished KPGT. It would soon become apparent that the prospect of moving to Šećerana was assisted by a new patron whose concern for KPGT seemed as unfathomable as the possibility of Ristić accepting their assistance. By 1995, the Subotica municipal leaders, i.e., the Alliance of Vojvodinian Hungarians, managed to oust Ristić from the National Theatre, arguing that he had marginalized Hungarian language drama and ruined the theatre interiors. For a while, the move from Subotica was on hold, as Ristić became engaged in an international collaboration, reviving Jovanović’s celebrated Liberation of Skopje at the London Riverside Studios, under the patronage of Vanessa Redgrave, with Rade Šerbedžija playing the leading role as in the original staging. Vanessa and Corin Redgrave’s initiative came as part of the project of marking the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation from fascism in Europe, drawing the attention of the wider public to the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Vanessa Redgrave also invited Haris Pašović, who came with his troupe from the besieged Sarajevo, against much adversity. Both ensembles were supposed to give performances at the beginning of May 1995. However, Pašović’s troupe

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cancelled their performance for two reasons. The first was that Sarajevo was ferociously shelled on the day the performance was scheduled, leaving at least three civilians dead. The second was that the troupe refused to participate in the festival together with a theatre director who was “a party leader in a fascist state.”24 By the end of 1994, as was becoming clear from the rumors surrounding KPGT’s move to the Šećerana buildings in Belgrade, Ljubiša Ristić acquired a new comrade (and patron)—Mirjana Marković, Slobodan Milošević’s wife. As Ristić would explain later, Mirjana Marković invited him, as a “known leftist intellectual,” to become the president of her new political party, the Yugoslav United Left (YUL). He was, in his own words, delighted to accept the offer, also becoming the YUL’s head of the committee for foreign relations. This “left” party gathered together mainly the Serbian new rich, with every third YUL member being the owner or executive of a firm, whose wealth had been made in the early 1990s—the years in which Serbia waged wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and was under international sanctions. Under the guard of the ruling Socialist Party of Serbia, the profits of the new rich were generated by smuggling monetary funds (multiplied through artificially-held foreign exchange rates, valid for “patriotic” tycoons only), derived from numerous illegal and invisible privatizations of state firms to friendly foreign destinations. The YUL had no significant electorate, and was considered a pet project of Milošević. What shocked the long-time collaborators and associates of Ristić was his insistence that he could find the ideals of genuine socialist revolution and multiculturalism in the YUL “movement”: I am the president of YUL, which is a movement of 26 parties, organizations, etc. Most of them are left-wing;… They (YUL) came to me … I am an independent intellectual … Dr. Mira Marković is the wife of the Serbian president, sociology professor… We have no connection to the SPS (Serbian Socialist Party).25

Not all from the local theatre milieu were appalled: Jovan Ćirilov, the director of the BITEF festival, recalls that when Ristić was appointed the president of the BITEF Council in 1995 by the Belgrade city secretariat for culture (after becoming the president of YUL), the festival no longer had to worry about funding or interventions in its selection of plays.26 Despite the fact that he claimed the YUL was unaffiliated to Milošević’s SPS, Ristić also asserted that his and Marković’s engagement

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would contribute to bringing peace to Bosnia-Herzegovina, with their positive influence on the ruling party (in reality, several prominent ­members of Milošević’s party had also joined the YUL or became its vocal supporters)27: Moreover, YUL, in fact, helped other parties, including the SPS, to stop being torn between two positions vis-à-vis the war … And Milošević told (Radovan Karadžić) a … clear truth: “Yugoslavia gave you weapons to defend yourself, not to occupy. Who gave you the right to ethnically cleanse territories, and why are you surprised now that it is being paid in kind to you?”28

Without disclosing whose generous decision it was that allowed KPGT to “occupy” the sugar mill buildings after being expelled from Subotica, Ristić announced that a concession was made to start building a vast new cultural center “from scratch”: Šećerana will, hence, grow into a large cultural center, to serve for the following fifty years. … The role played for many years in the culture life of Belgrade by the Kolarac People’s University Building will now be played by Šećerana … for the next fifty years.29

Despite Ristić’s numerous statements asserting that the refurbishing of the Šećerana (or International Arts Centre, as it would later be called) was going to be mostly a self-financed enterprise, involving fund-raising and corporate contributions, he admitted in 1997 that annual donations from the state amounted to close to one million German marks (about half a million Euro).30 Major works on the preparation of the grounds, cleaning, and rebuilding of the vast spaces took almost three years. By mid-1995, KPGT had already moved to Šećerana; in the same year, the YU-Fest was staged in new premises. Between 1995 and 1999, however, there was a sharp decline in the number of staged performances, with quite a few revivals of the old ones. To some extent, this was due to the fact that much work had to be done in order to make industrial spaces workable for theatre. The association of Ljubiša Ristić with Mirjana Marković and her political party contributed to a growing odium in theatrical circles, resulting in KPGT receiving some modest attention in the press. The two new plays that received some publicity prior to the grand opening of Šećerana in 1999 were Brecht’s Drums in the Night staged by Saša Gabrić and Assimil, an international collaboration between Ristić and the Dutch theatre Dogtroep.

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The absence of new theatrical releases until 1999 was compensated, to some extent, by a barrage of interviews that Ljubiša Ristić gave to the regime-friendly media, mixing detailed elaborations about construction works in Šećerana with his ideas about the international position of Serbia and his unchanging leftist and Yugoslav orientations. After serving for one year as the president of the YUL, Ristić explained that his opinion about the party was even more positive than before joining: Our leadership is getting better, too, since those who joined the movement for their own career advancement are leaving it … YUL is not the party of the wealthiest, but it is also not against private property. On the contrary, the parties who are fighting to get the wealthiest people are going crazy because a few leftists were able to become successful in their business.31

In 1996, Ristić’s staging of a play based on Danilo Kiš’s poem Pesnik revolucije na predsedničkom brodu [The Poet of the Revolution on the President’s Ship] caused an outrage and an (unsuccessful) attempt by Mirjana Miočinović, responsible for the literary legacy of Kiš, to forbid Ristić to use Kiš’s name, stating that “Ristić inflicts moral damage on the writer.”32 Ristić, a few years later, commented melancholically that Pesnik (his last play to be invited to BITEF) was already well under way with its rehearsals when he realized that “Mira Miočinović suddenly decided to hate me, and asked the authorities to ban the play like in the ‘good old times.’ Democratic Stalinists: a new phenomenon.”33 The grand opening of the International Arts Center KPGT took place in the summer of 1999, after the end of the NATO bombing against Serbia. The moment of rejoicing in Serbian victimhood gave the opening of the Center a flair of spiteful triumph: in a country exhausted by a decade of wars, economic sanctions and spiralling inflation, it was possible to fund a lavishly decorated space, with four stages, a glass greenhouse foyer with tropical plants, two restaurants and a large pool! The first plays staged in the new KPGT Center are memorable due to the choice of texts and their distinct political framing. During the two-month NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, Peter Handke, a celebrated Austrian writer, visited Serbia in protest against the bombing. Subsequently, he wrote a book titled A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, in which he accused Western media of being biased against the Serbs, whom he, paradoxically, framed as a monolithic ethnic category, in the same vein as the media he reproached. While the book was warmly

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received and celebrated by the bulk of Serbian critics, Handke’s decision to give a eulogy at Slobodan Milošević’s funeral in 2006 did not score him additional points. Among several of Handke’s texts that were staged by the KPGT younger cohort, I will mention only Jug Radivojević’s 1999 Zimsko putovanje do reke [A Journey to the Rivers] (based on Handke’s Justice for Serbia). It would be impossible to evoke the Handke-Fest performances at any substantial length, as the number of reviews is stunningly scarce. What the few critics chose to write is focused more on “what Handke likes about us,” and what the director Radivojević thinks about the book, than about the direction and acting. The actors were asked to create their characters—people from the margins, e.g., street wanderers—from the excerpts of the book, resulting in a succession of recitations. What all critics noted was an unintended dark irony in this prayer-plea: “God, make our theatre be the best, and don’t let them mix us with politics.”34 Rather than taking the play and text at face value, some local critics noted that the audiences could only think of the political dimensions of the Šećerana’s luxurious edifice. During the same inaugural season, Ljubiša Ristić directed Handke’s celebrated play from the 1960s, Offending the Audience, one of the few new pieces that he had directed himself since the late 1990s. The change of the political regime in the fall of 2000 cut short the plans for further refurbishing the Šećerana KPGT. Subsequently, Ristić was abandoned by the ballet troupe and several team members. The shortage of funds resulted in long breaks between performances, and more revivals of old plays. The downfall of Slobodan Milošević and the fleeing of Mirjana Marković to Russia to escape prosecution had a major impact on the contents of the “geopolitical” interviews that Ristić frequently delivers to the press (increasingly, also to tabloids). In his view, the odium that he has been exposed to since 2000 is not due to his association with the defeated political regime, whose leaders were convicted of major war crimes and large-scale embezzlement of public funds. Ristić deems, first, that the role of local political elites in the wars of the 1990s was “miniscule” in comparison to those played by Germany, the U.S., Britain, or Russia, who forced Yugoslavs to start the war.35 He reckons that the undeserved loathing he receives from his former collaborators is due to his uncompromising leftist convictions, loyalty to the “Yugoslav cultural space” and refusal to receive funding from the ‘West’ (accusing his former friend Borka Pavićević of serving George Soros, who “likes to pick ex-leftists.”)36

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Current Farewells to the Legendary Missa (in Lieu of Conclusions) Would it be correct to look at the conceptions of the Communist Revolution and the Left, as they were presented in the performances of the early KPGT, in order to explain the transformation of Ristić and his pact with the Serbian establishment? Perhaps, we should, rather, look at the meanings of the “left” in the practice of KPGT’s theatre. Between the late 1970s and 1991, KPGT brought together a large team of co-believers (dramaturgists, critics, stage directors, producers, actors, musicians) whose main idea of the “left” was creating and working in a sort of commune, away from the limitations of state theatres. When the team fell apart in 1991–1992, and Ljubiša Ristić was left virtually alone, the collective ethos of KPGT was irreversibly changed: it would be, hence, erroneous to seek the roots of Ristić’s ideological switch in the earlier ideas that drove and could be detected in his performances—because their outcomes were collective endeavors. It is much more likely to posit that Ristić’s own ideas of socialism and Yugoslavia were changed in the early 1990s, while the attitude toward the really existing establishment stayed the same. An insightful short diagnosis of the Ristić turncoat phenomenon came from Dragan Klaić, one of the ex-KPGT exiles. He argues that Ristić undertook [A] long march through the institutions [which] was a strategy of the 1968 generation, a crucial option of my generation, after an exhausted euphoria, provoked by a short-lived “rule of imagination,” and in relation to the efficacy of the mechanisms of repressive tolerance, which were used in both capitalism and socialism in order to stifle the contesting energy of the young.37

Klaić shows that Ristić’s KPGT creation was less a protest against than a search for an institutional “home.” Hence, theatrical and political radicalism were regularly accompanied by projects to revitalize and utilize material objects, and force the political establishment to succumb to such demands. While Ristić was by no means motivated by goals of his own material enrichment, he sought to come close to power points and twist their rules to support innovative theatre schemes. If we accept this judgment about Ristić’s reasons for his (but he was not alone!) long nomadic journey, i.e., his search for a giant

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theatre space that was absolutely free, it is disheartening to recall that the majority of critics, collaborators, and devoted audiences have identified (with) KPGT as a heroic and ultimately endless quest for theatrical expression that “grew out of concrete spaces which the authors had fought for: courtyards surrounding ramshackle houses, theatre skeletons destroyed in fire, circus tents, sand dunes, lake strands, the dilapidated Subotica synagogue…”38 Dragan Klaić proposed that it would be of utmost importance to make a study of the impact of KPGT in all corners of the post-Yugoslav region. In 2015, four years after Klaić’s passing, Oliver Frljić, a young Croatian director staged a play titled Kompleks Ristić [The Complex Ristić] in the Slovenian Youth Theatre, the first site of the 1980 Missa in A Minor. The staging of the play was accompanied by a compilation of short essays by post-Yugoslav dramaturgists and theatre historians. Rok Vevar, a Slovenian literature and theatre theorist, made a comparison between KPGT’s international endeavors in the context of the deepening Yugoslav crisis and the potential of the arts in the neoliberal post-socialist condition: The aesthetic diversification which … in the 1970s was considered as one of the most prominent elements of the theatre crisis, was embodied in superior performances, and the more the political crisis began to gnaw the federative structure and led it towards its demise, the more the international successes of the KPGT, the Mladinsko and the new theatre generations appeared … Today, only those who managed to get their work included in the museums of contemporary visual arts remain visible internationally.39

The verdict of Olga Dimitrijević and Ana Vilenica pertains to the 1990s transformation: With the KPGT, directing became the formatting of a concrete political space into which it entered in the nineties, at the price of exiting from engaged theatre, and has, in all its grotesque image, transformed into its ideological opposite, from revolution into reaction, from the left into the right.40

As a farewell of sorts, Draga Potočnjak, the actress who played in both the original 1980 Missa in A Minor and in the 2015 Complex Ristić, announces: “(T)he performance Kompleks Ristić, which I call Missa for

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Yugoslavia, is no longer played in a minor key. Or a major key. It has been left without tonality.”41

Notes











1.  The name Kazalište Pozorište Gledališče Teatar (KPGT) uses all the forms of the word theatre that exist in the Southern Slavic languages that were spoken in Yugoslavia: Croatian kazalište–kazati (to tell); Serbian pozorište–pozorje (place of happening); Slovenian gledališče–gledati (to see), and Macedonian teatar. 2. See Dragan Klaić, Teatar razlike (Novi Sad: Sterijino Pozorje, 1989). 3. See Irena Šentevska, “KPGT ili Pozorište kao ‘oslobođena teritorija’,” Jugolink: Pregled postjugoslovenskih istraživanja 3, no. 1 (2013). 4. See Filip Mladenović, “Alternativno pozorište u Jugoslaviji: KPGT–studija slučaja,” Kultura, no. 93 (1996): 82–94. 5. See Ana Dević, “Ethnonationalism, Politics, and the Intellectuals: The Case of Yugoslavia,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 11, no. 3 (1998): 375–409, and Ana Dević, “What Nationalism Has Buried: Powerlessness, Culture, and Discontent in Late Yugoslav Socialism,” in Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav Socialism, eds. Paul Stubbs, Igor Duda and Rory Archer (Aldershot and London: Ashgate, 2016), 21–37. 6. Tomaž Toporišič, “Taktike političkog i politizovanog pozorišta druge polovine XX stoleća,” Scena 45, no. 1–2 (2009): 251–265. 7.  See Herbert Blau, To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), and Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 8. The editors of Scena, the journal of the Sterijino Pozorje Festival [Sterija’s Stage], dedicated a hefty 2006 issue, titled “Deleted from Memory?”, to Ljubiša Ristić. For half a century in Yugoslavia, the Pozorje publishing house, attached to the most prestigious theatre festival, held in Novi Sad, remained among the richest repositories of texts and photographs pertaining to the Yugoslav theatre scene. 9. On censorship in Yugoslavia as a complex and opaque process, see Ana Dević, “Fringe Antinationalisms: Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony in Cinema,” in Towards Open Regionalism in South East Europe, eds. Paul Stubbs and Christophe Solioz (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012), 191–209. 10. Tomaž Toporišič, “Taktike političkog i politizovanog pozorišta druge polovine XX stoleća,” 253. 11. Dragan Klaić, Teatar razlike, 70–73. 12.  What is meant here by “state-funding” refers to a peculiar form of decision-making in the institutions that were called samoupravne interesne

216  A. DEVIĆ zajednice [self-management communities of interest], which worked on all levels (federal, republic, province) in Yugoslavia in the spheres of culture, science, and education. They collected and distributed funding received from local enterprises as a form of tax. Decision-making often worked in an opaque manner, vulnerable to clientelism and “pressures” from influential institutions, established artists and Party functionaries. 13. Tomaž Toporišič, “Estetske in politične (r)evolucije in (re)akcije kulturnega terorista,” Kompleks Ristić, Gledališki list SMG, no. 2 (2015): 24. 14.  Darko Hudelist, “Krleža je pet sati urlao na mene mašući štapom,” Globus, June 26, 2009. 15. Dragan Klaić, Teatar razlike, 52. 16. Ibid., 104–105. 17. In his last years (he died in 1989), Danilo Kiš wrote essays condemning the resurgence of nationalism, and stated that he may be “the last Yugoslav writer.” 18. Among the most vulgar comments on the “unsurprising” ethno-national loyalties of Haris Pašović and László Végel (novelist from Novi Sad) is the 1993 text by Slavica Lakičević, “O Laslu, Harisu i Borki,” published in Dani, March 31, 1993. 19. Jovan Ćirilov, BITEF director, defended the decision to run the Festival despite the sanctions, while Vladimir Stamenković, a renowned theatre critic and festival selector, held an opposing view and boycotted BITEF and Sterijino Pozorje throughout the 1990s. See Jovan Ćirilov, “Bitef pod sankcijama. Uprkos okolnostima,” Teatron 27, no. 118 (2002): 31–32, and Vladimir Stamenković, “Bitef pod sankcijama. Pravo pitanje,” Teatron 27, no. 118 (2002): 33–34. 20. Anja Suša, “Argumenti za i protiv,” Teatron 27, no. 118 (2002): 36–38. 21. Zorica Jevremović, “Pozorišne političke fabrike,” Republika, no. 468–469 (2010). http://www.republika.co.rs/468–469/20.html. 22. Ristić was influenced by Krleža in different ways. In the early 1970s, he was inspired by Georgij Paro’s use of fortress spaces in Dubrovnik for staging Krleža’s Aretej and Christopher Columbus (See Šentevska, “KPGT ili Pozorište kao ‘oslobođena teritorija’,” 2013). In his interviews, Ristić talks in length about his meetings with Krleža in the mid-1970s, discussing the plans to stage Vučjak [Wolfhound], and Pijana novembarska noć 1918 [The Drunken September Night of 1918] (the latter anticipates the travails of the state-building of Yugoslavia). According to Ristić, the two shared a devotion to Yugoslavism as a product of the revolutionary idea. Arguably, Ristić decided to direct Columbus in 1993 to underscore his ties to Krleža and Yugoslavism, i.e., KPGT’s apparently unchanging defense of political and cultural Yugoslavism (see Tamara Nikčević, “Moj obračun sa njima,” Vreme, June 14, 2012).

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23. M. Radošević, “Sarajevo i mit o Evropi,” Politika, September 19, 1994. 24. D. Simić, “Oslobođenje Skoplja u Londonu,” Politika, April 14, 1995. 25. Milan Stevanović, “Intervju: Ljubiša Ristić, prvak teatra i politike: Ne postoji jugoslovenska kultura,” Srpska anarhistička mreža, April 14, 1996. 26. Jovan Ćirilov, “Bitef pod sankcijama. Uprkos okolnostima,” 32. 27. Gordana Igrić, “‘Rotarijanci’ crvenog pokreta: Režija leve desnice,” AIM, April 7, 1995; Milivoje Glišić, “Predsedniku s ljubavlju.” NIN, July 18, 1997. 28. Svetlana Vasović, “Intervju: Ljubiša Ristić,” Srpska anarhistička mreža, January 14, 1996. 29. M. Đorđević, “Kulturni centar u šećerani,” Politika, August 17, 1995. 30. Nadja Keleri Andrejević, “Intervju: Mirotvorci, daleko vam lepa kuća,” Tabloid, August 13, 2015. 31. Jasmina Lekić, “Predsednik JUL-a: normalni i neobični,” NIN, February 16, 1996. 32. Slobodan Kostić, “Kiš na sceni KPGT-a: Estetsko iznad moralnog,” Vreme 479, March 11, 2000. 33. Ljubiša Ristić, “U potrazi za izgubljenim vremenom,” Večernje novosti, September 21, 2014. http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/kultura.71. html:510966-U-potrazi-za-izgubljenim-vremenom. 34. Aleksandar Milosavljević, “Punoća privida ili privid punoće,” Reporter, September 8, 1999. 35. Ljiljana Keković, “Intervju, Ljubiša Ristić. Služba je jedina domovina,” Ekspres.net, May 19, 2016. 36. Vukica Strugar, “Ljubiša Ristić: Zemlja izgubljenih iluzija,” Večernje novosti, April 20, 2013. 37. Dragan Klaić, “Dugi marš kroz institucije: varijanta Ristić,” Ljubiša Ristić, Deleted from Memory? Scena 42, no. 4 (2006): 16–25. 38. Ibid. 39. Rok Vevar, “Gonzo esej o kompleksu Ristić.” Kompleks Ristić, Gledališki list SMG, no. 2 (2015): 11. 40. Ana Vilenica, and Olga Dimitrijević, “Abstraktne resnice in konkretne laži,” Kompleks Ristić, Gledališki list SMG, no. 2 (2015): 28–30. 41. Draga Potočnjak, “Missa za Jugoslavijo, Komplex Ristić,” Gledališki list SMG, no. 2 (2015): 4–5.

Works

cited

Blau, Herbert. To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Ćirilov, Jovan. “Bitef pod sankcijama. Uprkos okolnostima.” Teatron 27, no. 118 (2002): 31–32.

218  A. DEVIĆ Dević, Ana. “Ethnonationalism, Politics, and the Intellectuals: The Case of Yugoslavia.” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 11, no. 3 (1998): 375–409. ———. “Fringe Antinationalisms: Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony in Cinema.” In Towards Open Regionalism in South East Europe, edited by Paul Stubbs and Christophe Solioz. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012, 191–209. ———. “What Nationalism Has Buried: Powerlessness, Culture, and Discontent in Late Yugoslav Socialism.” In Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav Socialism, edited by Paul Stubbs, Igor Duda, and Rory Archer. Aldershot and London: Ashgate, 2016, 21–37. Đorđević, M. “Kulturni centar u šećerani.” Politika, August 17, 1995. http://kpgtyu.org/pressarhiva/displayimage.php?album=823&pid= 6186#top_display_media. Glišić, Milivoje. “Predsedniku s ljubavlju.” NIN, July 18, 1997. http://www. nin.co.rs/arhiva/2429/3.html. Hudelist, Darko. “Krleža je pet sati urlao na mene mašući štapom.” Globus, June 26, 2009. http://kpgtyu.org/pressarhiva/displayimage. php?album=1013&pid=6633#top_display_media. Igrić, Gordana. “‘Rotarijanci’ crvenog pokreta: Režija leve desnice.” AIM, April 7, 1995. http://www.aimpress.ch/dyn/pubs/archive/data/199504/50407004-pubs-beo.htm. Jevremović, Zorica. “Pozorišne političke fabrike.” Republika, no. 468–469 (2010). http://www.republika.co.rs/468-469/20.html. Keković, Ljiljana. “Intervju, Ljubiša Ristić. Služba je jedina domovina.” Ekspres. net, May 19, 2016. https://www.ekspres.net/politika/intervju-ljubisa-risticsluzba-je-jedina-domovina. Keleri Andrejević, Nadja. “Intervju: Mirotvorci, daleko vam lepa kuća.” Tabloid, August 13, 2015. http://www.magazin-tabloid.com/casopis/ ?id=06&br=343&cl=33. Klaić, Dragan. Teatar razlike. Novi Sad: Sterijino Pozorje, 1989. ———. “Dugi marš kroz institucije: varijanta Ristić.” Ljubiša Ristić, Deleted from Memory? Scena 42, no. 4 (2006): 16–25. http://www.pozorje.org.rs/scena/ scena406/6.htm. Kostić, Slobodan. “Kiš na sceni KPGT-a: Estetsko iznad moralnog.” Vreme 479, March 11, 2000. http://www.vreme.com/arhiva_html/479/15.html. Lakičević, Slavica. “O Laslu, Harisu i Borki.” Dani, March 31, 1993. http://kpgtyu.org/pressarhiva/displayimage.php?album=1172&pid= 9961#top_display_media. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Lekić, Jasmina. “Predsednik JUL-a: normalni i neobični.” NIN, February 16, 1996. http://kpgtyu.org/pressarhiva/displayimage.php?album=837&pid= 6224#top_display_media.

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Milosavljević, Aleksandar. “Punoća privida ili privid punoće.” Reporter, September 8, 1999. http://kpgtyu.org/pressarhiva/displayimage.php?album=1235&pid= 10387#top_display_media. Mladenović, Filip. “Alternativno pozorište u Jugoslaviji: KPGT–studija slučaja.” Kultura, no. 93 (1996): 82–94. Nikčević, Tamara. “Moj obračun sa njima.” Vreme, June 14, 2012. http://www. vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=1058071. Potočnjak, Draga. “Missa za Jugoslavijo, Komplex Ristić.” Gledališki list SMG, no. 2 (2015): 4–5. Radošević, M. “Sarajevo i mit o Evropi.” Politika, September 19, 1994. http://kpgtyu.org/pressarhiva/displayimage.php?album=810&pid= 6147#top_display_media Ristić Ljubiša. “U potrazi za izgubljenim vremenom.” Večernje novosti, September 21, 2014. http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/kultura.71.html:510966U-potrazi-za-izgubljenim-vremenom. Šentevska, Irena. “KPGT ili Pozorište kao ‘oslobođena teritorija’.” Jugolink: Pregled postjugoslovenskih istraživanja 3, no. 1 (2013). Simić, D. “Oslobodjenje Skoplja u Londonu.” Politika, April 14, 1995. http://kpgtyu.org/pressarhiva/displayimage.php?album=823&pid= 6185#top_display_media. Stamenković, Vladimir. “Bitef pod sankcijama. Pravo pitanje.” Teatron 27, no. 118 (2002): 33–34. Stevanović, Milan. “Intervju: Ljubiša Ristić, prvak teatra i politike: Ne postoji jugoslovenska kultura.” Srpska anarhistička mreža, April 14, 1996. http:// www.yurope.com/zines/SAM/arhiva_2/0003.html. Strugar, Vukica. “Ljubiša Ristić: Zemlja izgubljenih iluzija.” Večernje novosti, April 20, 2013. http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/kultura.71.html:430428-LjubisaRistic-Zemlja-izgubljenih-iluzija. Suša, Anja. “Argumenti za i protiv.” Teatron 27, no. 118 (2002): 36–38. Toporišič, Tomaž. “Taktike političkog i politizovanog pozorišta druge polovine XX stoleća.” Scena 45, no. 1–2 (2009): 251–265. ———. “Estetske in politične (r)evolucije in (re)akcije kulturnega terorista.” Kompleks Ristić, Gledališki list SMG, no. 2 (2015): 24–26. Vasović, Svetlana. “Intervju: Ljubiša Ristić.” Srpska anarhistička mreža, January 14, 1996. http://www.yurope.com/zines/SAM/arhiva_2/0003.html. Vevar, Rok. “Gonzo esej o kompleksu Ristić.” Kompleks Ristić, Gledališki list SMG, no. 2 (2015): 11. Vilenica, Ana, and Olga Dimitrijević. “Abstraktne resnice in konkretne laži.” Kompleks Ristić, Gledališki list SMG, no. 2 (2015): 28–30.

Testimony Borut Šeparović Borut Šeparović

Director, Zagreb

Panel Discussion, Volkstheater/Volx Margareten, Vienna (November 19, 2015) In 1994 Montažstroj was performing in Germany and we met some people from KPGT Theatre from Serbia, who were also representing the region at this festival. I remember how uncomfortable we felt because we both thought the same thing: “Okay, these are those others. Are we allowed to speak to them?” Then in 1996 we again met people from Belgrade, at a drama festival in Atlanta. DAH theatre was there: if I remember well, it was a festival sponsored by the Open Society Foundations. They were telling me that we should come to Belgrade, to the BITEF festival, and I remember that a group of my co-workers were laughing. I talked to my mother, who is definitely not a nationalist, about this invitation and she said: “Come on, son, you don’t have to be the first.” Such episodes might explain the atmosphere we worked in.

B. Šeparović (*)  Montažstroj, Independent Theatre, Zagreb, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_13

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In Croatia there were some small pockets of resistance, but they were hardly visible. For me personally, institutional theatre at that time meant producing things that were boring and not relevant at all. Maybe you could not call it merely nationalistic, but definitely dreamy, and probably trying to be politically correct for that time and place. From my point of view, I thought that our engagement should mainly be an aesthetic one: we wanted to make a huge aesthetic difference, ­something like an aesthetic resistance. We sometimes did dance, and often we would end up in dance festivals; sometimes they would tell us that this was not dance, but movement, and very often we were not presented as a theatre company when touring abroad, although we were formed as such. I think going in this non-verbal direction with our performances was also some kind of a resistance to these logo-centric things that happened there during the war. Also, thinking internationally, you can communicate much better with such a non-verbal theatre form. We thought, if Croatia is a new country, we could start communicating internationally much easier in this, new way. In 1996 we were on tour in America, and we did a performance titled Everybody Goes to Disco, from Moscow to San Francisco in New York in the PS 122. There were three people in this show, two men and one woman. And in the announcement in the Village Voice the performers were ­presented as being a Serbian guy, a Croatian guy and a Muslim woman, which was not the case. This was a strategy. How do you want to attract an audience? An ensemble from Croatia had to refer to the war, even though our performance was about private landscapes which were torn apart—there was a lot of violence, and even some kind of ultra-violence, but it had nothing to do with the interpretation of the war itself. And I remember myself thinking, should I tell them this, that it’s not about that but it’s about how we feel? In 1995 I moved to the Netherlands. It was a combination of private motivations and this feeling that during that time in Croatia we couldn’t go anywhere with what we were doing. This feeling was quite decisive for my choosing to leave. Montažstroj would eventually get small grants from the Open Society Foundations, but we had literally no funding from the City Council of Zagreb or the Ministry of Culture. We were funded much more from abroad than from home. The group got tired. We had already been working for five years, and it was time to go further, so I think leaving was a logical reaction, at least for me.

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Speaking about the continuity of wartime: I think one of the best examples from my previous work in theatre is the play called Generation 1991–1995, performed in Zagreb Youth Theatre in 2010. What I consider to be very good about this performance is that it took place in Zagreb, in Belgrade and in Sarajevo during 2010 and 2011. The trick was that I was casting boys born in the period of the war and actually confronting them with history. For this audition, the boys were literally asked to bring their history books with them. And when they brought these books, the first thing that came up was that there are actually just a couple of words in them concerning the war (e.g. the war in Bosnia between the Croatian and Bosnian army forces was mentioned in just three sentences). And of course, there was nothing to learn in these books about the role of Croatia within this conflict. Our starting point was Boris Dežulović’s novel Jebo sad hiljadu dinara [Who Gives a Fuck About a Thousand Dinars Now], which we adapted for the stage and dealt with precisely this conflict. When we started to work together, in 2009, the youngest cast member was 14 years old: he was literally born on November 21, 1995 (the day of the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement). There were also two boys who were born in 1990. We worked together on this novel and we actually discussed a lot about what happened in the 1990s, what they were told about the war, who told them that, what they’ve learned from the media, etc. And of course, there were things that the boys had in common—boys like football, for example. So we were also playing with this “historical” football match between Croatia and Turkey in Vienna in 2008 during the European Football Championship which, in the Croatian media, was announced like “and now, 500 years after we defended Vienna against the Turks, we fight once again.” I used this because it was something familiar to them. We played the piece for two years in the Zagreb Youth Theatre. Since then, six of the boys from the play have enrolled in the Academy of Dramatic Art to study acting. I think this was really a decisive success of the piece. The performance toured the whole region and should have toured even more, but these boys were still in high school, so it was difficult to arrange. It was a nice project for other reasons. All these boys came to work together with different ideas and expectations. For example Nikola Nedić, a guy who is now playing in the National Theatre in Rijeka, came to the audition literally claiming “I’m a Croat,” and when I asked him to sing something from his heart, he started to sing “Čavoglave”

224  B. ŠEPAROVIĆ

by Thompson, one of the most extreme nationalistic heavy metal bands. And it took him eight months of work before he could come up on stage and say “I am Serb” or “I am of Serbian origin.” He told me that he would rather get naked on stage and show his genitals than say “I’m Serbian,” because his mother told him never to tell this. So, at least for this reason, it was a good process—this actor is now acting in the plays of Oliver Frljić, dealing with Croatian war crimes. I guess this was an interesting process for him. And all this came from the fact that we discussed things. I would even say that it was some kind of humanitarian or social work.

PART III

Subsequent and External Perspectives

The Theatre Exchange Between Slovenia and the Republics of Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s Barbara Orel

How did Slovenian theatre reflect on the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s and what was the reaction of Slovenian artists to the events in the former common state? These are the central questions of this chapter. It will explore the theatre exchange with the republics of former Yugoslavia in the repertory and noninstitutional (independent theatre) spheres and evaluate the significance of this exchange in the context of Slovenian theatre. The Slovenian theatre of the 1990s was surprisingly apolitical, especially considering the turbulent political events that resulted from Slovenia’s separation from Yugoslavia in 1991, the founding of the independent state and the breakout of the Yugoslav wars. The apolitical stance of Slovenian theatre production also merits attention as it followed the rise of political theatre in the 1980s, when theatre was perceived as a social platform generating liberal ideas and as a space

B. Orel (*)  University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_14

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of freedom: a space for expressing critique of the communist system and defending the freedom of speech, human rights, national self-­ declaration and aesthetic plurality.1 In the 1990s, the Slovenian theatre was no longer a political forum, but rather a space for the exploration of the theatre medium and artistic autonomy, especially the production of the non-institutional, independent theatre, which—in terms of Lado Kralj2—was “entirely transpolitical.” In accordance with the cultural policy of the newly founded Slovenian state, the theatre production was driven by two dominant tendencies: detachment from the socialist legacy and pro-Western orientation, which favored the integration of Slovenian theatre production into international Western networks. After the independence of Slovenia, the ties with the former Yugoslav theatre sphere were temporarily severed. As pointed out by Barbara Sušec Michieli, “this radical break with the Yugoslav cultural space occurred only within the institutional theatrical system, and not also within alternative, independent theatre and popular culture.”3

The Severed Ties The detachment from the Yugoslav connections in Slovenian theatre was not only a result of Slovenia’s independence, but also a consequence of the relations between the Yugoslav republics, which started to deteriorate in 1980 with the death of the state and party leader, Josip Broz Tito; the growing socio-political, economic and cultural frictions ultimately led to the breakup of the country in the early 1990s. This is also clearly reflected by the following data. In the second half of the twentieth century, plays by authors from other Yugoslav republics were a permanent feature at Slovenian professional theatres; they accounted for 5–10% of the annual theatre program, while Slovenian plays represented 25–40% of the program and foreign plays more than 50%.4 In the second half of the 1980s, however, the percentage of Yugoslav plays was reduced to a surprising degree: “This shift was especially conspicuous within the Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana, where during the decade leading up to Slovenia’s sovereignty, only one play by a Yugoslav author was staged.”5 In the 1990s, national relations were seldom explicitly addressed at institutional theatres. Not only did the theatres fail to reflect on the Yugoslav wars in a sufficiently engaged manner, but also did not recognize a turning point in the political history of Slovenia (i.e. becoming an independent country for the first time) as an

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opportunity to seize this historical moment and highlight the issues surrounding the relations between (national) identity, nation and state. These issues were only taken up by Slovenian theatre artists at a much later point—when Slovenia joined the European Union in 2004. In the 1990s, the Slovenian institutional theatres seemed to be disoriented by the turbulent political events and rather cautious in terms of their programming. Their main response to the tragic events in the Balkans was to stage classical plays with war-related themes. There was a significant increase in the number of ancient tragedies, which were rarely staged in Slovenian theatre. The 1990s saw the staging of six ancient plays and two contemporary reinterpretations of ancient Greek tragedies,6 which represented as much as a third of all the ancient tragedies staged in Slovenia after World War II. The ancient Greek tragedies were “a metaphor for the violence and barbarism in the Balkans,”7 especially that of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their universal message “was no longer the patriotism and dignity of the defeated, but the highlighting of the attitude toward “the Other or the foreigner.”8 At the forefront of these interpretations were ethical issues, discussed from the perspective of marginalized Others (women, prisoners of war and foreigners) and staged by renowned directors from the older, middle and younger generations. As a basis for problematizing otherness, two ancient tragic female characters were selected by two Slovenian playwrights: Antigone by Dušan Jovanović (1993) and Cassandra by Boris A. Novak (2001). They became the most far-reaching Slovenian theatre interpretations of ancient myths that reflected upon the Yugoslav wars. Jovanović’s Antigone, produced by the Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana, also won international acclaim. It was premiered in Vienna, Austria, on June 9, 1993 at the Wiener Festwochen festival. The festival’s curator, Elisabeth Wäger, invited the Slovenian director and set designer Meta Hočevar to co-create the festival program scope entitled Zeit/Schnitte [Time/ Cuts], dedicated to the theme of exile. Meta Hočevar chose the myth of Antigone and invited Dušan Jovanović to write a play. The focus was no longer on Antigone and her rebellion against Creon’s autocracy, but on the war pitting brother against brother—Eteocles against Polynices—for power over Thebes, “a rampage of nothing but strange irrationality and nihilistic blindness (Fig. 1).”9 The performance took place in the trap room of the Theater an der Wien—a kind of shelter and a global battlefield at the same time.

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Fig. 1  Antigone. Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana, co-producer: Wiener Festwochen, 1993 (Photo courtesy of Tone Stojko, Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana)

Cathy Meils, a critic for the Plays International journal, recognized this concept as a metaphor for “the Balkans as the basement of Europe.”10 In the Vienna newspaper Der Standard, Lothar Lohs denoted the performance as “the climax of the entire spectacle on exile: Antigone by Dušan Jovanović, a Slovenian Heiner Müller. With minimalist means and monstrous intensity, the horrific slaughter between the warring brothers is portrayed.”11 In the Graz newspaper Kleine Zeitung, Thomas Krenkler highlighted the position of the European, a mere spectator who turns away and thereby allows “the Balkans to remain Hades.”12 Among all the 13 performances of the Exile program scope, it was Antigone by the Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana that received the highest praise. Antigone was the first part of Balkanska trilogija [The Balkan Trilogy], dedicated by the playwright and director Dušan Jovanović (born in Belgrade, Serbia, but living and working in Slovenia since childhood) to his torn homeland. The second part of the trilogy, Uganka

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korajže [The Puzzle of Courage], a paraphrase of Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children, was also directed by Meta Hočevar in 1994. The third part, the play Kdo to poje Sizifa? [Who’s Singing Sisyphus?], was directed by the author himself in 1997. All three were staged at the Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana. Dušan Jovanović also directed Kasandra [Cassandra] by Boris A. Novak. This theatre portrayal of the oracle from Troy was instigated by the war in former Yugoslavia and the painful experiences that the poet and playwright Boris A. Novak had as a representative of PEN International and organizer of humanitarian aid for Sarajevo writers in the 1990s. His besieged city of Troy has mythological parallels with Sarajevo, Vukovar, Srebrenica as well as Grozny and other places of destruction in the contemporary world. The performance was met with a very good audience response at the Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana (2001). Considerably less attention, however, surrounded the staging of the play Alisa, Alica [Alisa, Alice] by Draga Potočnjak, premiered in 2000 at the Slovenian People’s Theatre in Celje directed by Matija Logar. The piece about the refugee named Alisa, who flees to Slovenia from the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, paints the picture of “the European, whose indifference gives rise to an erroneous sense of superiority over the Balkan and other ‘intertribal conflicts down there’.”13 Draga Potočnjak’s play Hrup, ki ga povzročajo živali, je neznosen [The Noise Animals Make Is Unbearable], dealing with the traumatic experience of the autistic teenager Armin, who witnesses the death of his family in a brutal military slaughter, has not been staged in Slovenia. The play received the First Prize of the Unknown Neighbours—a Project of Graz-European Capital of Culture 2003, and was premiered that same year at the Theater im Keller in Graz (Austria).

Ex Ponto In 1993, during the raging war in Bosnia, the Ex Ponto International Festival was founded in Ljubljana. Its aim was to set up a bridge with the former Yugoslav republics and create a platform for continuous exchanges with the Slovenian cultural space. This mission is inscribed into the very name of the festival. Ex Ponto is the title of the prose poems by the Bosnian Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić. The title refers to the poems Epistulae ex Ponto [Letters from the Black Sea] by the ancient Roman poet Ovid, which describe his exile in Tomis on the Black Sea coast. Creativity in exile was also the motto of the first Ex Ponto. The festival was initially

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conceived as a movement and a social platform, but gradually evolved into an international theatre festival. It was based on the “humanitarian idea to help exiled artists from the former common state to continue with their creativity also in the foreign, new environment.”14 Ex Ponto was also designed with the aim to introduce and bring closer to Slovenian people the creative efforts of the displaced, especially immigrants from Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the aim to help remove the label of otherness placed on the marginalized Bosnian community in Slovenia. It was established in the scope of the B–51 Cultural Society, a student NGO engaged in alternative culture and located in an underground shelter of a Ljubljana students dorm; its instigator was Damir Domitrović (director of the festival throughout its existence from 1993 till 2015), who worked in close ­collaboration with Ruža Mlač and Mirjana Borčić. Ex Ponto was initially conceived as an interdisciplinary festival, connecting a variety of artists from the former Yugoslav republics. This is also evident from its first program (1993). It opened with the exhibition of children’s paintings entitled Slikam na tujem [I Paint Abroad] and concluded with a concert of popular, acclaimed Slovenian and Bosnian groups or musicians, e.g. Šukar—a Slovenian group which predominantly plays Roma music; the Slovenian folk-rock musician Vlado Kreslin; the Bosnian singer and composer Saša Lošić–Loša, frontman of Plavi orkestar, a celebrated pop-rock group in Yugoslavia; and the popular Bosnian actor Branko Đurić – Đuro. The program also included a photo exhibition on displacement by Diego Andrés Goméz, a literary evening featuring writers from Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina and hosted by the Sarajevo-born poet Josip Osti, a concert by the Slovenian string quartet Enzo Fabiani and the Sarajevo Chamber Orchestra, the round table Novinarstvo v vojni in o vojni [Press in War and about War], as well as a simultaneous exhibition by the world-famous chess grand masters Predrag Nikolić (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Bruno Parma (Slovenia). One of the most well-known theatre groups to perform at the festival in the following years was the SARTR-Sarajevo War Theatre. By 1999, the initial mission of the Ex Ponto festival was fulfilled: it revitalized and re-institutionalized the exchange of cultural events and theatre performances between the Slovenian and former common Yugoslav cultural space, provided a platform for engaged discussion on current social, political and ethical issues, and established itself as an international multimedia and theatre festival. In the first two years, the program focused on contacts with Bosnian and Herzegovinian culture,

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in 1995 on Roma culture, in 1996 on the phenomenon of Istrian interculturalism, and in 1997/1998 again on the exchange with the Bosnian and Herzegovinian cultural space. The first period of the festival’s operation (1993–1998) was rounded up by it taking place both in Ljubljana and Sarajevo: presented in Ljubljana was a program featuring Bosnian artists (March 16–18, 1998) while Sarajevo hosted a selection of Slovenian theatre groups (March 19–21, 1998). That particular year, the emerging Ex Ponto’s identity as a performing arts festival became apparent, strengthening throughout its subsequent years of operation till 2015, after which the festival was abolished (due to the untimely death of its program director, Damir Domitrović, in 2016). In 2000, the established connections resulted in theatre co-productions.15 The tenth anniversary of the festival, however, was marked by expanding the program to include Eastern Europe and also attracting some Western European groups. When the ties with Yugoslavia temporarily severed in 1991, Slovenian theatre artists experienced a considerable shrinking of their area of operation. In the first years of Slovenian independence, when the paths into Western festival networks had just begun to form, Slovenian theatres were only able to present their work at the traditional Slovenian theatre festivals The Week of Slovenian drama (Kranj) and The Maribor Theatre Festival (Maribor). What was no longer available, however, was the once regular touring and networking with fellow theatre artists at Yugoslav festivals: the BITEF Festival in Belgrade, the Theatre Festival MESS Sarajevo, the Sterijino pozorje festival in Novi Sad, the Dubrovnik Summer Festival, the Ohrid Summer Festival (to only mention the most eminent ones). Ex Ponto filled the resulting gap and helped pave the way to the so-called festivalization of the Slovenian cultural space. It was followed by the founding of the following international festivals: the contemporary performing arts festival Exodos (1995), Mesto žensk/City of Women (1996)—an interdisciplinary festival showcasing women’s creativity, and Mladi levi Festival [Young Lions festival], presenting newly emerging young performance groups (1997).

The Theatre of Exile Worthy of special mention is the work of Draga Potočnjak, a writer and an actress at the Mladinsko Theatre. Between 1992 and 1997, she worked as a mentor and facilitator of a theatre group created to help its members (displaced Bosnian youth) deal with the traumatic experiences

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and painful memories of the war and generate “dramaturgies of hope,” as Sonja Arsham Kuftinec would put it.16 Potočnjak began to work with the displaced due to her empathy, a social sense as well as the need to articulate the tragic war events in the neighborhood. As she herself described it: “The displaced and the involvement with the theatre in which they themselves performed gave me an alibi to be able to talk about war at the time of war in the first place.”17 Her first encounter with the refugees was at the beginning of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in May 1991, at the Ljubljana assembly center; together, they created a devised theatre piece entitled Sretno doba, dok si djete! [Childhood is a Happy Age]. She approached the mentoring of the theatre group as a seasoned actress and took over the roles of director and producer. After the actors of this theatre group left Slovenia, she was contacted by a group of young people from Sarajevo who were preparing a performance on the theme of war. This gave rise to the founding of the group Nepopravljivi optimisti i povjerenici u sarajevsku dušu [Incorrigible Optimists and Believers in the Soul of Sarajevo], initiated by Igor Srdarević, Igor Anjoli and Mithad Huskić. Between 1993 and 1996, the group staged three performances at the KUD France Prešeren Cultural Society in Ljubljana: Kuća bez krova [A House without a Roof], Dođi makar sebi, ako nemaš kome drugom [At least come to yourself if you have no one else to come to], and I mirna Bosna! [And peaceful Bosnia!]18 All three performances dealt with the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, expressing a profound dissatisfaction and disagreement with the fact that Europe allowed for this situation to go on. Their political theatre was similar to the theatre of the oppressed by Augusto Boal. The community-based stagings by the Nepopravljivi optimisti group were not only performative utopias (Jill Dolan), but resulted in social theatre as discussed and defined by James Thompson and Richard Schechner as “a space for healing, action, community building, and art.”19 Their most successful staging, which also received media attention, was Kuća bez krova [A House without a Roof]. It was performed more than 20 times in less than three months—a high number even for repertory theatres. The performance was invited to the Linhartovo srečanje festival, showcasing a yearly selection of the best amateur theatre production in Slovenia, as well as to international Franc und Franc festival (later renamed Festival na obeh straneh meje [Festival on Both Sides of the Border]); this festival at the Slovenian-Austrian border took place in Gornja Radgona and Bad Radkersburg, and was attended by youth

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groups from all over Europe. Even more precious for their mentor, Draga Potočnjak, were their tours of refugee centers, where the audience participation was even more intense. “It was important for our future to know that we had at least had a slight influence on the overall awareness of the Bosnian war,” but also that “the young uprooted souls received acknowledgement in the new environment.”20 The social activities of the Nepopravljivi optimisti group concluded with the performance I mirna Bosna! [And peaceful Bosnia!], produced in collaboration with the Ana Monró Theatre. In 1997, it toured Bosnia—Tuzla, Goražde and Mostar, where it was unconditionally embraced by the audiences. According to Draga Potočnjak, this was the ultimate proof of the relevance of their work.21 It was also a confirmation that theatre can actually “suture the past, unsuppress historical narratives, and stitch together people’s memories,” along the lines of Sonja Arsham Kuftinec.22 In 1994, Draga Potočnjak received the Europe Prize in Tampere, Finland, for her dedicated work with the Nepopravljivi optimisti group. During the Yugoslav wars, refuge and a new home was sought in Slovenia by a number of artists, musicians, writers and theatre makers; the most well-known among the latter are Rade Šerbedžija, Zijah Sokolović and Branko Đurić – Đuro. Rade Šerbedžija, a Croatian actor and celebrity of Yugoslav theatre and film who achieved worldwide recognition after departing abroad, came to Ljubljana in 1992. During his stay in Slovenia, he played three roles, among which the greatest attention surrounded that of Earl of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s King Lear.23 The staging was eagerly awaited well before its premiere, giving rise to a big media spectacle; it was anticipated as the peak of the theatre season and placed on the biggest Slovenian stage at the Cankarjev dom cultural center. King Lear was a project by the celebrated Slovenian actor Radko Polič, with Dušan Jovanović as director and—to mention just a few renowned names from former Yugoslav theatre—Meta Hočevar as set designer, Bjanka Adžić Ursulov as costume designer, Radko Polič in the role of King Lear, Rade Šebedžija as Earl of Gloucester and Milena Zupančič as the Fool, joined by a host of other excellent actors from the Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana and the Ljubljana City Theatre (Fig. 2). The music by Davor Rocco was performed by the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra. Polič and Jovanović devised King Lear as a play about the decay and downfall of the world: “The omnipresent rampage and destruction of today can no longer be rationally explained even

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Fig. 2  King Lear. Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana, 1992 (Photo courtesy of Tone Stojko, Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana)

though ‘the machine’ is, of course, a fruit of human intelligence. Just like those machines, for example, which fuel the current and future Yugoslav wars, and to which this Lear no doubt alludes.”24 The performance arose the interest of Slovenian and Yugoslav critics and mostly received favorable reviews, with many noting that the intimate elements got lost in the visual postmodernist spectacle on the grand Cankarjev dom stage. They also pointed out that Rade Šerbedžija acted in the Slovenian language, mostly along the lines of what Aleš Berger wrote for the central Slovenian daily Delo: “at first, the concern to speak impeccable Slovenian (at which he largely succeeded) hampered the interpretation of the words, but in the second part, Šerbedžija gave rise to one of the highlights of the staging with the Dover cliff scene and almost established himself as the central tragic character of the performance.”25 Unanimous praise was received by Radko Polič as King Lear. The integration of non-native speaking actors into theatre performances is connected with unique challenges. This might be the reason why the Bosnian actor, director and writer Zijah Sokolović, who has continuously worked in Slovenian theatre since the early 1990s, has rarely appeared as an actor. During the war, he performed his cult monodrama,

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Glumac je glumac je glumac [An Actor Is an Actor Is an Actor], which he premiered in 1978 in his birthplace, Sarajevo, and still performs it today, as well as Cabares Cabarei (at the Café Teater in Cankarjev dom). The language he used in both pieces was Bosnian. After a short stay in Ljubljana, he moved to Vienna in 1992, but regularly directs at Slovenian theatres (in Ljubljana, Trieste, Maribor, Ptuj). Perhaps his most successful direction has been that of Lanford Wilson’s Zažgi! [Burn This!] in 1995 at the Ljubljana City Theatre. Received with great enthusiasm by the Slovenian audiences was the Bosnian actor and director Branko Đurić – Đuro, who still lives and works in Slovenia. In Yugoslavia, he gained popularity as an actor in Top lista nadrealista [The Surrealists’ Top Chart], a Sarajevo TV comedy series. He first introduced himself to the Slovenian theatre audiences in 1993 as an actor in Klinika Tivoli d.o.o. [Tivoli Clinic Ltd.], a Ljubljana City Theatre hit. The performance enjoyed box office success, but did not receive critical praise, rather reproaches that such performances did not belong to repertory theatre stages. Between 1994 and 1997, Branko Đurić – Đuro co-created the TV comedy series entitled Teater Paradižnik [The Tomato Theatre], a kind of Slovenian version of the Top lista nadrealista, in which he participated as director and actor. It was shown on Program 1 of TV Slovenia (with one of the highest national ratings), embraced as a welcome novelty in Slovenia, and enjoyed by both its creators and viewers alike.26 In the 1990s, Đurić frequently acted at commercial theatres (Café teater, Špas teater, Teater 55 etc.), and also directed the Slovenian film Kajmak in marmelada [Cheese and Jam] in 2003 about the love between an immigrant from a former Yugoslav republic and a Slovenian woman. Đurić’s creations were warmly embraced by the Slovenian audiences, probably also due to nostalgia for the once common Yugoslav past.

Conclusion The theatre connections between the Slovenian and formerly common Yugoslav spaces in the 1990s were marked by a paradox. On the one hand, the Slovenian theatre of the early 1990s was reproached for withdrawing from politics into artistic isolation, but on the other hand, it also enabled and supported the creativity of artists from other parts of former Yugoslavia. This paradox arose from the dynamics between two prevailing contradictory tendencies: to break with the past marked by

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the socialist heritage, and to continue to collaborate with Yugoslav artists (thereby preserving the professional connections and personal ties that developed in the common past). The detachment from the Yugoslav cultural sphere was furthered by the pro-Western orientation of the Slovenian cultural policy. As found in 1994 by Michel Uytterhoeven (performing arts section coordinator of Antwerpen 93-Cultural Capital of Europe, and founder of Klapstukinternational contemporary dance festival in Leuven), among all the postcommunist countries, “it was Slovenian culture that was promoted as one of the most interesting in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall”; in the field of the performing arts, only Slovenians manifested such a remarkably strong interest in presenting themselves on European stages.27 Uytterhoeven wondered whether such a strong orientation to the West could be connected with Slovenians trying to divert their attention from the catastrophe in Yugoslavia. This was put forth at the Theatre and Dance Weekend at the Cankarjev Dom cultural center in Ljubljana, showcasing the most progressive Slovenian independent theatre production, which was entirely transpolitical. This opinion was shared by many Slovenian and foreign theatre researchers in the 1990s. In Slovenian repertory theatres and noninstitutional production, the Yugoslav wars were rarely reflected on in an explicit manner. The number of stagings of ancient tragedies and classical works on the subject of power struggles and irrational destruction increased, with clear allusions to the war-torn Balkans. Reflection on the war conditions was a painful issue in Slovenian society. This is also evident from the fact that even the few Slovenian plays which dealt with migration, refugees and Otherness were not all staged in Slovenia (e.g. the aforementioned The Noise Animals Make Is Unbearable by Draga Potočnjak). However, the performances that reflected on the Yugoslav wars all generated great interest among the spectators, both domestically and internationally. Contrary to the institutional theatre sphere, which was hesitant about establishing connections with organizations from former Yugoslav republics, the exchange continued in noninstitutional cultural production and independent theatre. In 1993, a platform for this exchange was purposely established by the Ex Ponto festival—one of the few cultural organizations in Slovenia in the 1990s that based their programs on the connections with the culture and art of the formerly common country. The Slovenian theatre was initially disoriented by the political decisions

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in the 1990s (the founding of new countries and the outbreak of wars in the territory of former Yugoslavia). Nevertheless, artists from other Yugoslav republics (costume designers, set designers, directors, etc.), who had occasionally collaborated in the creation of performances, continued to do so. Furthermore, the Slovenian space offered work opportunities to numerous artists who took refuge in Slovenia due to the war in their homeland, and some of them remained in Slovenia permanently. Strengthening over the years, such connections actively co-shaped Slovenian theatre production, leaving their mark on the professional and amateur theatre spheres.

Notes





1.  Barbara Sušec Michieli, “Between Inertia and Cultural Terrorism: Slovenian Theatre in Times of Crisis and Change,” in Theatre After the Change: And What Was There Before the After? eds. Attila Szabó, Joanna Krakowska, and Mária Mayer-Szilágyi (Budapest: Creativ Média, 2011), 48; Barbara Orel, “Theatre as a Political Forum. The Role of Slovenian Theatre in the Disintegration of the Socialist Utopia in Former Yugoslavia,” in Theatre After the Change: And What Was There Before the After? eds. Attila Szabó, Joanna Krakowska, and Mária Mayer-Szilágyi (Budapest: Creativ Média, 2011), 29–30. 2. Lado Kralj, “Hommage à Ristić,” Maska 4, no. 1–2 (1994): 27. 3.  Barbara Sušec Michieli, “Out of Control? Theatre in the Grip of the Economic and Political Crisis,” Amfiteater 1, no. 2 (2008): 41. 4. Ibid., 40. 5.  Barbara Sušec Michieli, “Out of Control? Theatre in the Grip of the Economic and Political Crisis,” 41. 6.  The plays staged: Aeschylus: King Oedipus (Slovenian Permanent Theatre in Trieste, 1991, directed by Mile Korun); Aeschylus: The Oresteia (Slovenian National Theatre Maribor, 1993, directed by Paolo Magelli); Dušan Jovanović: Antigona [Antigone] (Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana, 1993, directed by Meta Hočevar); Aeschylus: Seven against Thebes (Slovenian Permanent Theatre in Trieste, 1995, directed by Mario Uršič); Sophocles: Philoctetes (Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana, 1996, directed by Paolo Magelli); Euripides: Iphigenia (Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana, 1998, directed by Meta Hočevar); Sophocles: King Oedipus (Mladinsko Theatre, 1998, directed by Tomi Janežič); and Boris A. Novak: Kasandra [Cassandra] (Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana, 2001, directed by Dušan Jovanović).

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7. Barbara Sušec Michieli, “Težave s klasiko in z zgodovino: starogrška tragedija v slovenskem gledališču 20. stoletja,” in Dinamika sprememb v slovenskem gledališču 20. stoletja, eds. Barbara Sušec Michieli, Blaž Lukan, Maja Šorli (Ljubljana: Akademija za gledališče, radio, film in televizijo, Maska, 2010), 152. 8. Ibid., 153; cf. also Svetlana Slapšak, “Tujci in begunci v grški drami,” Dialogi 30, no. 1–2 (1994): 31–36. 9. Andrej Inkret, Za Hekubo, gledališka poročila 1978–1999 (Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki muzej, 2000), 448. 10. Quoted after Mojca Kranjc, and Darja Dominkuš, “Antigona na Dunaju,” Gledališki list Drama SNG Ljubljana 73, no. 3 (1993): 61. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Slavko Pezdir, “Alisa v deželi prikazni,” Sodobnost 48, no. 5 (2000): 911. 14. Zdenko Matoz, “Ex Ponto–Umetnost v izgnanstvu” [Intervju z Damirjem Domitrovićem Kosom], Delo, September 1, 2013. 15. The first one was the staging of the play by the Montenegrin writer and poet Ljubomir Đurković, Tobelija–The House of Dolls, directed by Niko Goršič (Slovenia), who used the pseudonym Nick Upper at that time. The performance was created in co-production of Ex Ponto (Ljubljana), and the Montenegrin National Theatre (Podgorica), premiered on the stage of the eminent Slovenian cultural center Cankarjev dom (October 10, 2000), which also used to be the biggest cultural center in Yugoslavia. 16.  Sonja Arsham Kuftinec, Theatre, Facilitation, and Nation Formation in the Balkans and Middle East (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 38. 17. Draga Potočnjak, “Nepopravljivi optimisti ali gledališče pregnancev,” Dialogi 35, no. 5–6 (1999b): 21. 18. The stagings were created in the scope of Pregnanci [The Displaced], a program led by Karmen Furlan. 19. Arsham Kuftinec, Theatre, Facilitation, and Nation Formation in the Balkans and Middle East, 23. 20. Potočnjak, “Nepopravljivi optimisti ali gledališče pregnancev,” Dialogi 35, no. 7–8 (1999c): 19. 21. Ibid., 26. 22. Arsham Kuftinec, Theatre, Facilitation, and Nation Formation in the Balkans and Middle East, xviii. 23. In addition, Rade Šerbedžija also played the leading role in Roger Vitrac’s The Werewolf, directed by Dušan Jovanović at the Slovenian National Theatre Nova Gorica (1993), and the role of the Stranger in the first Slovenian rendition of Strindberg’s To Damascus, directed by Aleksander Jurc (in non-institutional production, 1993). From Ljubljana, Šerbedžija went on to London and then to the United States.

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24.  Andrej Inkret, “Kralj Lear ali metafizika igre,” Razgledi 40, no. 19 (1992): 15. 25. Aleš Berger, “Slikovita uprizoritev, razbegle besede,” Delo, October 7, 1992. 26. In Slovenia, Branko Đurić also directed two other popular TV comedy series—Naša mala klinika [Our Little Clinic] (2004–2007) and Čista desetka [Top-Notch] on POP TV. 27.  According to Uytterhoeven, apart from Slovenia, tendencies toward such an intense international policy in Europe could only be observed in Catalonia and Flanders: what they have in common with Slovenia (which is situated at the intersection of the Slavic, Germanic and Romanic cultures) “is an independent language, culture and history, which used to be surrounded by much larger cultures, like French, Spanish, HungarianGerman, Italian, and Dutch.” Michel Uytterhoeven, “Nekaj vprašanj slovenskim umetnikom,” Maska 5, no. 1–3 (1995): 38.

Works

cited

Arsham Kuftinec, Sonja. Theatre, Facilitation, and Nation Formation in the Balkans and Middle East. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Berger, Aleš. “Slikovita uprizoritev, razbegle besede.” Delo, October 7, 1992. Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Inkret, Andrej. “Kralj Lear ali metafizika igre.” Razgledi 40, no. 19 (1992): 15. ———. Za Hekubo, gledališka poročila 1978–1999. Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki muzej, 2000. Kralj, Lado. “Hommage à Ristić.” Maska 4, no. 1–2 (1994): 27. Kranjc, Mojca, and Darja Dominkuš. “Antigona na Dunaju.” Gledališki list Drama SNG Ljubljana 73, no. 3 (1993): 60–61. Matoz, Zdenko. “Ex Ponto—Umetnost v izgnanstvu” [Intervju z Damirjem Domitrovićem Kosom]. Delo, September 1, 2013. http://www.delo.si/kultura/oder/ex-ponto-umetnost-v-izgnanstvu.html. Accessed May 15, 2017. Orel, Barbara. “Theatre as a Political Forum. The role of Slovenian Theatre in the Disintegration of the Socialist Utopia in Former Yugoslavia.” In Theatre After the Change: And What Was There Before the After? edited by Attila Szabó, Joanna Krakowska, and Mária Mayer-Szilágyi, 28–37. Budapest: Creativ Média, 2011. Perne, Ana. “Družbenokritični angažma ali (zgolj) demonstrativno mreženje? Primer Ex Ponto” [Socially-Critical Engagement or (only) Demonstrational Networking? The Case of Ex Ponto]. Amfiteater 1, no. 1 (2008): 194–206. Pezdir, Slavko. “Alisa v deželi prikazni.” Sodobnost 48, no. 5 (2000): 910–912.

242  B. OREL Potočnjak, Draga. “Nepopravljivi optimisti ali gledališče pregnancev.” Dialogi 35, no. 3–4 (1999a): 62–79. ———. “Nepopravljivi optimisti ali gledališče pregnancev.” Dialogi 35, no. 5–6 (1999b): 13–25. ———. “Nepopravljivi optimisti ali gledališče pregnancev.” Dialogi, 35, no. 7–8 (1999c): 12–26. Slapšak, Svetlana. “Tujci in begunci v grški drami.” Dialogi 30, no. 1–2 (1994): 31–36. Sušec Michieli, Barbara. “Out of Control? Theatre in the Grip of the Economic and Political Crisis.” Amfiteater 1, no. 2 (2008): 31–51. ———. “Težave s klasiko in z zgodovino: starogrška tragedija v slovenskem gledališču 20. stoletja.” In Dinamika sprememb v slovenskem gledališču 20. stoletja, edited by Barbara Sušec Michieli, Blaž Lukan, and Maja Šorli, 127–165. Ljubljana: Akademija za gledališče, radio, film in televizijo, Maska, 2010. ———. “Between Inertia and Cultural Terrorism: Slovenian Theatre in Times of Crisis and Change.” In Theatre After the Change. And What Was There Before the After? edited by Attila Szabó, Joanna Krakowska, and Mária MayerSzilágyi, 45–54. Budapest: Creativ Média, 2011. Uytterhoeven, Michel. “Nekaj vprašanj slovenskim umetnikom.” Maska 5, no. 1–3 (1995): 38–39.

Fording the Stream of Conscience: Peter Handke’s River Journeys Branislav Jakovljević

Dust, fruit, paper clot and drift and spread where pipes spill scourings from the city’s swamp. A white ball-dress comes now, in bloated pomp a bare throat and a face as white as lead. The body wallows up, inflates the dress as if it were a white ship in the wind. The lifeless eyes stare up, enormous, blind, into a sky of cloud-pink rosiness. The lilac water gently rocks and swells, the wake stirred by the water-rats, who man the white ship. Now it drifts serenely on, writhing with grey snouts and with dusky pelts.1

B. Jakovljević (*)  Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_15

243

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First Expedition In the final moments of Peter Handke’s play Voyage by Dugout, or the Play of the Film of the War [Die Fahrt im Einbaum, oder Das Stück zum Film vom Krieg], the eponymous object emerges from upstage and moves toward the proscenium. In Claus Peymann’s production in Vienna’s Burgtheater, the hollow cylinder appears from behind the platform positioned center-stage, and makes jerky movements across the stage with a spotlight trained on it.2 It comes to a stop, and the penultimate scene of the play starts. Bear Skin Woman, the character who dominates this section of the play, announces: “At one time we traveled through the country in this dugout. The dugout can travel everywhere, it slides through rubble, over the mountains; it creates tunnels, mountain passes, fords.”3 Moments later, several characters try to board the logboat, but, as indicated in Handke’s stage directions, “there is not even room in the dugout for two.”4 One actress falls and remains laying on the ground, her head propped against the boat. Change of plans. Some dozen members of the cast climb onto the platform. The Bear Skin Woman, who wears a long silk negligée instead of a bear skin, attaches a tiny flag on a long slim pole to the front of the platform. Then she joins the members of the group, who have prostrated themselves on the podium. In Handke’s script, this transfer from a tiny boat to the platform takes the form of a literary transposition: “the dugout is ready for the launch … and a moment later the vessel begins to move.”5 In his staging, Peymann can’t accommodate Handke’s poetic liberty: as the dais slides toward the stage wing, the hollow cylinder stays behind, so that this enigmatic metaphor dominates the finale of the play. Voyage by Dugout was the last theater show that directly commented on the wars of Yugoslavia’s disintegration while they were still happening. It just barely made it: the world premiere took place in Vienna’s Burgtheater on June 9, 1999, the day when the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia signed a peace accord with NATO. This put an end to the bombing campaign that started on March 24, the largest deployment of NATO forces in Europe since the foundation of the military alliance. Voyage by Dugout belongs to the rich corpus of Handke’s writings about the disintegration of Yugoslavia, which started with his protest against Slovenia’s independence in Abschied des Träumers vom neunten Land. Eine Wirklichkeit die vergangen ist: Erinnerung an Slowenien [The Dreamer’s Farewell to the Ninth Land] in 1991, and continued with his travelogues from his visits to Serbia and eastern Bosnia in Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa, und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien [A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia] and Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise [A Summer’s

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Postscript to a Winter’s Journey] both published in 1996.6 Voyage by Dugout anticipates some of his later writings on the region, most notably his reports from the Hague tribunal: Rund um das Große Tribunal [Around the Grand Tribunal, 2003], Die Tablas von Daimiel [Tablas of Daimiel, 2005], and his travelogues Unter Tränen fragend [Questioning While Weeping, 2000] and Die Kuckucke von Velika Hoča [Cuckoos from Velika Hoča, 2009]. During this time he gave innumerable interviews to German, French, and Serbian media, voicing his opinions about Serbia and Yugoslavia. This media attention was fueled by his high-profile gestures, such as his return of the prestigious Büchner Prize in protest against the NATO bombardment of Serbia and Montenegro, his attendance at Slobodan Milošević’s funeral in 2006, and the controversy around the Heinrich Heine award, also in 2006.7 His activism around Serbia worked its way into his fiction in the 2000s, most significantly Crossing the Sierra de Gredos [Bildverlust, oder Durch die Sierra de Gredos 2002, English translation 2007] and The Moravian Night [Die morawische Nacht, 2008, English translation 2016].8 Significantly, Voyage by Dugout was Handke’s first attempt to integrate his activism and his literature. In the spring of 1999 he traveled twice to Serbia to witness the NATO bombing campaign (31 March–3 April and 23–29 April).9 However, textual evidence suggests that the play was not based on these experiences, but on his visits to the region and The Hague in 1998. But why the dugout? Handke raises the same question in the play itself, voiced by one of the characters. Bear Skin Woman’s answer outlines a poetic geo-history of the Balkans: The dugout … preceded the Romans, disappeared as their empire expanded, and reappeared after its decline. The Romans were but an interruption. The land has them to thank for all the great statues of the gods of victory and commerce that crowded out the dugout: but then… Emona and Sirmium perished, and the dugout raised itself again from the moor of Ljubljana, slid into the Ljublianica River, gathered speed in the Danube, steered upstream into the Drina, passed over the mountains of Montenegro, shot from there down into the Macedonian-Albanian Lake Ohrid, reversed course, and anchored with no anchor for centuries in the geographical center of the Balkans, in Sremska Mitrovica on the broad, still Sava River, in the former Roman city of Sirmium.10

The German word Einbaum suggests the simple construction of this river vessel: a boat made by hollowing out a single treetrunk (ein—one, Baum—tree). In this monologue, Handke touches on the archeological findings of some of the most ancient examples of dugouts in the Balkans

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(in Slovenia), as well as the most prominent historical episodes in which this kind of vessel appears: from references in the annals of the Eastern Roman Empire to “monoxyla” (again mono—single, xylon—tree) in which Slavic tribes attacked their galleys, to Ukrainian chaikas on the Dnieper river, to its Balkan variation šajka on the Sava and the Danube. Šajkas, small and swift river vessels that Austro-Hungarian military forces used to patrol the rivers that served as natural borders with the Ottoman Empire, were manned mostly by Serbian military staff in the sixteenth to eighteenth century. That might have been the historical motivation of Handke’s reference to Sremska Mitrovica, one of the main Serbian outposts in the southern Hungarian empire. What he omits is the deep assimilation of this military term into Serbian culture: from the staff on riverboats, it spilled over to any kind of armed units, so that even the traditional folk hat, which originated from a military uniform, came to be called šajkača.11 Handke could be pointing to this history of a people cursed with an existence on the border of two enemy empires in the concluding lines of Bear Skin Woman’s monologue: “Our sacred site here is the dugout. To stand next to the river: That is peace. To stand next to the rivers: That will be peace.”12 What kind of peace is Handke talking about? And what is disrupting it? While the title of the play is fairly vague, the subtitle unambiguously points to its central stratagem: the action is set “a decade after the last war for the time being” in a “large provincial hotel somewhere deep in the innermost Balkans,” which an international movie company uses to prepare for the production of a movie co-directed by an American director named John O’Hara and his Spanish colleague Luis Machado.13 O’Hara, who sports an eyepatch and boasts about his work in the westerns, is thinly disguised Hollywood legend John Ford, while Machado shares his nationality and his first name with the great Spanish filmmaker Louis Buñuel. The choice of these two directors betrays Handke’s personal tastes and emphasizes the mixture of stark, sometimes lyrical realism, characteristic of Ford, and the phantasmagoric critique of the bourgeoisie in Buñuel’s cinema.14 The latter seems to prevail: instead of a conventional Hollywood plot, the play consists of a series of auditions for O’Hara’s and Machado’s film, or as Handke puts it, a “parade of characters.”15 Protagonists present themselves, or their roles, in front of the directors, and then step aside to let the others take their place. The two directors are seated in high folding chairs close to the proscenium; opposite from them, upstage right, is a big restaurant kitchen double door with brightly illuminated round windows. Center stage is

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a small podium on which all characters step, and stage right is a line of dining tables. Upstage left, on the wall next to the kitchen door hangs a large tarpaulin sheet that covers war damage on the dining room wall. The film studio, the directors, the folding chairs, the reflectors: all of this already suggests that the main target of Handke’s criticism is the portrayal of the Yugoslav wars in western media. This film casting, in turn, strikingly resembles a judicial hearing.16 The characters not only audition for parts in the movie, but also present their perspectives on the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. They often appear in twos and threes, which results in elaborate courtroom confrontations: a “tourist guide” is juxtaposed with a “woodsman,” a village “chronicler” with a “historian,” three “internationals” with a Greek. Each of these pairings presents two strikingly opposed points of view that boil down to the local (woodsman, chronicler, Greek) vs. the global (tourist guide, historian, internationals). Whatever dramatic tension there is in the play, it seems to come from its layered structure: the dining room in a provincial hotel is in fact a film studio, and the studio is actually an improvised courtroom.17 The directors O’Hara and Machado figure as a panel of judges. The dining tables lined stage left are also attorneys’ desks, the double kitchen door dubs as an entrance for witnesses, and the platform at the center as a witness stand. In Around the Grand Tribunal Handke records that he first visited the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in March 1998, and that he made two more trips to The Hague before he went there in June 2002 to observe the trial of Slobodan Milošević. In all of his writings about the Hague tribunal, Handke makes frequent references to the media of visual representation, specifically to film and television. The pictures that newspapers and TV incessantly disseminate are upsetting peace because they are mere appearances. What disturbs peace is that which spreads false images, slanted opinions, and distorted truths: the mass media. Ever since the means of mass communication started becoming ever more reliant on images, they became the chief culprits for the general erosion of vision. The placement of the tribunal in a film studio can be seen as a continuation of Handke’s search for the recovery of vision, which holds a prominent place in The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire [Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire]. In this record of his pilgrimage to the mountain in the south of France that became the subject of Paul Cézanne’s paintings and drawings, he proclaims the French painter the “teacher of mankind.”18 What Cézanne can teach humanity is the vision: “For, obviously, almost everything has vanished … Where today is the color that comes from the

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substance of the thing itself? What today is food for the eyes?”19 The disturbance of vision is a serious disorder in the contemporary world because it unavoidably leads to the destruction of peace. In The Long Way Around, Handke writes that “real was what was peaceful,” and he will frequently return to the theme of peace throughout the Slow Homecoming tetralogy.20 Cézanne’s paintings don’t reproduce, but participate in reality: “taught by canvas itself, I realized that in that historical moment the pines and rocks, on a plain surface but … in colors and forms bound to the actual spot …, had joined hands to form a coherent picture writing unique in the history of mankind.”21 The real predecessors of Cézanne’s “thing-image-script” are Dutch seventeenth-century paintings, which Handke invokes throughout The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire. The erosion of vision brought about a crisis of witnessing. In Around the Grand Tribunal Handke laments the disappearance of “old-­fashioned observers,” such as those featured in crime stories that took outsiders as their protagonists, “private detectives such as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe,”22 or, for that matter, Lieutenant Columbo, the invisible and cunning “eye” from both Wings of Desire and The Lesson of the Mount Sainte-Victoire.23 Like the painting, which makes “proposals” through its language of “constructions and harmonies that parallel nature” instead of imitating it, Handke wants his theater to make “proposals” through its constructions, and not only through the speeches of his characters.24 This view of the theatrical reality that challenges, rather than imitating, the reality of the audience is already present in the direct address of Offending the Audience. In The Ride Across Lake Constance (1970), Handke engages theatrical conventions in a more complex way, from naming the dramatis personae after famous actors from the history of German theater, to the story about a villager who rode across the frozen lake, thinking that he had firm ground under his feet. He builds this story of the cracking and yielding of support into an allegory about theater. Similarly, the court procedure/audition for the movie in Voyage by Dugout is an intricate game of hide and seek, in which nothing is what it seems. The subterfuge that starts with the names of the directors extends to a whole series of thinly disguised references: the film is said to “also depict the rise of an historian to the status of a statesman,” which is a reference to Croatian wartime president Franjo Tuđman25; the two directors hear about another movie about the Bosnian war which “has made international celebrities” of its protagonists, “the poet, the dog, and the two children,” all of which points to Ademir Kenović’s 1997 film

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Savršeni krug [The Perfect Circle]26; and, of course, the staff from the ICTY also have their cameo appearances: for example, Louise Arbour is introduced as “the newly elected prosecutor” whose “red jacket heightens the color of her pale Canadian complexion,” etc.27 This accumulation of distortions evolves in an elaborate game of disguises that subverts theatrical conventions. Handke highlights it with a series of maskings and unmaskings of characters: the internationals are revealed to be natives, and a historian yet another chronicler.28 Finally, it appears that the Yugoslav wars shifted the very status of some of the major symbols in Handke’s writerly universe. Like film, television, and newspapers, Dutch paintings, which were heretofore one of the primary sites for the recovery of vision, have become machines for its destruction. At one point in Voyage by Dugout, an actress climbs onto the podium and narrates a story of judges who seek a respite from the horrible stories they are forced to listen to in the tribunal courtroom by visiting Mauritshuis Museum, which is located not far from the ICTY: And then I realized: The painter, painting, had invented peace in the midst of war. His Delft walked on the waters like Jesus in the storm (Matthew 8, 23–27)! And I thought: No wonder our judges and prosecutors seek strength in such paintings! And after my return to the tribunal, where that man (Points to the Woodsman) sat behind thick glass far away in the prisoner’s dock, his face simultaneously enlarged in the monitor, I recognized the similarity between the quiet, aquarium-like tribunal room and the camera obscura with which the Delft master tamed chaos. Just as he worked with his picture-box, our international board of justice worked to form another world. Their quiet international creation of justice was the exact equivalent of Vermeer’s creations. Our tribunal was inventing peace, as had our painter, assisted by an empty box—the courtroom—and by a lens, camera obscura! Sublimely, it was creating order as had our painter, and was thus breaking the cycle of revenge and counter-revenge. Isn’t that beautiful? End of the aesthetic? Beginning of aesthetics! A new aesthetics!29

This soliloquy is signed Lauren Wexler, The New Yorker. The author in question is Lawrence Weschler, and the text that Handke parodies comes from his article “Vermeer in Bosnia,” originally published in The New Yorker in 199530: The preliminary hearings now resumed. Tadic31 was seated in a sort of aquarium of bulletproof glass, a panoply of high-tech gadgetry arrayed all around him and around the various lawyers and judges:

250  B. JAKOVLJEVIĆ instantaneous-translation devices, video ­computerized evidence screens, and so forth.

cameras

and

monitors,

Inventing peace: I found myself thinking of Vermeer with his camera obscura—an empty box fronted by a lens through which the chaos of the world might be drawn in and tamed back to a kind of sublime order. And I found myself thinking of these people here with their legal chamber, the improbably calm site for a similar effort of transmutation.32

Handke invokes Weschler’s story about the camera obscura again in Around the Grand Tribunal, where he similarly deploys it as a metaphor for the courtroom.33 However, placing a camera obscura in the place of a courtroom is much more than a trope. This alignment points to a long history of close affiliation between legal space and the privileged spaces of knowledge and creativity, from the Renaissance studiolo, to artists’ and photographers’ studios, to the kinds of studios concerned with performance: rehearsal rooms and premises specialized for audio, film, and television recording. Weschler latches onto the Romantic fiction of the artist as a solitary creator and his camera as a place of withdrawal into a secluded space of study and creation, which ultimately results in great creations. From the photographer’s studio, to radio, film, and television studios, and then back to the artist’s studio, the studio as a medium shifted from the margins of the industrial to the very center of post-­ industrial capitalism.34 In the early years of the new millennium, high-tech courtrooms such as the ICTY in The Hague, Courtroom 20 in Vancouver Law Courts, and the experimental McGlothlin Courtroom at William and Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Virginia, started including a number of technological and architectural properties reminiscent of a modern ­ television studio, from so-called “powerfloors” (raised floors that permit easy change and installation of cables throughout the room) to lowered ceilings that facilitate the use of digital video cameras. The courtroom, sandwiched between lowered ceilings and hollow floors, houses a number of technological devices that are deeply integrated into judicial procedure: document cameras; smart boards; interactive LCD screens for judges, witnesses, and jurors; voice-operated video and audio recording equipment; an electronic docket; and electronic monitoring, to name just some of them. In ICTY, some of the technology in the courtroom comes from the linguistic diversity of the region and its intense politicization: on the

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extreme left and right of the courtroom well, there were three ­separate translation booths, plus an additional AV booth filled with monitors, recorders, mixing boards, and computers.35 These image and voice technologies exhibit not only court documents, evidence, and testimonies, but also the very site or legal deliberations as a highly organized circuitry of images. The courtroom is no longer a place from which image-­capturing technology is prohibited, but conversely, it is a place that actively ­participates in recording and disseminating these images. Courtroom No. 1 at the ICTY was equipped with six cameras for audio-visual recording of the proceedings. The footage was available free of charge to news carriers, ranging from Sense Agency, which specializes in the coverage of the tribunal, to news outfits from the region of the former Yugoslavia, to broadcasting giants such as CNN, BBC News, and Eurovision. However, the stream of images didn’t flow only from the courtroom, but also into it. The courtrooms were equipped with secure video links that facilitated remote witnessing, which was routinely used as a means of witness protection and for facilitation of the proceedings. In short, in the Hague tribunal, the legal chamber morphs into a television studio. On my visits to ICTY, I found the techniques of viewing used at the Tribunal strongly reminiscent not so much of Peymann’s conventional proscenium staging, but of the strategies devised by New York experimental performance groups such as the Wooster Group and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Both insisted on refusing audience participation and the reinscription of the line of separation within the space of theatrical representation. In the case of the former, this reinforcement of the proscenium came in the form of a long table positioned along the footlights, and in the latter, there was often a Plexiglas partition across the forestage. Paradoxically, the reason they used these strategies was not to enhance the illusionistic effects of the stage, but precisely to undermine and expose its mechanisms. In dramatic works from Offending the Audience to The Ride Across Lake Constance, Handke works persistently toward subverting theater. He tries it again in Voyage by Dugout. Toward the end of the play, one of the “local” characters (the Woodsman) “lifts the tree trunk that has been lying on the floor, hollowed to some extent, and carries it like a battering ram through the [dining] hall, breaking through the tarpaulin at the rear. In the large opening a cemetery appears, adjacent to the hotel.”36 A ferocious wind begins to move the hollowed tree trunk. This movement coincides with the sudden appearance of Bear Skin Woman. And again:

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Questioner: (Sounding like the INTERNATIONALS) What do you mean by dugout? Bear Skin Woman: I don’t mean it. I see it, you idiot! (She cuffs his head.) Another Questioner: (Sounding like the INTERNATIONALS) And where can I find the dugout again? And how? Bear Skin Woman: On the border between sleeping and waking. In the deepest darkness. In midwinter. In hibernation.37 The dugout is the ultimate means of transport. It has the capacity to take the traveler through the landscape, and quite literally so. Still, it is not a technological wonder, but the most primitive means of transportation. It is precisely because of this literalness and simplicity that it becomes a figure of travel, a means of carrying over (meta-phorein). But isn’t a dugout also something more than a literary metaphor? Like the play, it is lacking a center. It is precisely this hollowness that affords this object with lightness, as well as its capacity not only to carry over, but also to take in. It is a receptacle that is placed between the subject and the environment. In doing so, it facilitates the production of images. The dugout is the means by which a traveling shot is made in this “play of the film of the war.” In short, it exceeds the “Handkean symbol”38 to become something we can call “Handkean medium.”

Second Sail Unmoored, the (log)boat has left the riverbank. The way it was staged in the Burgtheater, the boat/platform’s departure is highly reminiscent of the final scene in Emir Kusturica’s film Underground39 which, Handke informs the readers of A Journey to the Rivers, he had seen before his 1995 visit to Serbia. O’Hara and Machado are now alone on the stage. In a moment, they will cancel the film they set out to make and conclude that the “society no longer exists.” But before they do, they will complain, in a pointed reference to the ICTY courtroom and its special accommodations for simultaneous translation, about the loss of “good translators.” They envision “new translators,” whose “translation would be the highest science,” the “antithesis of the Inquisition … and of cross-examination.”40 Talking about his plans to visit Serbia in the mid1990s, Handke also called, in a less poetic register, for a “knowledgeable pilot, companion, and perhaps translator.”41 So, A Journey to the Rivers begins with the gathering of a fellowship: the writer remembers Žarko

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Radaković, one of his Yugoslav translators, and enlists “his last confidant, a Mormon, far away in the American state of Utah” to help him get in touch with Radaković.42 This is not a random attempt: Radaković and Scott Abbott are not just hired guns but dedicated translation artists. The former had been translating Handke’s works into Serbian since the early 1980s, and it is primarily due to his efforts that the Austrian writer’s major works, such as his tetralogy, had gained a prominent place in the Yugoslav literary world. Good friends from their student days in Tübingen, Radaković and Abbott traveled through Austria and Slovenia in 1989 to retrace the journey Handke narrated in his book Repetition [Die Wiederholung].43 Abbott would join Handke and Radaković on their trip to eastern Bosnia in 1998, and some episodes from this expedition would end up in Voyage by Dugout. Instead of Abbott, Handke’s second traveling companion on his journey to the rivers was Zlatko Bocokić, a cardplayer, a poet, and a “painter of curious genre scenes,” who would take his friends to visit his parents in the village of Porodin, near the Morava river.44 The Moravian Night is yet another of Handke’s attempts, after Voyage by Dugout and Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, to integrate his political activism of the 1990s with his reflective prose of the decade(s) that preceded it. In the same way in which certain themes and narratives in Voyage by Dugout were based on experiences from his trips to eastern Bosnia and the Hague, in The Moravian Night Handke returns to his travelogue A Journey to the Rivers, and to his subsequent visits to the region, including his sojourns in the Serbian enclave of Velika Hoča in Kosovo. So, in this phantasmagoric play of associations between fact and reverie, the village of Porodin turns into “one of the last enclaves in Europe.”45 While the novel is peppered with repetitions and variations of motifs from his previous works,46 the ties between it and Voyage by Dugout seem especially pronounced. Sometimes they are structural: like the play, the novel is set in the near future, and unlike in the play, Serbia now has a “flourishing and—almost—universally recovering economy”47; at other times, they are revealed in small details: in the novel Handke invokes the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, one of the sources for the character of the movie director Louis Machado; and yet in other instances, it seems that the themes from the play don’t simply recur in the novel, but actually follow a certain logic of progression and enlargement. One of the most significant instances—but by no means the only one—of this accumulation and magnification is the boat that expands

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from a simple dugout to a ship anchored precariously on the bank of the Morava. It is big enough to serve as a hotel, with a large neon sign perched on top of it: “The Moravian Night.” Still, this respectable river vessel carries the seeds of its humble origin: the narrator, who has turned this river restaurant/hotel into his home, observes that the etymology of the term “ship” “goes back to the concept of a hollowed-out tree,” and adds an emphasis for good measure: “just think of it!”48 It turns out that “The Moravian Night” is a showboat with a solo (ein-, mono-) performance as its main and only attraction: the novel records a “night of storytelling” in which the narrator recounts his latest journey around Europe to the group of invited guests. At the center of the novel is a successful writer (a “national author”49) who had left behind his career, his lifestyle, and his vocation and decided to live on a boat anchored near the city of Velika Plana, in the heart of the Balkans. The river restaurant is “his house- and escape boat.”50 He leaves it to make yet another grand tour of Europe and, as it turns out, of his own life: he visits the Croatian island of Krk (where Handke wrote his first novel), attends a symposium on noise in Spain (in the past couple of decades, Handke has gotten into the habit of overlapping and mixing together the Iberian and Balkan peninsulas, as he did in Crossing the Sierra de Gredos), joins a “partisan” conference, which has only two other participants, on the subject of a “large unified country in the Balkans,”51 and, of course, makes his way to the place he hails from, to his village and to his mother’s grave. Having renounced his profession of a writer, he calls himself a “storyteller” and, in a nod to Odysseus, styles himself a “wanderer” and “boatmaster.” That is a tall order, but the narrator seems prepared to go any length just to get away from any association with writing and authorship. And it is precisely in the paradox of the “former” and “abdicated” writer52 who nevertheless narrates the story that another major theme from Voyage by Dugout reemerges in The Moravian Night: the theme of the author missing in the plain sight. In Handke’s mountain hotel/movie studio/tribunal courtroom, the questions of culpability and innocence are discussed in broad strokes, through a mixture of reportage, history, poetry, and invective. That is because in this labyrinth of mirrors, there is only one thing missing: the perpetrator. At the time of Travel by Dugout’s premiere in June of 1999, it could have been Radovan Karadžić or Ratko Mladić, both of whom had been in hiding since 1995. Handke buries an oblique reference to them in a diatribe of the three “Internationals,” who storm onto

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the stage/hotel/studio/courtroom on mountain bikes, one of them plunging into bureaucratic language peppered with clichés and arcane acronyms: During a walk through the woods near the S.X.S bunker last week, I had the opportunity to ask the future head of the U.P.R.G.A. some detective questions, after which I was led blindfolded to the hideout of the indicted former P.D.G. of the S.X.S. and was the exclusive witness of his hair-­ raising—I really wish one of our R.A.F.’s would simply shave his head— A.Q.Y. philosophy, which tends to B.I.P.I. or R.S.I.P.I. or even finally to H.S.I.P.I., or perhaps in fact to the monks of Chilander?53

Or could it be one of many other war criminals who went into hiding after the signing of the Dayton Accords which put an end to the fighting in Bosnia, for example, the “missing man” from The New York Times article that Handke dismissively references in A Summer’s Postscript to a Winter’s Journey?54 The article in question is most likely that of Chris Hedges, “From One Militia Chief, A Trail of Plunder and Slaughter,” published on March 25, 1996. This was one of the first reports on Milan Lukić, a particularly savage leader of a local militia group in the city of Višegrad, which was held responsible for deaths of some 400 Bosnian Muslims. Handke questions the truthfulness and plausibility of witness statements and newspaper reporting about Lukić, singling out from the article the detail that he liked to walk barefoot as one of his most significant character traits. Lukić’s signature statement was not bare feet, but bare lives. His “hair-raising … A.Q.Y. philosophy” included rounding up local Muslim civilians into houses and setting them on fire.55 Handke concludes A Summer’s Postscript on a particularly cynical note, in which he compares Bosnian Serb forces with “Red Indians” who were, as in Hollywood westerns, perched on hilltops, attacking “Yankee caravans” in their struggle for freedom. Unlike the dugout, which was a medium of transport, the boat becomes a place of telling. The canoe has swelled into a mighty boat, which is a “fortress,” and even more, an “enclave.”56 An enclave is an ex-territory, surrounded by foreign land. It is an enclosure, surrounded by the flow, but not participating in it. If the dugout could glide across rubble, skip over hills, burrow tunnels, and sail over mountain passes, the boat stays stationary. It is no longer a means of transport, metaphorical

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and otherwise: the boatman leaves it behind and then comes back to tell the story. He brings back with him glimpses of the old Handke: “At most he could think of animals, and usually very small ones, such as a frozen bee that one wanted to try to revive by blowing on it, a daddy longlegs, lying dead in a dusty corner of a room”57; or: “and weren’t intimations, or at least intimations of this sort, perhaps also facts that one ought to perceive in their physicality, as living matter in the full sense—as a particular network of arteries?”58; or: “For a moment the dog crossed his path in the form of a raven, large enough for two and almost silent, accompanied by nothing but a rushing sound from far away in the east…”59 But this isn’t, and can’t be, the Handke of The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, or The Left-Handed Woman, or Offending the Audience. The wanderer and the boatmaster should know better than anyone else that once you go “there,” to the other bank, you don’t come back unchanged. What does the walk show about the walker? How did the dugout come to get stuck in Moravian mud?

The Final Crossing As in Voyage by Dugout, the logboat disappears in the final pages of The Moravian Night. This time, it doesn’t drift offstage/downstream, but sinks: “what had just recently been a boat had shrunk into a dugout, and the dugout sank.”60 Submerged, but not gone (remember the story about Romans, Sirmium, etc.). We find it again stranded in the Zabela prison in central Serbia, where Handke visits Dragoljub Milanović, the former director of state-owned broadcasting company Radio Television Serbia, and a close associate of Slobodan Milošević. In his pamphlet Die Geschichte des Dragoljub Milanović [Dragoljub Milanović’s Story, 2011], he portrays the former TV boss as a forgotten victim of the legal system that bent under political pressure from the West. He pledges to tell “the story even if I had only a tree trunk, dugout canoe, or railroad tie to talk to; I—in spring 1999, during the three months of a wholly one-sided campaign (when counteraction of any kind was inconceivable)—paid two visits, each time for about a week, to a country being bombed without cease …”61 In its voyage from the hotel dining hall/ studio/courtroom to the prison facility near the city of Požarevac, Handke’s dugout makes a detour around a bombed-out television studio that is not located in the “depopulated region in the innermost Balkans” but in the densely populated area in the very heart of Belgrade.

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Indeed, Handke visited Belgrade twice during the “air-raid war.” On April 23, 1999 he set off on his second voyage to Serbia that spring. Accompanied (again) by Bocokić and Thomas Deichmann, a German investigative journalist, the writer took a route that went, pointedly, through Republika Srpska: Banja Luka, Bratunac, Srebrenica, Zvornik.62 On the Serbian side of the Drina, a major from the Serbian police joined the group, which, as Handke comments ironically, made it look like an “official delegation.” They arrived in Belgrade on April 25, and departed the following day on a journey that followed, as Handke put it, “the path of war damage.”63 The “delegation” first makes its way to the city of Kragujevac in central Serbia, where they visit a bombed-out car factory; then they turn west to the city of Kraljevo, and then south to the canyon of the river Ibar, a major corridor that connects central Serbia with Kosovo. Before getting to the war zone, the group makes a sharp turn to the mountain resort of Kopaonik, and then on April 27, they turn back to Belgrade, their itinerary being suddenly changed because “none of us could take the sights of such destruction anymore.”64 Before his departure from the Serbian capital, on April 29, Handke makes a short walk across Tašmajdan park from hotel Metropol to the Serbian television building which had been, he reports, bombed to pieces about two weeks earlier; here, eleven employees “were reported lost” (a verbatim quote from the Western press); according to Der Spiegel, the victims were to blame: after all, the sound engineer, makeup girl, and all the others had been warned that Serbian television was a “target.” If so—I noticed—someone had aimed poorly: instead of the evil tower broadcasting propaganda, the modest four-story building next to it had been hit; the bomb went all the way down to the basement. Once more—yet again—I saw cleanup and removal work at the site of attack.65

As on his other travels, there are people milling around the writer, but he is oddly apart from them. This is an unpopulated landscape: And then, in due course, I see what’s perhaps the very picture of this wartime journey (so pictures still exist? images haven’t vanished entirely yet?): on one tree next to the demolished television station hang ribbons of film and audio tape, scattered by the bomb but looking like garlands put there on purpose, from the lowest branches up to the verdant crown— glistening, swaying, and flashing bright silver in the morning sun of today, 28 April 1999; just to the side stands the single-level Belgrade Children’s Theater, which has been only partially damaged.66

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Handke’s dating puts the bombing of Serbian television studios to mid-April, a full week before he embarked on this fact-finding mission. Actually, the television studio in Aberdareva street was bombed in the early morning hours of the very first day of Handke’s second journey, on April 23, at 2:06 A.M. local time. It was a major news item in the region and beyond, and by the time the writer and his “delegation” arrived in Belgrade two days later, it was still in the headlines. Still, Handke restrains from mentioning this incident when he talks about his arrival in Belgrade from Bosnia. And once he brings it up, he chooses to break his pattern of lecturing the Western media and does nothing to correct the reporting in Der Spiegel: it was not eleven television employees that “went missing” in the attack, but sixteen. All of them were technicians and security personnel. And they had names: Jelica Muntilak (27, make-up artist), Ksenija Banković (27, video board operator), Darko Stoimenovski (25, technician), Nebojša Stojanović (26, technician), Dragorad Dragojević (27, security guard), Dragan Tasić (30, electrician), Aleksandar Deletić (30, camera operator), Slaviša Stevanović (32, technician), Siniša Medić (32, program designer), Ivan Stukalo (33, technician), Dejan Marković (40, security guard), Milan Joksimović (47, security guard), Branislav Jovanović (50, technician), Slobodan Jontić (54, editor), Milovan Janković (59, mechanic), and Tomislav Mitrović (61, film and television director). And they also had families, none of which Handke visited on his subsequent visits to Serbia. However, he visited Dragoljub Milanović, who was the top executive of Radio Television Serbia at the time of the bombing. In Dragoljub Milanović’s Story, Handke notes that he visited him twice: first in March 2009, and again in June 2010. In this narrative, he again mentions ribbons of video tape fluttering in the wind and the children’s theater. This time too, there is not a single mention of the victims buried under the rubble. That is probably because this story is not about them, but about the person complicit in their murder. Any mention of the victims would bring up that other, inconvenient story. On his second visit, in 2010, Handke makes sure to mention that there is no “prospect of Milanović ever being released from prison.”67 Another exaggeration. The former TV boss walked free two years later, having served a 10 year sentence for his complicity in the killing of his employees. In his version of Milanović’s story, Handke doesn’t mention that, over the years, Serbian television became identified with Milošević’s regime

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more than any other state institution, including the police and the army: so much so, that even in the early 1990s it was nicknamed “TV Bastille.” He also omits that since he became the head executive of RTS in 1995, Milanović, who was a journalist by trade and a politician by vocation, became especially disliked both by his colleagues and the public at large because of the purges he made among the journalists and of the vulgar propaganda of RTS news programs, which started long before NATO bombing raids. He skips pointing out that one of the most momentous instances of the toppling of Milošević’s regime on October 5, 2000 was the storming of the “TV Bastille,” during which security forces prevented the employees and protestors from lynching Milanović. Handke tucks under the carpet the information that he was the only high official from Milošević’s entourage who was tried and sentenced to prison for his crimes from the 1990s. Truth be told, he mentions that Milanović was also put on trial for corruption, specifically for assigning apartments to a group of television employees, but he doesn’t mention the proportions of this affair: 170 apartments given to members of television personnel loyal to him and to the regime he was serving. That’s hundreds of thousands of Deutsche Marks in a country where, only a few years earlier, during the government-induced hyperinflation, the average monthly income was only a couple of Marks (for those few who were lucky to have regular employment). In one of many interviews he gave in the spring of 1999, Handke said that “collateral damage is the meaning of this bombardment.”68 Another evasion: the meaning of this war was collaborative damage. That is the full significance of the “Milanović story” and many other stories from the Yugoslav wars. On the one hand, NATO’s decision to bomb television studios located in a densely populated urban area was clearly a war atrocity. In its report “The Crisis in Kosovo,” Human Rights Watch argues that RTS headquarters did not qualify as a legitimate war target: Even if one could justify legal attacks on civilian radio and television, there does not appear to be any justification for attacking urban studios, as opposed to transmitters. After strikes on the Belgrade and Novi Sad headquarters, Yugoslav state broadcasters were able to easily move operations to other facilities. In this case, target selection was done more for psychological harassment of the civilian population than for direct military effect. The risks involved to the civilian population in undertaking the

260  B. JAKOVLJEVIĆ urban attack thus grossly outweighed any perceived military benefit. What is more, NATO failed to provide clear advance warning of the attacks “whenever possible,” as required by Protocol I, art. 57.69

In its report “NATO/Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: ‘Collateral Damage’ or Unlawful Killings?” Amnesty International went even further, stating that “the attack on the RTS headquarters violated the prohibition to attack civilian objects contained in Article 52 (I) and therefore constitutes a war crime.”70 On the other hand, that night Dragoljub Milanović did nothing to protect his employees. As Zoran Janić points out in his book Tišina u Aberdarevoj [Silence in Aberdareva Street], despite repeated warnings about the possible bombing of RTS studios, during the night between April 22 and 23 there were between 150 and 160 employees in the RTS building, up to three times more than necessary for running night programs. Furthermore, the head of this media house did not follow the explicit order of the Yugoslav Federal Government (Decree #37) about the mandatory evacuations of public buildings, and also prevented the enforcement of RTS safety procedures.71 While low-level employees were left in the building, all of the high-ranking editors and managers who had ties with government officials left the building well before the NATO rocket struck.72 Within hours of the bombing, the families began to suspect that their loved ones were intentionally sacrificed to make yet another propaganda case about ruthless NATO aggression. On April 26, while Handke was busy investigating a Kopaonik mountain resort, the first six victims of RTS bombing were buried. Milanović gave a propaganda speech during the memorial held at the cemetery in driving rain. While he spoke, the family and friends of the victims started booing, and as he rushed to the car where his chauffeur was waiting for him, shouts of “Killers! Killers!” came from the crowd.73 So why eulogize and excuse this despicable character? Or other despicable characters such as Milan Lukić? Why them and not someone else? If Handke was so revolted with NATO, why didn’t he write about the parents of Siniša Medić, who searched in vain even for the smallest speck of their son’s body, which was pulverized in the bombing of the television building, but were left with nothing to bury? Why not so many others, who suffered in innumerable ways? Why present the “case” of Milanović? Why the tearful poem for Milošević? Why the dictator and his cronies? Why, if not for their privileged access to the “Serbs,” whom they robbed

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and abused, and made into willing participants in their own humiliation; whom they sent to slaughter others and be slaughtered, whom they humiliated and belittled, and whom they scattered in the winds? What Handke learned from them is that cruelty goes unnoticed if it is wrapped in the rhetoric of self-victimization. Importantly, this cold sadism is always aimed equally at the perceived enemy and the compatriots. Handke has the poetic license to use his superb prose to rationalize whichever crimes and criminals he wants, and he had picked the safest route to do that: even the worst serial killers are to some degree misrepresented in the media. One Yugoslav war that is routinely overlooked, and that in fact has never been seriously considered, is the war that the Serbian regime under Milošević waged against its own citizens. Unlike the wars he waged in Croatia or Kosovo, Milošević won this war. And here, despite all that he has been saying, Handke is siding with the victors. This is his SainteVictoire, where he makes his stand until the bitter end. The dugout grows into a floating hotel, big enough to constitute an enclave. This seems to be a remnant of a much bigger enclosure that Handke discovered in his early wanderings around “his Balkans.”74 In “the land between the rivers” he wants to find that “never-to-be-­ defined” Volk he had been searching for since, at least, The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire.75 In his winter travelogue from Serbia he confesses that “there remains with me from there the image, in contrast to our own, of a sharpened and almost crystalline everyday reality. As a result of the war? No, much more the consequence of an entire, great people, Volk, that knows itself to be scorned apparently throughout Europe …”76 Handke sees this national consciousness as an unintended outcome of the international sanctions against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and asserts that the “crystalline everyday reality” he observed is shielding Serbia from the corrupting commercialization of capitalism. The enclosure constrains, but, Handke suggests, it also protects. He finds “something happy, light, vivacious” in the process of “buying and selling” in Belgrade open-air vegetable markets: From the messiness, mold, and forced nature of mere business deals that arose there, in miniature but in myriad variety, something like an original and, yes, traditional pleasure in commerce. Paripassu business dealings: the meaning of such a term was renewed here in this isolated country, as was, for example, the word ‘notions’. Business be praised: would you ever have expected something like that from yourself (and it wasn’t even

262  B. JAKOVLJEVIĆ commissioned)? And I caught myself then even wishing that the country’s isolation—no, not the war—might continue; that the Western (or whatever other) world of goods and monopoly might continue to be inaccessible.77

But now, that is no longer the case. The dugouts have been beached— no: buried—and everything seems fine. The “new economy” is “all-­ pervasive,”78 and the country has been “disenclaved.”79 This neo-liberal fairy-tale has been built by the folks that Handke has been exculpating since the 1990s. Highly visible atrocities such as the siege of Sarajevo and genocide in Srebrenica were inseparable from the bloodless (and also very bloody) crimes that Milošević’s regime perpetrated against the citizens of its own country. These crimes are buried under the representations of ‘Serbs’ in Handke’s prose no less than in news reports he criticizes. Did he hear about the cycles of hyperinflation in 1989 and in 1993–1994? Is he aware who was the machinator behind both of these highly orchestrated robberies of the citizenry? Who are the winners and who are the losers in these and other crimes in and around Serbia? Do the lines of victory and defeat in these crimes coincide with national boundaries? If not, Handke, what do you make of it? From your first writings until the very latest, the Volk that you find in Serbia is hobbit-like: small people in a faraway land, children in grown men’s bodies, running around endlessly serious but patient, with their small economies, worries, sorrows, envies, rivalries, grievances… They appear like that “procession of protohumans” you describe in The Moravian Night: “tiny frogs, not much bigger than ants” which, like “a people on the move,” “lumbered and wobbled awkwardly along, zigging and zagging, out of order, sometimes veering to the side; crawling, groping, scouting their way forward…”80 Perfectly exposed to a squashing, they were stepped on, and mashed, and pounded, heavily. In Travel by Dugout, the Greek (your alter ego) describes a rally of cab drivers he witnessed in the streets of Belgrade: “They were protesting in front of a government building that had nobody in it, except, perhaps, the night watchmen, protesting the death of their own, silently, with the myriad of lit-up taxi-for-hire signs.”81 What or who killed the cab driver? What about scores of unresolved murders that took place in the 1990s all over Serbia, some of which were likely to happen during one of your visitations? Did you hear about the mass anti-government protests in the winter of 1996–1997? Have you seen any images of nighttime beatings of protesters and common citizens by packs of special police forces in

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plainclothes? If you don’t trust independent media in Serbia, would you trust Scott Abbott and Žarko Radaković, your pilots and translators, who witnessed one of these beatings in the streets of Belgrade only a day or two before your arrival there in the spring of 1998? A flood of angry people swept into the street. The police stepped back. The crowd stormed past. A line of blue-coated policemen stepped in front of them. The crowd moved on, more slowly, filtering through holes in the line. A white-haired couple screamed at the policemen, blew their whistles, gestured wildly. Green-and-yellow flags waved. Ten short-haired men, big men, in black leather jackets and jeans stepped between the police and the crowd. When the next person moved forward, a black-coated man pushed him back. An advancing woman got the same treatment. Skirmishes ensued. Quick exchanges of blows. Flashfights. Thugs against citizens. No match. The crowd fell back while cameras rolled, five or six TV cameras, a dozen or so still cameras, held high to record the fighting. Footage, in seconds, for the evening news … A policeman drew back his boot and swung it at a seated person. Then again. Other policemen kicked at crossed legs and bent knees. The crowd jumped up and turned and drew back and began to run. The police moved rapidly with them, kicking and swinging nightsticks.82

Did any of your friends, guides, drivers, poets, river pilots ever tell you about the word smrtnjak from Vuk Karadžić’s Serbian Dictionary (Srpski rječnik, 1818), meaning a boat, Einbaum? It translates, roughly, as something like mortifier, and depicts the situation in which the dead carry the living, like that girl in the water, or crushed TV workers. Did they tell you the name of the first victim of Yugoslav wars? His name was Branivoje Milinović, 17 years of age, and he died on Knez Miloš Street in Belgrade, during anti-Milošević demonstrations on March 9, 1991, from a police bullet. While the plainclothes thugs were the special variety of Milošević’s regime, the pattern is applicable to the entire region. None of the seven states that emerged from the ruins of the former Yugoslavia is innocent of crimes against its own citizens: consider the treatment of the “erased” in Slovenia, ethnic cleansing in Croatia, disappearances in Kosovo, the mafia killings in Montenegro, ethnic violence in Macedonia, suppression of workers’ protests in Bosnia… By creating vast zones of impunity for “dirty wars” that the leaderships of post-Yugoslav societies waged (and are still waging) against their own citizens, international institutions such as the UN Security Council, NATO, and indeed

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the ICTY, contributed to the creation of deeply corrupt political and justice systems in the region. Handke’s “Yugoslavia prose” is paradigmatic of the patterns of self-victimization that nation-states that emerged from the former Yugoslavia use for their own justification. The result of all of that is the lack of minimal agreement about the meaning of the Yugoslav wars and about their real outcomes. All that the best of art, including theater that emerged during and after these wars, could do was to ask questions. No scholarly work, including this volume, has been able to provide answers.

Notes







1. Three verses from the poem The Dead Girl in the Water [Die Tote im Wasser] from Georg Heym, Poems, trans. Antony Hasler. (London: Libris, 2004), 55. By courtesy of Antony J. Hasler. 2. I am grateful to Burgtheater dramaturge Rita Czapka for sharing a video recording of this production with me. 3. Peter Handke, “Voyage by Dugout, or The Play of the Film of the War,” PAJ 34, no. 2 (2012): 96. 4. Ibid., 97. 5. Ibid., 97. 6. Out of all of Handke’s early texts on Yugoslavia, only A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia has been translated into English. The translator was Scott Abbott and the book came out in 1997. 7. His nomination for the award was withdrawn after his appearance and speech at Milošević’s funeral. Claiming that he intended to donate 50,000 Euro from this award to the Serbian enclave of Velika Hoča in Kosovo, he later collected this sum with the help of Claus Peymann, who in the meantime had moved to the position of artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble in Berlin. 8. I am grateful to Davor Beganović for calling my attention to the first of these two titles. 9. His travelogues from these visits were collected in Unter Tränen fragend [Questioning While Weeping], published by Suhrkamp. 10. Handke, Voyage by Dugout, or The Play of the Film of the War, 96. 11. Handke is certainly aware of this headgear, although he didn’t include it in “The Tale of Hats in Skopje,” a story in his collection Once Again for Thucydides. 12. Handke, Voyage by Dugout, or The Play of the Film of the War, 96. 13. Ibid., 62.

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14. In his 1980 book The Lesson of Mount Sainte-Victoire, having confessed that he had always been looking for “teachers,” Handke refers to John Ford as “den Meister” (See Peter Handke, Slow Homecoming: The Long Way Around; The Lesson of Mont-Sainte-Victoire; Child Story [New York: New York Review of Books, 2009, 52]). While the proper meaning of “Meister” is the teacher, in published English translation this phrase has been rendered as “the great John Ford” (ibid., 164). If, as some Handke scholars suggest, The Lesson of Mount Sainte-Victoire is the work that sets the tone for the writer’s “middle period” of the 1980s, then Travel by Dugout could be seen as a repudiation of at least some of his aesthetic alliances and ideals of that phase. 15. Handke, Voyage by Dugout, or The Play of the Film of the War, 67. 16. Of course, here I am in complete disagreement with Fritz Wefelmeyer’s assessment that this play “is certainly not a case of a covert trial, perhaps an adjunct to the international tribunal in The Hague,” as cited in Fritz Wefelmeyer, “Handke’s Theater,” in The Works of Peter Handke: International Perspectives, eds. David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2005), 231. 17. In his staging, Peymann followed and amplified Handke’s directions that indicate this spatial and symbolic layering of the play. 18. Handke, Slow Homecoming: The Long Way Around; The Lesson of MontSainte-Victoire; Child Story, 176. 19. Ibid., 180. 20. Ibid., 128. Between 1979 and 1981, Handke published three books of prose and a play (Langsame Heimkehr, Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire, Kindergeschichte, and Über die Dörfer: Dramatisches Gedicht), which are widely considered a major turning point in his career (Karl Wagner, “Handke’s Tetralogy,” in The Works of Peter Handke: International Perspectives, eds. David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2005), 132). The English translations of the first three were combined into the book Slow Homecoming (1985, 2009), and the play was published separately as Walk About the Villages: A Dramatic Poem in 1996. In Yugoslavia, the tetralogy was published in Žarko Radaković’s translation from 1988 to 1990. 21. Handke, Slow Homecoming: The Long Way Around; The Lesson of MontSainte-Victoire; Child Story, 178. 22. Peter Handke, Rund um das Große Tribunal (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 15. 23. Handke, Slow Homecoming: The Long Way Around; The Lesson of MontSainte-Victoire; Child Story, 189. 24. Ibid., 178. 25. Handke, Voyage by Dugout, or The Play of the Film of the War, 71.

266  B. JAKOVLJEVIĆ 26. Ibid., 74. References to films about the Bosnian war don’t end here. At one point, one of the “three internationals” tells about one of her “colleagues who, risking his life, saved thirteen orphans from the besieged city,” a story which British director Michael Winterbottom turned into the film Welcome to Sarajevo. Ibid., 86. 27. Ibid., 81. Louise Arbour served as ICTY prosecutor from 1996 to 1999. 28. Ibid., 91, 72. 29. Handke, Voyage by Dugout, or The Play of the Film of the War, 101. 30. In his English translation of the play, Scott Abbott inexplicably substitutes back the source name, thus revealing the identity of the parodied journalist. For the original, see Peter Handke, Die Fahrt im Einbaum, oder Das Stück zum Film vom Krieg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 89. 31. Weschler’s article was a report from the proceedings in the first high-profile trial held at the ICTY. Duško Tadić was a Bosnian Serb indicted for crimes against Muslim prisoners in the notorious Omarska detention camp in northwestern Bosnia. 32. Lawrence Weschler, Vermeer in Bosnia: A Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 24. 33. See ibid., 18 and passim. 34. As it happens, in 1948, a year before Life Magazine showcased Jackson Pollock’s Long Island studio on its pages, the US Supreme Court’s Paramount Decree forced major film studios to give up their theatrical chains, which “effectively ended vertical integration in the movie business” (Lynn Spigel, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 17). This twilight of the big motion picture studio system coincided with the rise of television networks: the same year the monopoly in the film industry was disbanded, CBS announced its plans to build the “largest television studio plant in the United States,” and five years later it opened the Television City in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles (ibid., 118). This transformation from a spatial enclosure to an open city marks the transformation of the studio as the place of picture-making to the general principle of circulation of images. 35. The official languages of the Tribunal are English, French, Albanian, and what the ICTY staff refers to as BCS (Bosnian–Croatian–Serbian). 36. Handke, Voyage by Dugout, or The Play of the Film of the War, 92. 37. Ibid., 96. 38. See Karl Wagner, “Handke’s Tetralogy,” in The Works of Peter Handke: International Perspectives, 137. 39. Or of the rat crew from Heym’s poem I used as the epigraph in this paper. The same motif is persistent in German-language poetry, and Handke’s dugout could be seen as a continuation of this ghastly tradition. Consider

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Benn’s poem “Beautiful Youth” in Gottfried Benn, “Beautiful Youth,” translated by Michael Hoffman, Poetry 197, No. 6 (2011), 489: “The mouth of the girl who had lain long in the rushes / looked so nibbled. / When they opened her chest, her esophagus was so holey. / Finally in a bower under the diaphragm / they found a nest of young rats ….”—This brings a whole new layer to the symbolism of the “dugout.” 40. Handke, Voyage by Dugout, or The Play of the Film of the War, 98. 41. Peter Handke, A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia (New York: Viking, 1997 [1996]), 3. 42. Ibid., 4. 43. The result of this experiment in experiential translation was first published in Serbian as Ponavljanja: Putovanja u predele romana (Belgrade: Vreme knjige, 1994), and subsequently in English as Double Vision Vol. 1: Repetitions (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2013). 44. In Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise, Handke describes Bocokić as a “painter, driver, and an artist of living,” see Peter Handke, Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 9. 45. Peter Handke, The Moravian Night (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2016 [2008]), 38. 46. Consider, for example, the “fruit thief ” motif in The Moravian Night, 265; and Crossing the Sierra de Gredos (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007 [2002]), 273. 47. Handke, The Moravian Night, 4. 48. Ibid., 28. 49. Ibid., 168. 50. Ibid., 7. 51. Ibid., 281. 52. Ibid., 8, 67. 53. Handke, Voyage by Dugout, or The Play of the Film of the War, 79. 54. Handke, Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise, 39. 55. Lukić was apprehended in 2005 while hiding in Argentina and brought to the ICTY, where he was sentenced to life in prison. While in hiding, he was also tried and sentenced in Serbia in absentia for crimes he committed against Serbian citizens of Muslim ethicity. 56. Handke, Voyage by Dugout, or The Play of the Film of the War, 3, 18. 57. Ibid., 29. 58. Ibid., 107. 59. Ibid., 178. 60. Ibid., 310. 61. Peter Handke, Die Geschichte des Dragoljub Milanović (Salzburg: Jung und Jung, 2011), 13.

268  B. JAKOVLJEVIĆ 62. Deichmann’s claim to fame was his argument that the photographs of Muslim inmates behind barbed wire in the Serb-held internment camp of Trnopolje in northwestern Bosnia, which made headlines in western media, were actually staged. Serbian nationalists used his “evidence” to support their claims that the stories about torture and killings in Trnopolje and Omarska camps were the products of western media manipulation. I am not sure how Deichmann, or for that matter Handke, reacted to the discovery of the mass grave in Tomašica, near Trnopolje and Omarska. This is the largest mass burial site from the Bosnian war that has been discovered to date. 63. Handke, Unter Tränen fragend, 115. 64. Ibid., 144. 65. Ibid., 150. 66. Ibid., 152. Translation from the German by Erik Butler. 67. Ibid., 32. 68. Peter Handke, “Moral ist ein anderes Wort für Willkür” (interviewed by Willi Winkler), Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 15–16, 1999 (Feuilleton). 69.  Human Rights Watch. “The Crisis in Kosovo,” 2. https://www.hrw. org/legacy/reports/2000/nato/Natbm200-01.htm#P413_109721. Accessed September 15, 2017. 70. Ibid., 46. 71. Zoran Janić, Tišina u Aberdarevoj (Belgrade: Dan Graf, 2006), 24. 72. Ibid., 32. 73. See Janko Baljak’s documentary film Anatomija Bola [Anatomy of Pain], available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT5tkohcujg. Accessed September 14, 2017. 74. Handke, The Moravian Night, 117, 154. 75. Handke, Slow Homecoming: The Long Way Around; The Lesson of MontSainte-Victoire; Child Story, 175. Elisabeth Krimmer observes that “Heidegger’s philosophy exerted some influence on Handke’s recent works,” and she goes on to suggest that “while Handke is attuned to the impact of the Nazi past on the collective unconscious of today’s Serbian population, he does not reflect on the influence of his own childhood in the Nazi empire on his perception of the war in the former Yugoslavia” (Elisabeth Krimmer, The Representations of War in German Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 169). 76. Peter Handke, Walk About the Villages: A Dramatic Poem (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1996), 69. 77. Ibid., 41. 78. Ibid., 6. 78. Ibid., 302. 80. Handke, The Moravian Night, 260.



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81. Handke, Voyage by Dugout, or The Play of the Film of the War, 85. 82.  Scott Abbott and Žarko Radaković, Double Session 2: Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2014), 117.

Works Cited Abbott, Scott, and Žarko Radaković. Double Session 2: Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary. Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2014. Amnesty International. “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY)/NATO: ‘Collateral Damage’ or Unlawful Killings? Violations of the Laws of War by NATO During Operation Allied Force.” https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur70/018/2000/en/. Accessed September 15, 2017. Benn, Gottfried. “Beautiful Youth,” translated by Michael Hoffman. Poetry 197, no. 6 (2011): 489. Handke, Peter. Slow Homecoming: The Long Way Around; The Lesson of MontSainte-Victoire; Child Story, translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: New York Review of Books, 2009 [1979, 1980, 1981]. ———. Walk About the Villages: A Dramatic Poem, translated by Michael Roloff. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1996 [1981]. ———. Once Again for Thucydides, translated by Tess Lewis. New York: New Directions, 1998 [1995]. ———. Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996. ———. A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, translated by Scott Abbott. New York: Viking, 1997 [1996]. ———. Die Fahrt im Einbaum, oder Das Stück zum Film vom Krieg. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999. ———. “Moral ist ein anderes Wort für Willkür” (Interviewed by Willi Winkler), Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 15–16, 1999 (Feuilleton). ———. Unter Tränen fragend. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000. ———. Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, translated by Krishna Winston. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007 [2002]. ———. Rund um das Große Tribunal. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003. ———. Die Geschichte des Dragoljub Milanović. Salzburg: Jung und Jung, 2011. ———. Voyage by Dugout, or the Play of the Film of the War, translated by Scott Abbott. PAJ 34, no. 2 (2012): 61–99. ———. The Moravian Night, translated by Krishna Winston. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2016 [2008]. Hedges, Chris. “From One Militia Chief, A Trail of Plunder and Slaughter,” The New York Times, March 25, 1996. http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/25/ world/from-one-serbian-militia-chief-a-trail-of-plunder-and-slaughter.html. Accessed October 4, 2017.

270  B. JAKOVLJEVIĆ Heym, Georg. Poems, translated by Antony Hasler. London: Libris, 2004. Human Rights Watch. “The Crisis in Kosovo.” https://www.hrw.org/legacy/ reports/2000/nato/Natbm200-01.htm#P413_109721. Accessed September 15, 2017. Janić, Zoran. Tišina u Aberdarevoj. Belgrade: Dan Graf, 2006. Krimmer, Elisabeth. The Representations of War in German Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Spigel, Lynn. TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Wagner, Karl. “Handke’s Tetralogy.” In The Works of Peter Handke: International Perspectives, edited by David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2005, 131–148. Wefelmeyer, Fritz. “Handke’s Theater.” In The Works of Peter Handke: International Perspectives, edited by David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2005, 194–235. Weschler, Lawrence. Vermeer in Bosnia: A Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004.

Testimony Nihad Kreševljaković Nihad Kreševljaković

Director of MESS theatre festival, Sarajevo

Volkstheater/Roter Salon, Vienna (September 21, 2015) I was 19 when the siege of Sarajevo started, and shortly before that I had just started to study history. My twin brother was studying law and I remember the discussions we had in 1993 about who had chosen the more senseless thing to study. From the perspective of the siege, studying law seemed completely wrong—you have genocide happening around you and you can’t see any sense in the ideas of the law. On the other hand, all historians use this sentence about how history is the teacher of life, but you are directly witnessing that history has not really taught us anything. So I would say that my knowledge was never based on academic experiences, and I strongly believe that most of my knowledge is heavily influenced by the experience of the siege. I would just like to mention some of the things that relate to this statement, so as to show the perspectives of our everyday life under the siege. For example, I was always irritated when people said that someone died during the Sarajevo siege, shot by a sniper or killed by a N. Kreševljaković (*)  MESS International Theatre Festival, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_16

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grenade, because he/she was walking too slow, or too fast. And this is something we thought about for four years, it was something that was always on my mind: the fact that I could be killed any minute. After four years of thinking that, it affects you in some way. And I remember that during the siege I was walking a lot (I was working first as a fireman in Professional Fire Brigade and, later on, as a post officer for the Bosnian Army) and I was always very consciously thinking about walking, asking myself what was the “regular” kind of walk. So I really tried to find some kind of balance between not being too much in a hurry and not being too slow. So those kind of things were the daily thoughts of the citizens of Sarajevo. And I’m saying this because these activities were basically some kind of artistic experiences. So, the attack on Sarajevo started on April 6, 1992; the biggest battle happened on May 2, and after that day, Sarajevo was totally under siege. Being totally under siege means that you can’t go in or out of the city. That you have a well-armed army on the hills surrounding the city, shelling it, using snipers. That there is no electricity, no gas, no phones, no internet of course. On May 17, 1992, by decision of the city of Sarajevo, the War Theatre SARTR [Sarajevski Ratni Teatar] was founded. This is something we are very proud of. My father was the mayor of Sarajevo at the time. In that founding document they described the reasons for founding the SARTR, stating that it was a new institution founded for the special importance of defending the city. Today, as the director of SARTR, I still use this sentence, as I truly believe that artistic spaces, or theatres for that matter, are spaces in which we defend this concept of the city, the concept where diversity is the main aspect of our lives. This is important to underline because everyone will talk about diversity as a quality, but in practice, we don’t see people practicing it as something they really enjoy. When I decided to apply for the position of director of the Sarajevo War Theatre, for me, one of the most important experiences was that, basically, during the war we didn’t use any money for productions—for example, talking about Susan Sontag’s production of Waiting for Godot, we found some battery lamps to use during the rehearsal, or they got candles from the sponsors. We were managing like that. So, the concept where people work because they believe in things, and not because they get money out of this, is something that we today consider as one of the most important things. And this artistic experience is something we try to follow just as in that time.

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Having the experience of wartime Sarajevo, I formed my belief that real beauty lies in the fact that artists and cultural workers and intellectuals can believe in utopian things. It doesn’t matter that things don’t look real at all. We have an obligation to believe in our capacity—and I’m aware of how cheesy this may sound—to change things from what they are now. I would just like to mention a few things which I find interesting and relevant to this topic. For example the performance of Sklonište [Shelter], which was our first performance, the first theatre première in besieged Sarajevo, took place in September 1992. From the very beginning of the siege we had some theatre performances and different events which were held in theatres, but were mostly played in hospitals, or shelters. But the first written text and theatre première was this piece performed by the Sarajevo War Theatre SARTR. And that was basically a reflection of the real situation in Sarajevo—those artists were really coming to shelter in the Sarajevo Youth Theatre, talking, drinking, and there they came up with the idea of doing something. I talked to those people and then did a film called From Shelter to Sarajevo War Theatre, and what was interesting in all of this is that, on the one hand, some of those people thought that this was all senseless, and on the other you had those who thought this was something very important. And thanks to those people who thought it was important to do something, to act, today we have texts that I believe are not just a part of Bosnian cultural heritage, but also European. Talking about theatre repertoires during the Sarajevo siege, there are different stories, as you had not only professional theatre performances but also a lot of theatrical performances taking place in shelters, hospitals, etc. But according to Davor Diklić, the editor of the book Teatar u ratnom Sarajevu, 1992–1995. Svjedočanstva [Theatre in wartime Sarajevo, 1992–1995. Testimonies], there were approximately 2000 theatre performances held during the war in Sarajevo, which is a very impressive number. Although I would reduce that number a bit, still, just the fact that we can talk about this number is already impressive. The number of premières was, I think, maybe 100, which is still more than the number of premières that we have had now in the last four years. In relation to the theatre taking place in Serbia and Croatia at that time, the situation in Sarajevo was radically different. We were being shelled but we considered ourselves to be on the side of justice, which makes you much more relaxed about the whole situation.

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Next to this idea, I would like to add a personal memory, which I always mention to my colleagues from Serbia with whom I communicate and work very often today. I remember, during the war, watching a Serbian TV report from Zvornik, featuring the image of a Serbian flag fixed on the minaret of the mosque, with some Serbian folk music playing from the speakers of the mosque, and a journalist reporting from the spot saying “as you can see behind me, there is a Serbian flag on the minaret, you can hear Serbian music being played, Zvornik is liberated!” I saw it in Sarajevo and I sincerely believe that everybody was watching the news at that point; you could not say that you hadn’t seen this, everyone who saw this footage of the Zvornik mosque with this flag and with this music must have thought that something was wrong. I never found any article written in Serbia where somebody complained about the concept that you are liberating some city by putting anothers’ flag on the church or mosque and playing some inappropriate music from the minaret. So, the story about artists saying that they didn’t know, that they weren’t aware, is very similar to the story of artists in Nazi Germany saying that they didn’t know what was happening. Which is hard to believe, as they did witness their neighbors disappearing in huge numbers overnight. So, I think that when talking about theatre and art in the conditions of the war, the only important issue, as I mentioned before, is to talk about ethics in the context of art. I worked at a theatre festival for 20 years, and I had an opportunity to see some of the best performances of my lifetime. I was watching Robert Wilson, Peter Brook, Oskaras Koršunovas… But you know, I don’t remember ever having an experience like the one I had in the theatre during the war. I’m sure that these performances were not the best performances, but the thing is, when we talk about art and especially theatre (and here I’m not talking from any academic point of view, but from my personal experience), I believe that one of the most important things we can do as artists is to establish an interaction between the “us” onstage and the “us” in the audience. So the only complete interaction I ever experienced happened during those performances I saw during the war. And in that situation, being in a theatre meant, first of all, that you had to come to the theatre. I lived close to the theatre so I had only a few intersections to pass, but if you lived in the new part of the city you would have had to travel eight kilometers, risking your life every 50 meters. So the fact that people chose to come to the theatre under such conditions is incredibly impressive.

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Talking about what I find important in relation to the experience is the fact that the first people after the criminals (because criminals never stop communicating with each other; they were doing this during the war, selling, exchanging, smuggling things, etc.) who started communicating within the region were artists. So, the MESS Festival had already invited theatre groups from Belgrade to come to the Festival in 1997. Very soon, theatres from Croatia were invited as well. Nowadays, this looks normal, but at that time, I must say, I was not so much openminded because I was still living through those frustrations after the war. But I must say that Dino Mustafić, today’s director of the MESS Festival, was the one who said that it was important to start communicating. As Sarajevo War Theatre, we were invited to perform in the Belgrade Drama Theatre, but when we sent a proposal to perform in Trebinje,1 they told us: “change your name.” This person in Trebinje responsible for our guest performance asked us if we could avoid stating the full name of our theatre and use our acronym (SARTR) instead. And we agreed, because it was important for us to start this communication. We call ourselves Sarajevo War Theatre in the sense that we are fighting for peace; the word “war” is not taken as a strictly negative word. But for us, it’s really important to establish this communication: we believe that communication is one of the most lacking things in our society. We wish to establish communication with our colleagues in Bosnia who consider that this communication is some kind of a problem. This means that we are not ignoring their roles and positions in the wars, but we really want to openly talk about this. And open talk and communication is going in a good direction, although there is a lot of work in front of us. But the main proof that we have returned to “normality” will be the moment when we have that capacity of seeing each other’s works and performances, films, maybe even disagreeing on them, and not having difficult emotions about it.

Note 1. Trebinje lies within Republika Srpska, one of the two constitutional autonomous entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the other being the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Strategies for Challenging Official Mythologies in War Trauma Plays: The Croatian Playwright Ivan Vidić Darko Lukić

In the play titled Big White Rabbit, by Croatian playwright Ivan Vidić (born in 1966), an ambitious professor succinctly declares his impression of the cultural and spiritual condition of Croatia after the fall of communism and the war for independence, in a pompous and dogmatic manner: After everything we have lived through, various revolutions and fruitless experiments, extravagancies and the dirtiest debaucheries, one fact remains: the army, police, church, state and the system stayed pure… Our only stronghold is the basic, the inherited and the traditional. Everything else has already been tried and proved to be wrong.1

At the moment of the first public performance of this play in 2004, the audience recognized these words with a smile as Vidić’s typical sarcasm directed at the predominant Croatian nationalist, nationalistic, and nation-building myths and mythologies. However, prior to this, Vidić’s

D. Lukić (*)  University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_17

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texts had been causing discomfort for an entire decade. And while critics and theatre professionals unanimously embraced Vidić’s plays, they remained on the margins of mainstream Croatian theatre, performed mostly in alternative theatres. Occasionally, there were some attempts to make a breakthrough and perform them on large mainstream stages, which undeservedly received adverse criticism. For an entire decade, Ivan Vidić’s plays, such as Groznica [Fever] (1993), Bakino srce [Grandmother’s Heart] (1995), Octopussy (2001) and Veliki bijeli zec [Big White Rabbit] (2002), as well as his other texts, have subversively undermined the national mythology constituted in Croatia after the country gained its independence, during and immediately after the war. Ruthlessly and vehemently, Vidić pinpointed conservative matrices that served as the basic foundation for the nation-building mythology, that is Catholic clericalism, machismo, nationalism, the idealistic picture of rural life in the nineteenth century, militarism, the fabrication of national myths, and the construction of false traditions. Vidić’s Groznica is a grotesque parody of the bourgeois social pattern, the idealization of national history and the cult of a mother who gives birth to a soldier. Bakino srce was initially titled By the Fireplace, which is a direct reference to a very banal and primitive novel written by the notorious Croatian minister of culture during the Second World War and the promoter of Hitler’s racial laws in quisling Croatia (Mile Budak) who, in the 1990s, suddenly gained the public status of a kind of “reputable” writer from the first half of the twentieth century.2 In this text, Vidić mercilessly renounces the cult of the patriarchal family and “a humble common man” as a natural birthplace of all forms of fascism with open tendencies to revise history in the context of the new “nation-­building” mythologies. In Octopussy, he depicts the unscrupulous enrichment of the new war-profiteer class and the dominance of brutal emigrants returning to Croatia only to rule the country and construct it in line with their frustrations on the margins of developed Europe. Finally, Veliki bijeli zec explores a painful tragedy experienced by Croatian war veterans, destroyed by PTSD, neglected, living on the verge of poverty, giving into alcohol and dreams about the glorious and heroic past that no one finds interesting anymore, except for the occasional anniversaries and military parades in the function of further fortification of the state mythology. Vidić writes about all those topics during the period 1993– 2003, and his dramatic oeuvre from that period indicates all prominent features of war trauma drama. During the decade when people were

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publicly proclaimed enemies of the state and nation with u ­ nbearable ease, Vidić, as a talented and very disquieting playwright, posed a s­ erious “problem.” As someone who volunteered for the front, Vidić took part in defending the country, and as opposed to many professional patriots who went into hiding in Vienna, New York City or at least an agitprop office in Zagreb, he participated in the fierce battles to defend Dubrovnik. Due to this, it was impossible to accuse him of a lack of patriotism. A much more effective strategy was to simply ignore his talent. Vidić was simply removed from the official state and nation-building kitschy coulisse and placed on the margins for an entire decade. In that context, Vidić’s war trauma dramatic texts serve as an excellent example for highlighting the qualities of the few Croatian playwrights and their texts whose subgenre marked an entire generation’s subversive approach to war and post-war mythology. Since I have dedicated a number of years of extensive research into the field, by studying the American plays on the topic of the Vietnam War as well as about twenty Croatian authors who wrote about the trauma of the war for Croatian independence (or the Homeland War), in Vidić’s plays I discovered an exemplary model of drama that simultaneously and directly corresponds with the challenge of war trauma. Vidić testifies about his own experience of war trauma, at the same time indirectly providing a reflection of other people’s war traumas.3

Defining “War Trauma Plays” The term “war trauma plays” is a derivation of the common term “trauma literature” introduced by the American sociologist and c­ultural studies scholar Kalí Tal.4 In her extensive research on writers and fiction authors belonging to various groups of trauma victims, such as ­ Holocaust survivors, Vietnam veterans, victims of sexual or child abuse, Tal implemented the interdisciplinary approach to their literature(s). In her analysis, which used methods of literary theory, psychology, sociology, and literary criticism, Kalí Tal established a special status for “trauma literature” as a separate genre. She was well aware of a “new kind of critical practice”5 that this approach was instigating, and the fact that “trauma literature,” as a specific genre, could be nominated as a subspecies or a “subgenre”6 in hybridizing with different kinds of literature of oppressed individuals, groups and communities, minority groups, etc.

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Here, it is important to observe the importance of the distinction made between “legitimating histories” and the quite distinct “histories of mourning,”7 which constitute trauma experiences both on an individual and community level. Paul Connerton refers to great, large-scale, universal “historical traumas” producing “broad types of suffering,” and especially to that smaller scale, “more routinized forms of suffering” that are individual and intimate.8 All great national myths share a common feature: there is no space for individual trauma, since “behind the foreground narratives of justification, real or symbolic wounds are stored in the archives of cultural memory.”9 On the contrary, the literature on war trauma is always mainly about individual trauma. War trauma literature bears witness to traumatic experiences and “real or symbolic wounds” that are not “stored in the archives of cultural memory” but, rather, in the archives of individual memories and personal histories. In that process, as Alex Danchev points, “witness testimony is evidence, and something more than evidence… Witnessing shapes history and memory.”10 And such shaping is rarely, if ever, synchronized with the official mythology and institutionalized cultural memory. It is by all means legitimate to question whether Vidić’s plays could be treated as historical or, perhaps, even political theatre projects. My answer to both questions is no—and a very resolute no. None of them conform to the standard theoretical definition of historical drama and theatre and none of them had the slightest intention to produce any of the necessary effects of political drama and theatre. As a very specific subgenre of war trauma plays within the genre of trauma literature, they are clearly distinct from both historical plays and political theatre.

How Is War Trauma Drama Different from Historical or Political Drama? Although there is a long history of a clear correlation between history, especially the art of memory, and the theatre, with literary beginnings in Robert Fludd’s concept of memory as theatre, or, in fact, as a stage,11 historical plays and historical theatre construct facts from very selective memories and in high accordance with common knowledge and accepted collective memory. For that reason, the distinction between war trauma plays and historical plays is very clear. Paul Connerton asks “why do we produce histories?” and immediately answers that “histories seek to legitimate a present order of political and social power.” That legitimation can be given in “affirmative” or “critical” versions, depending

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on the justification or subversion of historical narratives or the political order.12 Always and exclusively, war trauma plays operate with p ­ rivate memories, individual histories, and personal myths. Therefore, they ­simply cannot make part of national mythologies, collective memories, and common knowledge but, on the contrary, function only in opposition with them or, at least, at a distance from them. There is a diversified and variegated corpus made of numerous very different war plays, which is not the topic of this paper. For the purpose of various analyses, there have been numerous well-elaborated and frequently presented collections published comprising each and every Croatian play ever written on the topic of war, mentioning war, or referring to the consequences of war.13 Using various approaches with rather random methodologies, the total number of “Croatian war drama plays” amounts to almost one hundred. Such a reductive approach is possible when the selection criteria are scientifically flexible and theoretically extremely extensive, or if they rely on rather elusive evidence. However, this kind of literature (including any type of play and any kind of remote or direct reference to the topic of war in Croatia ever written) does not belong to the subgenre of war trauma plays presented in this paper. First of all, war trauma plays are strongly and clearly marked by the authors’ evident personal and inner need to reconsider, redefine, challenge, and/ or destroy the mainstream social and political mythology refraining from the intention to act politically. Wherever it occurs, the influence and impulses of war trauma plays on mainstream theatre productions appear to have a rather late impact. As James Reston, theorist of “Vietnam literature” in the US and Vietnam war veteran, clearly pointed out: “In the moment when it became fashion to think about Vietnam, the nation has already forgotten completely the agony of that experience.”14 In Croatia, the delay was not that long at all: at the time when mainstream theatres and festivals were producing most of the war trauma plays, “the agony of experience” was not so remote and certainly not “completely forgotten”; yet it still took a few years until public theatres and festivals decided to face such a challenging and unpleasant topic. The main reason for this was the different tone and approach used in war trauma plays compared to the previously featured mainstream historical or pseudo-historical theatre, political theatre, or propaganda theatre—hit or miss performances called “war plays.” In the case of war trauma plays, the official social mythology was openly challenged and the

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audience had to face it. And theatre managements, of course, had to cope with the risks that such repertory decisions brought along. In their relationship with the dominant social mythology, Vidić’s plays were confronted with a rather intricate heritage of preceding national mythologies. Croatian social mythology is very specific in terms of historical experience and the treatment of its distinct mythological elements. There have always been several parallel, yet different and even opposite “competitive” mythologies in different parts and regions of Croatia, or even within the same region. Deprived of its independence for hundreds of years, Croatia had not developed state-based national mythologies about law, order, judgments, and justice embodied in national heroes fighting for the victory of ultimate principles. Quite the opposite: the Croatian epic is full of rebels, brigands, and conspirators who are constituent heroes of national myths in direct opposition with the principles of law and order, failing to obey the rules and respect the state. It is a mythology that idealizes the tragic hero in his loser’s withdrawal denoting escapism (including alcoholism) as a socially acceptable manner of coping with the troubles the individual is going through while clashing with the (almost always foreign) system or the establishment. The Croatian hero is neither a leader of triumphant ideas nor an architect of battles for justice; in most cases, he is a suffering victim in battles fought by the others, by strangers. Then came the 1990s, bringing independence, the transition from communism to capitalism, and war—all at once. A dreadfully demanding amount of work for a small nation and a newborn democracy. In terms of establishing and (re)creating social mythology, in the 1990s the newly independent country and Croatian society experienced the emergence of several “big dreams” in a relatively short and turbulent period of not more than a decade: a final fulfillment of the dream of independence, Europe as a “natural and historical habitat,” capitalism as a more liberal, freer, and more pleasant environment for people to live in, and the dream of freedom—individual, political and national. Old socialist and communist myths were swiftly demythologized and abolished on a large scale, only to make space for new myths based on all the above mentioned “big dreams.” New myths were hastily constructed from various bits of archives, historical memories, museums, tradition, heritage, religion, and folk tales, and finally reshaped according to the new social and political circumstances. This hybridization and recycling of social mythology was carried out following typical, well-known patterns where old myths are replaced with new ones while new myths are hybridized from a number of

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very diverse elements: from scientific facts to epic folk songs. The material found in folk tales was used in a way described by Jan Assmann,15 emphasizing the importance of oral history in the building of collective and ­cultural memory and, especially, in the formation of mythologies.16 As the process of establishing a state and a nation inevitably evolves from the creation of a particular mythology, one might note that the new social mythology in Croatia was established rather quickly and coherently. In order to give form to the common will, society uses a wide scope of rituals, as Chwe Suk-Young17 refers to Clifford Geertz: “authority creates ceremonies and rituals that form common knowledge.”18 Croatian theatre in the 1990s, especially the institutionalized National Theatres, played a very important role in such ceremonies and rituals. In his essay The Restauration, Ivan Vidić described that process of funding new national mythologies and inventing new traditions with explicit refusal and contempt: reconstitution, reinterpretation and reconstruction of important elements of the authentic Croatian cultural expression was initiated …The pastoral and Arcadian Croatian forest and grove, field and pasture, shepherd with a flute, folk prophets and tribunes were mixed with the elements of ecclesial rituals, the aesthetic of entertainment and music scene and spectacular sports events … Croatia always gains something. But it is scary to even think about what Croatia is gaining in reality.19

Needless to say, there were more than enough artists and theatre productions ready to support this process, reaffirming the new mythology and contributing to the consolidation and predominance of mainstream social mythologies. As Michal Sládeček and Jelena Vasiljević20 remind us, “cultural reminiscence is distanced from everyday memory, with symbolical meanings which transcend the time.” Through such distances the memory reaches its point of “objectivisation” in culture, where it “begins institutionalised and symbolically mediated.”21 In fact, the “symbolical mediation” means that a common myth or a national myth is necessarily formed of selected elements of facts. For that reason, Paul Connerton reminds us of the function of Jean-François Lyotard’s metanarratives or, maybe, even pseudo-­ narratives, which are “institutionalised, canonical and legitimating; they pretend to represent an external object and then they pretend to be a narrative” and, what is even more important here, “they are ‘official’; they are

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the ‘legitimations of theorists’; they tell the stories ‘which are supposed to rule’.”22 In the context of Connerton’s different types of forgetting, the formation of national myths often combines the formation of new identities, annulment, and repressive erasure.23 The pattern of Croatian construction of the new national mythology precisely followed all these steps and strategies. Vidić’s war trauma drama lies on the sidelines of such national mythologies and collective reminiscences because it uses completely different and quite opposite strategies to approach war topics and war memories, in personalized and individual approaches to the war experience and the new mainstream social mythology. Most of these were closely connected to the war trauma art, and thus with war trauma plays, too. Ivan Vidić himself did not take part in the process of creation of the mainstream social mythology, but distanced himself from any kind of ideology during the turbulent 1990s. As Dubravka Vrgoč points out in her research on Croatian drama and theatre in the 1990s,24 the best Croatian playwrights simply “do not want to fill in the empty ideological space with any kind of ideology, myth, original meaning, traces of tradition, statement, constant speech or previously established values.”25

The Choir of Lonely Soloists In his “war trauma plays,” Ivan Vidić wrote for an audience who had their own experience of war, either at the same time or slightly earlier. Most of that audience had a chance to witness the war and experience some kind of war trauma by watching TV or just looking through their windows or to the next village. Their most natural urge to escape experiences of war trauma was fulfilled by going to the theatre to find moments of relief and oblivion, or refuge from discomforting reality, at least for a brief period of time. That is the main reason why Ivan Vidić (like all other Croatian war trauma playwrights) did not receive a massive response from the audience, nor did he produce much interest from theatre programmers at the time his plays were written. Although Vidić wrote as the events were unfolding, his standard procedure was not a verbatim account, nor even a docudrama, but rather fiction-based dramatic plays, more or less in line with the postmodern dramatic style. An analysis of Ivan Vidić’s war trauma drama from the perspective of the author’s position in the dominant, mainstream social and national mythology indicates his utter disappointment with most of

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the basic elements of collective mythology in all of the above-mentioned plays, which may have contributed to the constitution of personal myths. Evidently, that was not the case. Great disappointment and betrayed expectations considered with much greater hindsight (and therefore providing a much more accurate assessment) are described by Horvat and Štiks as a mixture of war tragedy, economic collapse, cultural devastation, and abandonment by the democratic world.26 Beyond such disappointment and anxiety, there is also strong emotional involvement since, as Danchev notices, “Witnessing is intimately bound up with suffering. Loss is the common currency.”27 In that sense, one might conclude that Vidić followed a path of “continuity of discontinuity,” opting for constant variations that avoided any secure anchoring in a solid statement or a chosen mythology. Certainly, he is typically positioned as “non-aligned” and “non-affiliated” in relation to the mainstream national and social mythology. If we consider myths of the nation, race, faith (or religion), and gender as basic solid elements of constituting any national and social mainstream dominant mythology, Ivan Vidić, like most Croatian war trauma writers, has never expressed the slightest sympathy for nationalism, racism, machismo, or any religious belief. Without those “marble foundations” of any national and cultural mythology, he simply had no foothold to make him feel “at home” and to dwell somewhere that might be called a cozy place like home. None of the fundamental elements of national mythology offered a possible shelter to him. Militant vocabulary prevailed on the public stage, especially during the war. For Vidić, this was not the language he spoke, and I strongly believe that he was not even able to understand it sufficiently. The process of organizing the past, which Pierre Nora28 calls “an eradication of memories by triumphant history,” is a crucial moment of rupture of “ancient liaison of identity” represented by the “sameness between history and memory.”29 In the context of that change, “remembrance is passing through the process of the most careful reconstruction.”30 In the opposition with “archivist remembrance,” Nora emphasizes “remembrance as individual duty.”31 For Vidić and his war trauma plays, basic, simple, and clear “black and white” mythology, so indispensable during wartime and the early stages of The Birth of the Nation process, was simply unacceptable. At the same time, his sense of “remembrance as individual duty” was quite obvious and rather strong. So, the effect of war trauma has

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necessarily lead him to demythologization as a reaction, yet without opening space for the establishment of an alternative mythology in lieu of the replaced and challenged one. That “nowhere position” is quite typical for all trauma literature and war trauma plays in any culture. Ivan Vidić and the best Croatian playwrights are no exception to this rule. At the point where playwrights are no longer in a no man’s land and have a very firm position, other dramatic texts are found, i.e. those that treat the topic of war differently and thus compose the aforementioned corpus of almost 100 titles. Ivan Vidić’s war trauma plays, therefore, follow the same pattern as any trauma literature in the process of challenging common mythologies and deconstructing propaganda simplifications by using as the author’s coping strategies a set of individual approaches to particular reactions and a diversity of responses to identical traumatic experiences. Another typical characteristic of war trauma plays is the urge (rather old-fashioned and out-dated even for the 1990s) for storytelling. Yet, in Vidić’s plays storytelling as a procedure has no connection to any kind of realism or conservative structure whatsoever. On the contrary, all the plays deflect from realism. Distancing oneself from realism is not only the consequence of an evident disconnection of Croatian plays from the contemporary “new European drama.” Even more so, the lack of interest for realism and the accurate portrayal of reality is the consequence of the redefinition of the author’s personal myths and his conflict with social myths and demythologization, so inherent to war trauma plays. This “lack of reality” is certainly a consequence of redefining personal myths: the author definitely abandoned the so-called “objective picture of reality” as well as any kind of formal realism, and even demonstrated his trust in the solidity and clarity of realistic forms. Vidić also expressed a deflection from realism in his treatment of time. As for his dramatic time, Vidić is clearly distanced from the period of his characters and plots. He always chooses the position of “well-informed storyteller,” which also precludes well-informed audiences: another typical feature of war trauma literature. Maurice Halbwachs noticed that the repetition of our memories is precisely where “a sense of our identity is perpetuated.”32 But, what happens to identity once we stop repeating the same memories? War trauma plays show deeply-rooted problems with identity on the level of depersonalization and uncertain identities.

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In the titles of all the plays analyzed in this paper, i.e. Groznica [Fever], Bakino srce [Grandmother’s Heart], Veliki bijeli zec [A Big White Rabbit], and Octopussy, there is not a single personal name to be found. These titles use the names of objects, facts, appearances, and animals. Even the characters themselves barely have regular personal names but rather names like She, Grandmother, Grandfather, Mother, Professor, Security Guy, Boss, Uncle, Aunt, Little Sister, Baby, etc. If a personal name appears, it is either a conspicuously common and typical Croatian name that sounds rather banal to a Croatian audience, or a completely unfamiliar and strange one (Fig. 1). Such distinct and obvious (also systematic) depersonalization of characters and their detachment from real personalities is another very typical feature of war trauma literature. American drama on the Vietnam War, for example, is also full of such examples. It is quite impossible to say that Vidić belongs to a movement, community or even a particular group. For an entire group of Croatian

Fig. 1  Actress Katarina Bistrović Darvaš as Jela 1 in the play Veliki bijeli zec [Big White Rabbit] by Ivan Vidić, 2004 (Photo N. N., courtesy of the Zagreb Youth Theatre ZKM)

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playwrights writing about war trauma I prefer to use the metaphor “a choir of lonely soloists.”33 A “personal history” is confronted with an “objective history” which is always institutional and “inserted into the structure of dominant institutions,”34 since “personal memory” is individual and distinctive from cognitive memories.35 At the time, such a position has inevitably put Ivan Vidić (as well as other Croatian war trauma playwrights) in a socially marginal position, or, at least, outside of the mainstream. Because of this, and because of their tenacious individualism, the authors never became a “group,” “school,” “stream,” “movement,” or any kind of a collective. They stood apart from a collective chorus, each of them singing her/his own song as a lonely soloist surrounded with the noise of collective responses to the war experience. Such particular, highly individualistic, highly personal, and unorganized influence resulted in the fact that the impact of Croatian social mythology was never as strong as, for example, the impact of the American “Vietnam War playwrights.” But in spite of such weak influence and modest impact, the demythologization was clear, evidently subversive, constant, and notable. Ivan Vidić is the most evident and most typical example of this.

Re-mythologization The high probability of re-mythologization is always a trap for war trauma plays. Because of their ideological innocence and porous statements, such plays can easily, although involuntarily and unwillingly, become part of a new kind of mythologization, or even form the constituting material for new myths. This is why Tim O’Brien, in his essay How to Tell the True War Story, warns that “if at the end of a war story you feel uplifted… then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.”36 There are different reasons why further interpretations and reinterpretations of war trauma drama can easily fall into the trap of re-mythologization. One of them, without any doubt, is the wellknown human idea of a “better past” or “golden age.” In the aftermath of traumatic memories of the Great War, and in the very beginning of the Second World War, Maurice Halbwachs wrote about “the reconstruction of the past.” In one of the earliest modern reflections on such a process, Halbwachs analyzed the “reshaping operation” of transforming memories and reconstructing the past, rooted in “what one might call nostalgia for the past,” describing the process as a construction of “this

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illusory appearance of the past.”37 This process usually takes place “if certain memories are inconvenient or burden us,”38 because “the mind reconstructs its memories under the pressure of society.”39 The second threat of possible re-mythologization is found in the turbulent process of reshaping identities and repositioning reminiscence strategies after the war trauma becomes distant enough, when a new common agreement about the shared past needs to be (re)negotiated. When focusing on “social memory,” Connerton notes that “we will experience our present differently in accordance with the different pasts to which we are able to connect that present”40 because the “images of the past commonly legitimate a present social order.”41 Something at first glance similar yet in reality very different to social memory is the strategy of “historical reconstruction.”42 Such reconstruction can easily reinterpret war trauma plays in a way which can (even involuntarily) result in new common mythologies (ab)using war trauma plays to the benefit of new mythological constructions or supposed re-mythologization. Looking back with sufficient hindsight, Srećko Horvat and Igor Štiks precisely pointed out common misapprehensions about the post-­ communist Balkan that have spread as a result of greater or lesser oversimplification of facts and misunderstandings of their historical and cultural complexity.43 This oversimplification is based on selective strategies, which Connerton calls “cultural forgetting.” Thus, Connerton notes: “At the opening of the twentieth-century memory was psychologized; at the close of the century the turn was to cultural memory.”44 As a direct result of such cultural memory, there is also a process or a phenomenon of “cultural forgetting.”45 During that process, a decade or two after their occurrence, Vidić’s war trauma plays can be easily misunderstood and misinterpreted as re-mythologization. The third important threat of possible re-mythologization may depend on the authors of war trauma plays. In the process of re-­mythologization, the author’s psychological motivation may easily follow an entirely unwanted and unconscious pattern of suppression or denial. On the author’s psychological level (such as the level of any human need for storytelling), there is always the concealed possibility of delaying, rejecting, or exaggerating some information without any intentional need to change or ignore the facts. These hidden mechanisms, together with unconscious strategies, should never be mistaken for the intentional selection and reshaping of information, so typical for propaganda literature, nor for a natural human urge to remodel the truth. As we are dealing

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with very personal and individual testimonies, as Danchev reminds us, it is important to accept that “the act of witnessing is not a neutral act. It does not leave things as the witness finds them. It does not spare feelings. The witness spares nothing and nobody, not even the witness.”46 But, at the same time, as Halbwachs points out, “society from time to time obligates people not just to reproduce in thought previous events of their lives, but also to touch them up, to shorten them, or to complete them so that, however convinced we are that our memories are exact, we give them a prestige that reality did not possess.”47 The playwrights dealing with war trauma are never focused on construction, but rather on deconstruction and the subversion of mythologies in respect to the facts related to social influence, in the course of their personal approach to their own literature, which can be contaminated with subsequent intention to mythologize their own traumatic experience, courage to bear witness and a role in the social impact which their plays eventually had on the audience’s reception. That makes the process of analyzing re-­ mythologization strategies an even more complex and responsible task. In war trauma literature and war trauma plays, the de-mythologization of social myths is almost consistently a strong and deep personal need that may be unconscious on a deeper level (as a result of coping with trauma) in the diversity and variation of its forms. At the same time, each and every war trauma author is always exposed to a bi-directional stream and the retroactive effects of re-mythologization. Any theoretical analysis should always bear these facts in mind and a serious scientific approach should never neglect that possibility. Any critical reception of texts on war topics which neglects to deal with such a delicate analysis is in great danger of overlooking a profound difference between war trauma literature and trivial mainstream writing on fashionable topics or even vulgar ideological propaganda.

Conclusion Ivan Vidić’s war trauma plays analyzed in this paper differ from other works of playwrights that tried to immediately respond to war and traumatic experiences which resulted in mostly propaganda type of plays. They were written in the period between 1990 and 2000, in the first decade of Croatian independence and during extremely turbulent times of political and economic transition and brutal and very traumatic military conflict. During that period, the question of identity (both national

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and religious) raised the vital question of “to be or not to be” in Croatia, as well as in all other ex-Yugoslav countries, leading to a series of violent conflicts. Igor Štiks precisely analyses this particular relevance of multiple identity problems in ex-Yugoslav conflicts and suggests a relation between “nationalist arguments based on identity politics” and violence.48 Besides that, Croatia, as all other post-communist countries, reopened the question of the World War II and the leading totalitarian ideologies from the first and second halves of the twentieth century. Reflecting upon special forms of social memory in post-communist countries, Paul Connerton concludes that “in Central and Eastern Europe, national memories were reappropriated in the wake of 1989, and the legacy of fascism and Stalinism remains to be confronted.”49 In such an ideological mess, with the reality obscured by war trauma, the witness role of drama and theatre was challenged by many ideological and mythological threats such as nationalism, war propaganda, the overgrowth of the religious (clerical) ideology and turbulences inherent to a very weak and fragile democracy. The public sphere was largely contaminated by historical revisionism idealizing the pre-communist period, especially the period of the quisling puppet state or the so-called Independent State of Croatia (clearly and directly linked to Italian fascism and German Nazism and ideologically identified with them). At the same time, in the very same community and nation, the resistance to such ideologies was also very strong, clear, and loud. Such a lack of an absolute consensus and the lack of ideological agreement on the national mythology made the situation in the Croatian cultural sphere even more complicated and confused. Jan Assmann suggests strong connections between reminiscence, memory, identity, and cultural persistence.50 In the Croatian case, it is always necessary to use plurals and to speak about reminiscences, memories, and identities, and this makes the ­cultural persistence rather blurry. The plays of Ivan Vidić, as the most representative and the best of Croatian war trauma plays, are analyzed in this paper by following the path of war trauma literature in its poetics of reminiscence, escaping the traps of ideological challenges, and using strategies of “inner isolation” or “inner exile.” In such a “non-position,” the plays remain almost completely ­disconnected from reality, as their author confronted his own memories, constructed individual reminiscences, and created a kind of private history.

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Notes 1. Ivan Vidić, “Veliki bijeli zec,” Kazalište, no. 11/12 (2002b): 166–167. 2. See Hrvatska enciklopedija, http://www.enciklopedija.hr/natuknica. aspx?id=9958. 3.  Results of the research and comparative studies of characteristics of American and Croatian dramatic literature on war trauma served as the topic of my doctoral dissertation published in 2009 in the book titled Drama ratne traume [War Trauma Drama]. 4. See Kalí Tal, “Speaking the Language of Pain: Vietnam War Literature in the Context of a Literature of Trauma,” in Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature, ed. Phillip K. Jason (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991a); Kalí Tal, “The Self Reflexive War: War Looking at Film Looking at War,” Jump/Cut, no. 36 (Spring 1991b); Kalí Tal, “When History Talks Back: Inviting Vietnam Veterans into the Classroom,” in The Vietnam War, ed. Marc Jason Gilbert (Stamford: Greenwood Press, 1991c); and Kalí Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 5. Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma, 76. 6. Ibid., 17. 7. Paul Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning, History, Memory and the Body (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 17. 8. Ibid., 16. 9. Ibid., 29. 10. Alex Danchev, On Good and Evil and the Grey Zone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 28. 11. See Frances A. Yates, Umijeće pamćenja (Zagreb: Jesenski i Turk, 2011), 373. 12. Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning, History, Memory and the Body, 1. 13. See Sanja Nikčević, “Croatian Theatre and the War 1992–1994,” in Theatre and performance in Eastern Europe: The Changing Scene, eds. Dennis Barnett and Arthur Skelton (Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, 2008). 14. James Reston, Coming to Terms: American Plays and the Vietnam War (New York: Theatre Communications Group Inc., 1985), ix. 15. Jan Assmann, Kulturno pamćenje (Zenica: Vrijeme, 2005). 16. Ibid., 79. 17. Michael Chwe Suk-Young, Rational Ritual—Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 18. Ibid., 19. 19. Ivan Vidić, “Obnova,” Frakcija, no. 1 (1996): 35. 20. Michal Sládeček, Jelena Vasiljević, and Tamara Petrović Trifunović, eds., Kolektivno sećanje i politike pamćenja (Beograd: Zavod za udžbenike, 2015). 21. Ibid., 12.

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22. See Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning, History, Memory and the Body, 2. 23. Ibid., 33–45. 24. Dubravka Vrgoč, “Nova hrvatska drama—primjeri dramskog stvaralaštva s kraja 80-ih godina,” Kolo, no. 2 (1997). 25. Ibid., 129. 26. Srećko Horvat and Igor Štiks, Dobro došli u pustinju postsocijalizma (Zagreb: Fraktura, 2015), 23–24. 27. Danchev, On Good and Evil and the Grey Zone, 40. 28. Pierre Nora, “Između sjećanja i povijesti,” Diskrepancija 8, no. 12 (1997): 135–165. 29. Ibid., 137. 30. Ibid., 146. 31. Ibid., 151. 32. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 47. 33. Darko Lukić, Drama ratne traume (Zagreb: MeandarMedia, 2009). 34. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 19. 35. Ibid., 140. 36. Tim O’Brien, “How to Tell the True War Story,” Esquire, October, 1987, 210. 37. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 49. 38. Ibid., 50. 39. Ibid., 51. 40. Connerton, How Societies Remember, 2. 41. Ibid., 3. 42. Ibid., 13. 43. See Horvat and Štiks, Dobro došli u pustinju postsocijalizma, 22. 44. Connerton, How Societies Remember, 1. 45. Ibid., 143. 46. Danchev, On Good and Evil and the Grey Zone, 30. 47. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 51. 48. Igor Štiks, Državljanin, građanin, stranac, neprijatelj (Zagreb: Fraktura, 2016), 198. 49. Connerton, How Modernity Forgets, 2. 50. Assman, Kulturno pamćenje, 18.

Bibliography Assmann, Jan. Kulturno pamćenje. Zenica: Vrijeme, 2005. Beronja, Vlad, and Stijn Vervaet, eds. Post-Yugoslav Constellations. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2016.

294  D. LUKIĆ Chwe Suk-Young, Michael. Rational Ritual—Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 2002. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. How Modernity Forgets. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ———. The Spirit of Mourning, History, Memory and the Body. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Danchev, Alex. On Art and War and Terror. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. ———. On Good and Evil and the Grey Zone. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Erll, Astrid, and Ansgar Nünning, eds. Cultural Memory Studies. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. Gašparović, Darko. “Što je (hrvatska) proza drami?” Kazalište VIII, no. 17–18 (2004). Zagreb: Croatian ITI UNESCO Centre. Geertz, Clifford. “Centers, Kings and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power.” In Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, edited by Clifford Geertz, 121–146. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Gluhovic, Milija. Performing European Memories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959. Habermas, Jürgen. “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power.” In Power, edited by Steven Lukes, 75–93. New York: New York University Press, 1977. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Horvat, Srećko, and Igor Štiks. Dobro došli u pustinju postsocijalizma. Zagreb: Fraktura, 2015. Hrvatska enciklopedija. http://www.enciklopedija.hr/natuknica.aspx?id=9958. Jestrovic, Silvija. Performance, Space, Utopia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Kolstø, Pal, ed. Media Discourse and the Yugoslav Conflicts: Representations of Self and Other. London: Routledge, 2009. Kuftinec, Arsham Sonja. Theatre, Facilitation, and Nation Formation in the Balkans and Middle East. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Lukić, Darko. “La Guerra y la Vida Teatral.” Primer Acto 7, no. 260 (1995): 35–39. ———. “Contemporary Croatian War Plays.” Slavic and East European Performance 17, no. 2 (1997a): 49–56.

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———. “Hrvatsko ratno pismo.” Kolo 9, no. 2 (1997b): 98–118. ———. “How Greek Drama Affected Playwriting Concerning the Contemporary Balkan Wars.” Fifth International Symposium on Ancient Greek Drama, December 1999a. ———. “Wojna Na Piora.” Dialog 12 (1999b): 27–38. ———. Drama ratne traume. Zagreb: MeandarMedia, 2009. ———. Kazalište, kultura, tranzicija. Zagreb: Croatian ITI UNESCO Centre, 2011. ———. Uvod u antropologiju izvedbe. Zagreb: Leykam International, 2013. Milohnić, Aldo, and Nada Švob-Đokić, eds. Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies. Zagreb: CultureLink, 1989. Nikčević, Sanja. “Croatian Theatre and the War 1992–1994.” In Theatre and Performance in Eastern Europe: The Changing Scene, edited by Dennis Barnett and Arthur Skelton. Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, 2008. Nora, Pierre. “Između sjećanja i povijesti.” Diskrepancija 8, no. 12 (1997): 135–165. O’Brien, Tim. “How to Tell the True War Story.” Esquire, October 1987. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics, the Distribution of the Sensible. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. ———. Dissensus, on Politics and Aesthetics. New York: Continuum, 2010. Reston, James. Coming to Terms: American Plays and the Vietnam War. New York: Theatre Communications Group Inc., 1985. Senker, Boris. Hrestomatija novije hrvatske drame, II. dio 1941–1995. Zagreb: Disput, 2011. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Knopf, 1977. ———. Together, the Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. London: Penguin Books, 2012. Sládeček, Michal, Jelena Vasiljević, and Tamara Petrović Trifunović, eds. Kolektivno sećanje i politike pamćenja. Beograd: Zavod za udžbenike, 2015. Štiks, Igor. Državljanin, građanin, stranac, neprijatelj. Zagreb: Fraktura, 2016. Tal, Kalí. “Speaking the Language of Pain: Vietnam War Literature in the Context of a Literature of Trauma.” In Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature, edited by Phillip K. Jason. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991a. ———. “The Self Reflexive War: War Looking at Film Looking at War.” Jump/ Cut 5, no. 36 (Spring 1991b): 32–45. ———. “When History Talks Back: Inviting Vietnam Veterans into the Classroom.” In The Vietnam War, edited by Marc Jason Gilbert. Stamford: Greenwood Press, 1991c. ———. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Vidić, Ivan. “Obnova.” Frakcija 2, no. 1 (1996): 34–36.

296  D. LUKIĆ ———. Drame. Zagreb: Hrvatski centar ITI, 2002a. ———. “Veliki bijeli zec.” Kazalište 8, no. 11/12 (2002b): 157–191. ———. Dolina ruža i druge drame. Zagreb: Hrvatski Centar ITI, 2012. Vrgoč, Dubravka. “Nova hrvatska drama—primjeri dramskog stvaralaštva s kraja 80-ih godina.” Kolo 10, no. 2 (1997). Yates, Frances A. Umijeće pamćenja. Zagreb: Jesenski i Turk, 2011.

Postmodern Antigones: Women in Black and the Performance of Involuntary Memory Aleksandra Jovićević

Thomas Bernhard spent his entire career alternatively mocking and mourning Austria’s Nazi legacy, which he, with his typical f­rankness, once described as “a pile of garbage on the stage.”1 In the plays and novels that Bernhard published during the last decade of his life, he addressed the Austrians even more ferociously, asking them to disrupt the silence surrounding the country’s Nazi past. In his last novel, Extinction [Auslöschung, 1986], he even more vividly dramatizes what he had previously defined as Herkunftskomplex, translated as origin-­ complex or a complex of descent, that is, a burden of unwanted inheritance. The narrator in this novel, Franz Josef Murau, has just received the news that his parents and brother have been killed in a car crash, leaving him the family estate. He feels nothing but resentment toward them and this estate, where his parents had hosted Nazis before and after the war. In his anger, he decides to write a book to be called

A. Jovićević (*)  Department of Storia dell’arte e Spettacolo, La Sapienza University in Rome, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_18

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Extinction, whose purpose would be to “extinguish everything that Wolfsegg means to me, everything that Wolfsegg is, everything.”2 But he also realizes that this cannot be done literally, only in literature, because he does not have the courage. Although at the end of the novel he hands over the estate to the Jewish community in Vienna, there is something pitiful in this individual gesture, because an act of charity alone cannot redeem what Bernhard saw as Austria’s pathology: Austrian society never underwent a process of denazification, or an emancipation from war crimes committed by Austrian Nazis during the Second World War. Murau’s weakness does not come from a difficulty that we feel every time we try to communicate to the other our most intimate experiences, but rather from the impossibility of accepting and expressing something that is completely unimaginable and at the same time unforgettable. According to Adorno, though discursive knowledge is adequate to reality, and even to its irrationalities, which originate in its laws of motion, something in reality rebuffs rational knowledge. Suffering remains foreign to knowledge; though knowledge can subordinate it conceptually and provide means for its amelioration, knowledge can scarcely express it through its own means of experience without itself becoming irrational. Suffering conceptualized remains mute and inconsequential, as is obvious in post-Hitler Germany.3

All that is left to Franz Murau are the words through which he tries to destroy his material heritage, a Nazi shelter. And it is only through words that he can condemn the legacy of Nazi atrocities, because he is without any other kind of power except language. It is through words that he finds out about his family’s accident, and it is only through words that he had learned about the Nazi’s atrocities. In spite of the fact that he does not have a first-hand memory of what happened, he wants to destroy this involuntary memory, while also feeling the obligation of that memory, so he decides to write a novel. To write is an act of remembering: Scholastique Mukasonga, a writer from Rwanda of Tutsi origin, claims that the obligation of memory for her became an obligation to write. Being outside of her country for years, she was the only member of her family that survived the genocide in Rwanda: Of all of those who were called cockroaches, that were killed, including the newly born, of all of those of whom even a memory had to be destroyed,

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I remained a memory and it was in me, and thanks to my writing, that it survived. The genocide made me a writer.4

Being a citizen of Serbia, I too have been an involuntary witness of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the wars and crimes that accompanied them (1991–1999), and the indifference with which the officials and the majority of the people in Serbia try to cope with, avoid, and suppress the roles played by the Serbian Army, paramilitaries, state officials and civilians. Instead of confronting the crimes and punishing the perpetrators, the state authorities consciously work on a process of what Friedrich Nietzsche defined as “active forgetting.”5 However, this process also creates a whole body of “involuntary memory” that, no matter how modest, emerges like a “memory in spite of forgetting.”6 In the best tradition of Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin situates a ­virtually limitless field of experiential modalities between an event and its recollection. The split between conscious voluntary memory and unconscious involuntary memory results from the split between individual and collective memory caused by secularization and individualization. Benjamin distinguishes between the products of “archival memory,” or Erinnerung (which denotes a fixed stock of singled out facts, an archive, where all past experiences have a fixed place), and Gedächtnis (usually translated as “remembrance,” which sees data flow together in a much less determined and controllable manner, presented as a continuous process within which memories can change place and form different connections). Benjamin sees remembrance as a process, a repeatedly changing stream, into which new experiences are constantly inserted.7 However, the constant denial and destruction of collective memory that connects the experience of contemporaries with that of previous generations is one of the most typical, yet at the same time most strange, phenomena of our century. The majority of those who grew up at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century have been raised in some kind of permanent present time, in which the organic relation to the historical past is missing.8 And because of this, “the entire contemporary social ­system started slowly to lose a capacity to remember its own past.”9 However, the main question remains: how can individuals, societies, and governments know about the suffering of individuals and communities yet still not act in their defense, as happened during the Yugoslav wars, 1991–1999? The question is also what to do with the knowledge that has been communicated, as well as with the memories that are

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constantly and purposefully suppressed or forgotten. According to Luc Boltanski, on one side there is an unfortunate person who suffers and, on the other, a spectator who views the suffering without undergoing the same fate and without being directly exposed to the same misfortune10 (it is impossible to know and feel the pain of others, according to Elaine Scarry).11 The further the spectator is from the ­unfortunate person, Boltanski claims, the more the disjunction between their situations seems to be insurmountable and in consequence, the action becomes more problematic. However, in order to assume an adequate attitude, the distant observer (Smith and Boltanski) or external bystander (Cohen) cannot remain indifferent, nor draw a solitary enjoyment from the spectacle.12 Stanley Cohen offers a theoretical foundation for the better understanding of the mechanisms of denial that enable a simultaneous “knowing and not-knowing” about events that are “too threatening to confront, but impossible to ignore.”13 He identifies three agents of denial in the “atrocity triangle”: “victims” (those to whom terrible events happen), “perpetrators” (those who enact violence), and “bystanders” (those who witness or who become aware of the suffering of the victims). Furthermore, Cohen distinguishes between “immediate bystanders” (those who bear witness to atrocity), “external bystanders” (those who know or learn about atrocity from a physical distance) and also “bystander states” (governing states and organizations that know about atrocity without stepping into aid the victims). All three types of bystanders engage in forms of denial that range from failing to acknowledge the occurrence of violence to dismissing its magnitude or the impact that violence has on its victims. Therefore, to give an account of the tragedy of the others, the remembrance must rise above local suffering and/or individual compassion in order to form a general picture, for example of an accounting kind, and must therefore compose this picture by assembling particular sufferings in such a way as to obtain an immense imaginary collection of all kinds of unfortunate people. Thus, I have started my research on different symbolic modalities of remembering and commemorating war crimes by those who do not have a personal recollection of these events, that is, by those who can be defined as either external bystanders or distant observers. I have departed from Paul Connerton’s assumption that, as well as different types of structural oblivion, there are specific modalities of remembering and memories relative both to modern and postmodern culture. According

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to Connerton, there are two aspects of remembering: the first depends on the stable system of places, while the other is implicitly connected to the bodies.14 These two aspects of remembering indeed offer essential indications for the understanding of different types of memories characteristic of postmodernity. Cultural patrimony, museology, ethnohistory, industrial archeology, war memorials, holocaust memorials, et cetera: all these concepts refer to a common interest in commemorating different aporias of humanity.15 However, what has been forgotten in postmodernity is something very profound: the intense compassion for the extreme suffering of people elsewhere, the memory of recent war crimes and atrocities. What interests me most here is how every year one nongovernmental, antiwar organization in Serbia, Women in Black—the Serbian branch of an international feminist and anti-militarist organization of 10,000 women worldwide—remembers and commemorates the execution of 8372 Muslim civilians in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. This despicable crime was committed over ten days: men and boys of Muslim ­origin were systematically shot by Serbian soldiers between July 11 and 22, 1995, and then buried in various locations, some of which are still unknown (so far 150 sites and 74 mass graves have been located). This is considered one of the worst crimes in European history, exacerbated by the fact that it happened in the midst of a globalized, developed, hightech, mediatized and united Europe. The main perpetrator, General Ratko Mladić, was found guilty of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ICTY in November 2017, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Yet although more than twenty years have passed, not all the bodies of missing people have been found (6504 people have been buried in the memorial center until July 2017, and every year there is a ceremony for burying more bodies that have been found and identified in the meantime) and except for the Memorial Park in Potočari, there is no real monument raised for the victims.16 The only people who grieve and memorialize the victims, aside from their families, are Women in Black through their various performances, such as for example in an action that took place several years ago: Par cipela–jedan život [A Pair of Shoes, One Life] (July 11, 2010), in which they invited the citizens of Belgrade to donate a pair of shoes, collecting 16,744 shoes in order to raise a symbolical monument in a form of a shoe-wall (Fig. 1). This recalled another action, proposed by Bosnians

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Fig. 1  Performance Par cipela–jedan život [A Pair of Shoes, One Life]. Women in Black, July 11, 2010 (Photo: Srđan Veljović, courtesy of Women in Black)

themselves in Berlin, to build an eight meter high sign reading “UN, made of shoes” and entitled “The Shame Pillar.”17 In 2010, the same year that Women in Black organized the collection of shoes for their shame pillar, a group on the extreme right, now in power in Serbia, cynically invited citizens to come and take a pair of the collected shoes for themselves, due to the economic crisis.18 On July 7, 2016, marking the occasion of the 21st anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica, Women in Black organized a similar protest. As always, they wore black and stood in silence in Republic Square in Belgrade, raising several different banners: “We will never forget the genocide in Srebrenica”; “Responsibility”; “Solidarity”; “We remember”; “Remembrance.” They also enacted a performance, Srebrenica 8372, during which ten women in black stepped out one by one with the red letters that created the word “Srebrenica.” Then four women came out, carrying the numbers 8, 3, 7 and 2, for 8372, the estimated number of victims (Fig. 2). At the end, all the activists stood on the steps of the monument to the Serbian prince Mihailo, forming a living monument. This was another symbolic installation/living memorial, the continuation of an attempt to construct a real monument to victims of the Srebrenica genocide.

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Fig. 2  Performance Srebrenica 8372. Women in Black, July 7, 2016 (Photo: Srđan Veljović, courtesy of Women in Black)

For example, a similar memorial, Kamen spoticanja [Stumbling Block], was made by Women in Black on July 7, 2015, in Srebrenička Street in Belgrade, and was destroyed in less than 24 hours.19 In spite of their silence and non-violence, the protests of Women in Black are very visible and have a strong impact on passersby, who are never indifferent: they are anguished, ashamed, irritated, or even mildly bemused. Sometimes people shout insults at them, or even try to attack them physically. Women in Black are always the first victims of any kind of riots and mass manifestations by ultra right-wing activists and disappointed soccer fans. According to Susan Sontag, to be a spectator of tragedies taking place in another country, or a geographically distant place, is a quintessential modern experience.20 Thus, the awareness of the suffering that accumulates in wars happening elsewhere and the commemoration of them through performance can be seen as a postmodern social construct. Indeed, if today the mass media is the biggest and most potent producer of images in the so-called society of Empire,21 then a live performance that happens here and now, with its subversive aesthetics, acquires a new power. While the media shows us what is happening in real time, the performances of Women in Black represent a confrontation between past and present, between forgetting and memory, between a promise to create a place of memory and the effective realization of that promise. Only recently have we been able to witness new forms of collective memory that are neither reduced to heroic deeds, nor to what Nietzsche

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calls monumental history, but are aimed at the universal recognition of suffering and the therapeutic surpassing of its paralyzing consequences: what Nietzsche called critical history. For example, putting together different methodological and disciplinary approaches (deconstruction theory and psychoanalytical studies as well as clinical research on the syndrome of post-traumatic stress), trauma studies were initially dedicated to the testimonies of survivors of the tragic events in the twentieth ­century, starting from the collective trauma of the Shoah. It was the first objective of this complex interpretative work, taking into account ­lacunas, silences, distorted memories, and subtractions, to progress to an examination of the various methodological instruments at its ­disposition. In seemingly marginal details, these studies have individuated the ­possibility of fundamental contents taken out of a History, attempting in this way to redimension the excessive abstraction that had been developing for years in theoretical and academic reflection. Giorgio Agamben claims a similar situation in the case of Auschwitz: at a certain point it became evident that “testimonies contained as their essential part certain lacunas that those who survived witnessed something that could not be witnessed,” and to comment on their testimonies necessarily meant to interrogate those lacunas, or rather, to try and listen to those who survived.22 According to Paul Ricoeur, we must always remember that not everything starts from the archives, but from testimonies, and whatever may be our lack of confidence in such testimonies, in the final analysis, we have nothing better than those testimonies. The confrontation among testimonies becomes even more important where there is no other type of documentation.23 Testimony takes us in one bound to the formal conditions of the “things of the past” (praeterita), the conditions of possibility of the actual process of the historiographical operation. Testimony opens “an epistemological ­process that departs from declared memory, passes through the archive and documents, and finds its fulfillment in documentary proof.”24 After Auschwitz was liberated, it seemed that this kind of crime could not ever be repeated, but still a similar genocide, of smaller proportions, happened in Srebrenica, in the heart of Europe, and only fifty years after the liberation of Auschwitz. To paraphrase Adorno, we should say: Never again Srebrenica! But how it can be prevented? What kind of education should be implemented? And how it should be remembered? If we go back to Connerton’s second premise, according to which the act of remembering does not depend only on a stable system of places and the

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testimonies of survivors, but implicitly on the bodies, then to c­ oncentrate on bodily (or incorporated) practices means to question the dominant idea that only written words or tangible monuments may be taken as a metaphor for remembering. Paul Connerton argues that images of the past and recollected knowledge could be conveyed and sustained by ritual performances, and therefore that a memory can be a memory of a body. And if the art of memory could be implicitly connected to a body, therefore it can also be defined as a performative memory, meaning that a performance of bodies that remember can be used as an instrument of memory. Connerton sees body as a fundamental site of memory on which commemorative ceremonies are based and can alter over time. This ‘bodily memory’ can also be manifested in various cultural objects that, in the case of Women in Black, are recognized in their dress code, their use of silence and banners.25 They always wear black to symbolize their grief for all known and unknown victims of the Yugoslav and all other wars.26 And they always stand in complete silence, because according to them, they “do not have words to express the tragedy that war provokes.”27 In contrast to a written account, which depends on the complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, the performances of Women in Black are conducted without words, except for the unsophisticated banners they carry, which contain simple messages potentially directed to all who are viewing them at a given moment. Thus, one must ask what it means to perform involuntary memory, as distinct from just acknowledging it. Women in Black enact a sense of the immediate past, because people present at their performances still remember very well what happened. Even if the passersby were clueless, they would understand that they are witnessing simultaneously an act of mourning and a protest. Using Boltanski’s classification of different types of semantic action between strong and weak, collective and individual action, I would place the performances of Women in Black in the category of a strong collective action, or into what Boltanski calls “effective speech,” based on their: (a) intentionality; (b) incorporation in bodily gestures and movements; (c) sacrifice of other possible actions; (d) the presence of others; and, (e) a commitment.28 The commitment and perseverance of Women in Black has lead to some important decisions, as on January 15, 2011, when the European Parliament adopted a resolution that officially proclaimed July 11 as the Day of Memory for all victims of the massacre in Srebrenica. From the beginning of their existence, October 9, 1991, Women in Black of

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Serbia have been performing their silent protests, organizing about a thousand peaceful actions on the streets of Serbia. Their first actions were conducted during the Yugoslav wars (in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia between 1991–1995, and then in 1998–1999 in Kosovo and during the NATO bombardment of Serbia), which they continued to commemorate regularly, even after the peace treaties. They continued to commemorate the important dates and victims not only of war crimes, but also of those who opposed Milošević’s regime for more than a decade. For example, Remembering and Marking Important Dates in the History of the Non Violent Opposition to the Regime in Serbia, is also one of their actions. Women in Black always protest in the open, on the streets and main city squares, but sometimes their actions include Visits to Difficult Places or Visiting Places Where the Crimes Were Conducted in Our Name. Their performances have different names: to remember, to mourn, to commemorate, to protest; but in fact a good deal more than these, because Women in Black obviously have a capacity for becoming a sort of critical discourse of society. Choosing their bodies as the locus of memory, Women in Black transform the city squares and streets into political and performative spaces. These spaces are difficult to control and could become a zone of great challenge. Through memorizing the victims of History, especially those who suffered, who were humiliated and killed, but also forgotten, Women in Black represent suppressed political and ethical concerns as well as a demand for justice. One of the intentions of Women in Black is to redirect attention toward the history of the common people, as opposed to history predisposed to only one interpretation. Thus, their performances turn Women in Black not only into archeologists, but also into anomalous female historians. The task of a female historian can be subversive because it challenges the hegemony of the male’s construction of the past. To be a female historian is not merely to write about the past: it also means binding oneself to the dead, to tell the truth about the suffering of others. The responsibility of a female historian is mandated by the Other, who is absent, who does not exist anymore biologically, and cannot speak for himself; precisely “one whose face the historian may never see, yet to whom giving countenance becomes a task.”29 The meaning of Women in Black’s performances and demonstrations is strictly connected to the ethics of nonviolence and forgiveness. According to Judith Butler, in the “war against terror” proclaimed by the Bush administration after 9/11, the enemy has been dehumanized, while

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the victims have been divided into the bodies that have to be mourned and those of the enemy, who cannot be buried, nor remembered, in order to justify the war.30 To this dehumanization of the enemy, Butler has counterpoised an ethics of nonviolence based on the conscience of the vulnerability of the Other that accompanies every human being who approaches the ethics of Women in Black. When I started this paper I wanted to write about the affective memories and intangible monuments created by Women in Black of ­ Serbia for all the victims of the ex-Yugoslav wars, but my research took me to the female side of the war, which could be seen in many symbolic actions taken by women throughout history, starting with Sophocles’ Antigone. It is as if women’s roles in history have always been to mourn, remember and recall, and create archives, through different symbolical actions. Antigone’s persistence and resistance against state and patriarchal rules also explain why she remained a myth so tenacious in the occidental tradition. Her determination is more connected to our history than typical interpretations claim, even if Antigone really did not enter into History (written by men) but remained a challenge to the official interpretation, a myth hard to conceive of and accept.31 The myth of Antigone can help to clarify an interpretation of the patriarchal tradition, as well as to elaborate a female logic or dialectics that enabled women to enter into relations with men without threatening their subjectivity, their world, and their path. It seems that a franchise to describe a conflict that is at the basis of the human condition has been given only to this literary text.32 The original source of drama can be seen in the paradox of the conflict and polemical incomprehension in the language itself. The origins of the dialogue can be found in the discovery that human beings, even when using the same language, could mean something completely different, even irreconcilable. “Men and women use words in different manners. When their meanings encounter one another, their dialogue becomes dialectic and their expression a drama.”33 This non-dialogue between men and women can be also found in the words of Simone Weil, who claimed that war and violence could turn anybody subjected to them into a thing, including women.34 The poetic corpus that constitutes the tradition of war is configured as a male thought, not only because in these works women are completely absent, but even more so because they are basically dominated by the forms of representation of an “I” that has defined a linguistic universe

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and stylistic structure, which has been adjusted for its voice, thematic choices, and discursive typologies, that has codified a scale of values, that has constructed imaginations of the feminine based on its own desire and its own historical culture. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that on the website of Women in Black of Serbia one can read: “Always disobedient to patriarchy, war, nationalism and militarism,” or “We go out to the street, and with the presence of our bodies we express disobedience to all those who, either with arms or words, provoke war, hatred and violence.” Funeral rituals, which literally close the dead within the space of earth and into a phantasmal sequence of generations that are the basis of the family world, were always a specifically female deed.35 In this sense Women in Black have symbolically taken the place of Antigone, because they continually remind society that not all the dead have been found and buried. The message Women in Black transmit to society is not only that people should never forget their dead, but that they should also never forget who were the main perpetrators. When they say that they will forever remain disobedient to patriarchy, war, nationalism, and militarism, they recall the words of Sophocles’ Antigone. In his indictment, Creon insists on the disobedient and youthful femininity of Antigone. The verbal duel between Creon and Antigone finishes with the word “woman” (verse 525), precisely when Creon exclaims: “Until I live, no woman will govern over me!” This is the main source of the final and supreme conflict between the male and female world. A dialectic clash between universal and particular, between female focus and that of a male forum, this polarity of ethical substance crystalizes around the values of the imminent and transcendental, and are condensed in a struggle between a man (Creon) and a woman (Antigone) around the body of a dead man (Polyneikes).36 The persistence and determination of Women in Black in ­enacting these performances of remembrance also recall Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of repetition. For Kierkegaard, repetition is not the simple reproduction of the past, but rather a means of recollection in the future. Repetition is a way of interacting with memory, an act of remembering, or of re-remembering, with an eye for the future.37 Around the same time as the Srebrenica genocide, Jacques Derrida began his writings on memory and mourning, describing memory as an impossible mourning or mourning in default. Memory entails irony in its representation of the past, which for Derrida meant tolerance rather than impertinence.

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For Derrida, there is no past independent of the present, as there is no present independent of the future.38 His thought approaches Benjamin’s writings on memory, opening up the possibility of thinking about the relation between memory and history in various ways. According to Derrida, any archive, as much and more than a thing of the past, should call into question the coming of the future. “It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.”39 Therefore, it is exactly this orientation of the archive toward the future that gives us ethical and political responsibility. Like in the case of Benjamin’s Gedächtnis, it means that an archive cannot be closed: it remains open forever in the future. In his brief text, Excavation and Memory, Benjamin writes that the work of an archeologist could shed light, aside from the technical and material aspect, on something which could be essential to the activity of our memory: “He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.”40 Therefore what emerges from lost time are always images that, when torn out of their previous situation, become like “torsos in a collector’s gallery.” This means at least two things: that the art of memory cannot be reduced to the inventory of found objects, and that archeology is not only a skill for exploring the past, but most of all, a kind of recollection for understanding the present. Therefore, it seems proper to conclude that the art of memory could be defined as performative (in Benjamin’s words, “epic and rhapsodic”). Epic and rhapsodic in the strictest sense, genuine memory must therefore yield an image of the person who remembers, in the same way a good archaeological report not only informs us about the strata from which its findings originate, but also gives an account of the strata which first had to be broken through.41

If we replace the words “epic and rhapsodic” with “performative,” what immediately comes to our mind are the actions of Women in Black, even if they are very simple and direct. In their case we can speak of performative memory: history perceived and interpreted by Women in Black is not an abstract entity, but a synthesis of many meanings. In the epoch of

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mass and social media, their performances represent a triumph of simple corporality and a direct impact on the individual and social conscience. Women in Black’s commemorative actions are not symbolic and static representations, but a performative and dynamic action. Indeed, their symbolic acts are perceived as performative so long as the performative memory becomes involuntary memory, breaking the structural process of forgetting.

Notes





1. Ruth Franklin, “The Art of Extinction: The Bleak Laughter of Thomas Bernhard,” The New Yorker, December 25, 2006, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/12/25/the-art-of-extinction. Accessed on April 30, 2018. 2. Thomas Bernhard, Extinction: A Novel (New York: Vintage International, A Division of Random House, 1995), 99. 3. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 18. 4. Scholastique Mukasonga, “Il mio pianto, il pianto degli scarafaggi,” La lettura/Corriere della sera, February 16, 2014, 21. 5.  See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and the Abuse of History for Life (Arlington: Richer Resources Publication, 2010). 6. See Henry Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1990). 7. See Walter Benjamin, “Ibizan Sequence,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, part 2 (1931–1934), eds. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). 8. See E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, A History of the World, 1914– 1991 (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 1996). 9. Frederick Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Postmodern culture, ed. Hal Foster (London and Sydney: Pluto Press, 1985), 125. 10.  See Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 11. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 12. See Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, especially the chapter on “The Moral Spectator,” 35–57. See also the section on “The Topics of Suffering,” 57–131. Departing from Adam Smith’s moral theory on the different spectatorship of suffering, Boltanski examines three topics regarding the reaction of a spectator: denunciation, sentimentality and aesthetic pleasure.

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13.  See Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 2002). 14. Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 6. 15. Ibid., 11. 16. In the International Court in The Hague ICTY, about ten people were sentenced for this crime, among them Zdravko Tolimir, intelligence servant and deputy of Mladić, who was sentenced for life, while a general, Radislav Krstić, was sentenced to 46 years’ imprisonment. 17. See www.zeneucrnom.org. Accessed on April 30, 2018. 18.  Today, this party, Srpska napredna stranka [the Progressive Party of Serbia], is in power, and its leader, Tomislav Nikolić, was the President of the Serbian Republic until May 31, 2017, when he was replaced by his principal collaborator, Aleksandar Vučić. Vučić had previously been Prime Minister since April 2014. 19. The next day, thirty activists visited the Potočari Memorial Centre, where they attended the burial of the remains of 127 victims of the Srebrenica genocide. During the entire trip through Serbia, Women in Black were accompanied by heavy police protection, which caused a big problem. From the border to Belgrade, the police car drove very slowly in front of the bus, not letting the bus driver drive at the prescribed speed. Since Women in Black were planning to participate in a commemorative event—marking the genocide in Srebrenica, held in front of the Serbian Parliament and organized by the Youth Initiative for Human Rights which began at 8:00 p.m., in the end they were late, arriving in Belgrade at 10:00 p.m., when the event had already ended. It was evident that this was a deliberate obstruction. This was similar to the ways in which police in Serbia exhaust and humiliate their activists: This kind of “protection,” this militarization of their actions primarily serves as a strategy of exhaustion, discouragement, deterrence of future activities, and intimidation. See www.womeninblack.org. Accessed on April 30, 2018. 20. See Susan Sontag, Regarding the Suffering of Others (New York: Picador, 2004). 21. See Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Empire (London: Harvard University Press, 2001). 22. Giorgio Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998 (2010)), 9. 23. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 147. 24. Ibid., 162. 25. See Paul Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

312  A. JOVIĆEVIĆ 26.  A poem by Enes Kišović is published on their website: “As colorful armies, diplomats and models / Walk the red carpet of the World / (Dressed according to the latest fashion), / And the smell of blood and perfume / Lingers in the air, / You are still wrapped in Antigone’s black, / In the Virgin Mary’s black, Anne Frank’s black, / The black worn by the mothers of Jasenovac, / The mothers of Bleiburg, / The mothers of Srebrenica… / I can see you / Talking to the raped women of Trnopolje,/ Reaching out to the war orphans of Kozara, / Bowing your heads before the detainees of Omarska… / Alas, the black you’re wearing, / Is getting more black by the day. / Whereas I so long to see you /Wearing festive clothes in my lifetime./ Today, however, / Might and Arrogance / Shine brightly, / While Truth is wrapped in black. / But soon, young people / Will be talking about the time/ When your blackness / On this black land / Was more beautiful than flowers.” 27. See www.womeninblack.org. Accessed on April 30, 2018. 28. Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, 185. 29. Edith Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heteorology, and the Nameless Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), XII. 30. See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). 31. Luce Irigaray, All’inizio, lei era (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2013), 122. 32. George Steiner, Antigones (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 231. 33. Ibid., 235. 34. See Simone Weil, Simone Weil’s “Iliad or the Poem of the Force”: A Critical Edition, ed. James P. Holoka (New York: P. Lang, 2003). 35. Steiner, Antigones, 34. 36. Ibid., 35. 37. See Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 38. See Jacques Derrida, Memoirs for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 39. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 36. 40. Benjamin, “Ibizan Sequence,” 576. 41. Ibid.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

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———. Problems of Moral Philosophy. Paolo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001. ———. Education After Auschwitz. http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/ frankfurt/auschwitz/AdornoEducation.pdf. Agamben, Giorgio. Quel che resta di Auschwitz. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998 (2010). Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Benjamin, Walter. “Ibizan Sequence.” In Selected Writings, Vol. 2, part 2 (1931– 1934), edited by Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. Bergson, Henry. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books, 1990. Bernhard, Thomas. Extinction: A Novel. New York: Vintage International, A Division of Random House, 1995. Boltanski, Luc. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 2002. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ———. The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. Memoirs for Paul de Man. Translated by Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. ———. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Scorze. Roma: Nottetempo, 2014. Franklin, Ruth. “The Art of Extinction: The Bleak Laughter of Thomas Bernhardt,” The New Yorker, December 25, 2006. https://www.newyorker. com/magazine/2006/12/25/the-art-of-extinction. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Hobsbawm, E. J. The Age of Extremes, A History of the World, 1914–1991. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House, 1996. Irigaray, Luce. All’inizio, lei era. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2013.

314  A. JOVIĆEVIĆ Jameson, Frederick. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” In Postmodern culture, edited by H. Foster. London and Sydney: Pluto Press, 1985. Kertész, Imre. Fatelessness. London: Harvill, 2005. Kierkegaad, Søren. Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Mukasonga, Scholastique. “Il mio pianto, il pianto degli scarafaggi,” La lettura/ Corriere della sera, Sunday edition, February 16, 2014, 20–21. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Use and the Abuse of History for Life. Arlington: Richer Resources Publication, 2010. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Suffering of Others. New York: Picador, 2004. Steiner, Georg. Antigones. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984. Weil, Simone, Simone Weil’s “Iliad or the Poem of the Force”: A Critical Edition. Edited and translated by James P. Holoka. New York: P. Lang, 2003. Women in Black official website. www.zeneucrnom.org. Wyschogrod, Edith. An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Testimony Dino Mustafić Dino Mustafić

Director, Sarajevo

Panel Discussion at the MESS Festival, Sarajevo (October 10,  2016) I think I have the hardest job, talking about the Sarajevo war years here today in Sarajevo, as there are many people in the audience who were also protagonists of those times and of this theatre under siege. The true meaning of this panel we are part of today, called Theatre In War, War In Theatre, was happening here in Sarajevo, on the front line, and not elsewhere in the region. With this distance of 20, 25 years, I almost feel a little bit ashamed to talk about my personal memories of the beginning of the war because I was very naive, and the idea that this war was going to happen in such a manner was totally inconceivable for me at the time. When it all started in Croatia, I remember us saying that something like this wouldn’t be possible in our country. Then when it started to happen on the borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina, we in Sarajevo thought that it was never going to happen in our city, because Sarajevo had this very mixed demographic before the war, there was this incredible balance of different ethnic groups, and this idea that someone would try to divide D. Mustafić (*)  Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1_19

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the city, families, friendships, city districts, and buildings, seemed mad to us. Unfortunately, from this perspective, technically speaking, the ­ideologists of these wars could say that they did their job successfully, producing this moral and ethic downfall that happened during the 1990s. One could see the extent to which nobody knew what was going to happen here by stating just these two facts: on April 4, the last play in the National Theatre in Sarajevo was played. This was the play Čudo u Latinluku [The Miracle in Latinluk] by Dževad Karahasan, and new performances were planned on the April 5 and 6, but they had to be canceled. I remember running to hand over my school exercise at the Academy very early that morning: shots were already being fired over the city, and I had to hand it in as otherwise I would be expelled from the class. So, you see, we didn’t have any clue what was happening and what our conditions were, and this I find is a general problem of people in the theatre world—we are all living in our microcosmos, we are pretty closed up, we only meet people like us, and then we were hit on the head by the war and suddenly we came to realize how different people around us are, how they think differently, how much hatred, bestiality, etc. there is. So, for me, the war was somehow a doubly important experience. First of all, from an artistic point of view, this was a radical existential situation where you suddenly realize what life and death are, while still being a student at the academy. On the other hand, you suddenly become aware of the meaning and significance that art and theatre has. My first professional work came about exactly in this context, and I soon realized that theatre forms this parallel universe that soon becomes its own entity—an aesthetic rather than an ethnic entity. Which is just as real as the outside world. So, as of this first performance of the play Sklonište [Shelter] and the establishing of the SARTR Theatre—Sarajevo is one of the few cities that gave birth to a new theatre in the middle of wartime—through producing and performing these plays during the war, all this proves how theatre served the citizens of Sarajevo as a sort of parallel world that we all ran to, escaping the images of violence and destruction. I will also talk a little about this anti-war movement, which ­happened to be very sporadic in Zagreb and Belgrade. I personally think that the majority of the theatre community in those countries was very dishonorable, even shameful—there was boulevard theatre being played at that time, this cheap repertoire that didn’t reflect at all what was happening just 100 kilometers away. The first beginnings of what we could call resistance came about in 1994 with productions directed

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by Gorčin Stojanović, with the texts of Biljana Srbljanović, this small subversion in the repertoires was happening. At the same time, in Sarajevo, there were no plays with “shooting, drinking and singing,” no ethno-folkloric repertoire. We really played Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Sławomir Mrozek, we staged the musical Hair, so this repertoire that was being shown was very cosmopolitan. Why am I emphasizing this now? Because when one looks at the structure of the Sarajevo theatre production during the war, one could say that it was highly respectable, by the number of premieres, by the titles; it was actually more respectable than it is now. On the other hand, the theatre was spreading and really believing in this idea of cosmopolitan Sarajevo. We thought that we were doing a very important thing for saving our city; I still think like this today. There are always those who would cynically comment on our efforts by saying that we wouldn’t be able to actively create cultural resistance without this physical resistance, but I must say that this was very organically connected because theatre in war became some sort of ritual. Going to the show and returning home meant literally risking your life. So, theatre kept on living in these conditions, under bombs and gunfire, and I think that these times were the most interesting times for Bosnian-Herzegovinian theatre. Even in the aesthetic sense, I think some very interesting plays and authors appeared, a new generation of actors was formed, so from the sociological, anthropological, theatrological and phenomenological point of view, these were the most interesting times for scenic arts. We in Sarajevo, we didn’t have time to think about whether we would do theatre or not. We simply didn’t know how to do anything else but create art, and those people who could do that and were not mobilized to fight were doing it. I remember a certain number of colleagues who were active fighters and would come to rehearsals during the breaks in combat uniform—they would literally come directly from the front lines. But besides theatre, the overall cultural life was incredibly intense, with a large number of exhibitions, classical concerts, growing literary production… There was this creative force everywhere, and I guess only time will tell whether anything of this is still aesthetically relevant and what was just pure factography. But, considering the theatre alone, these facts are truly fascinating—you had over 1000 first performances, a vast number of replays, all the theatres in Sarajevo were open and working. There was nothing of this material aspect—Snježana Banović and Gorčin Stojanović mentioned the hyperinflation and these existential

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problems—here, people would just work for a pack of cigarettes or for a package of humanitarian aid; there was this medieval system of commodity exchange, we had no other means of payment, so the actors and all of us working in the theatre didn’t have any material satisfaction. Our only satisfaction—especially if we’re talking about the actors—was spiritual. At that time, the actors were truly living as the embodiment of Jerzy Grotowski’s idea of actors being the real priests of theatre: they were incredibly brave and dedicated. I don’t need to tell you that this was a generation that almost vanished biologically, and one for whom I have great respect. Many of them, despite being middle-aged or even older, stayed in Sarajevo during the war. And many of them, and this we must also emphasize, were not exclusively ethnic Bosniak. They weren’t even Bosnian, but they stayed and performed here in the theatre, and most of them stayed in their own cities because they were simply actors. I remember, for example, the first performance of the play Rhinoceros by Ionesco in 1994. This was my second direction, a big ensemble performance. We took a picture during the rehearsal, with everybody included in the production. And somebody wrote our names under the photo but made it so that the last names were in bold letters, and it was then that I realized that out of 17 actors in this play, some 12 or 13 were Serbs. So you see, the theatre was the best example of promoting the multicultural Sarajevo. In 1996, Roberto Ciulli hosted the first ex-Yugoslavian meeting in Germany, where he invited some theatres from Zagreb, Belgrade, and Sarajevo. There was the Zagreb Youth Theatre ZKM with the show Hamper, Sonja Vukićević came from Belgrade with Richard III, and we came with Mrożek’s The Police. And in our company you had Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs… And I remember coming to this restaurant there and there was the Serbian group on one side of the room, the Croatian on the other, and the first thing we did upon entering the room was to put the tables together and say “come on people, let’s sit together!” And this is this paradox of Bosnia—we suffered the most, but we are always the first who offer reconciliation, even before the establishment of ­diplomatic contacts. And all of this was enabled by the theatre. Theatre is much more than a bridge, a communication channel. In Sarajevo at that time, theatre meant even more than life. And this significance of theatre was never restored, which I find normal considering the actual Bosnian and Herzegovinian government, and the current oligarchy—they would applaud if all the theatres stopped working. So, this importance of

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theatre, this feeling that what we are doing is of essential importance, this is what was inevitably lost. And this is why I’m still interested in wartime theatre. Just to give you one more example that I find extremely pertinent. We all learned about this notion of catharsis, and for me, this was always somehow too abstract and speculative. And too intellectual as well. And then, there was this one show here in Sarajevo that audiences truly loved, Ljubovnici [Lovers] by an anonymous author from Dubrovnik, a renaissance comedy of errors and situations that consisted of love poems from the period. And I remember, on the same day I went to see the play, Sarajevo was heavily bombarded. One shell fell on the city just a few minutes before the beginning of the play, so the actors were unsure whether they would continue to perform or not. And I happened to be there in the audience. The theatre was completely full, and we all knew what had happened outside the theatre. The performance started, and I guess on this date this question of whether theatre should stop or ­continue during the war was solved for us in Sarajevo. At the end of the performance, half of the audience was singing these love songs with the actors and applauding, and half of the audience was crying. You know, every performance in Sarajevo was kind of an apotheosis to life. Every first performance ended with applause in which we applauded each other for coming to the theatre. Our rehearsals would start with “good luck!”, the same salute that miners would use before going underground, because what was most important for us was that the same group of people started and ended a certain theatre production. Because, you know, we had colleagues who were wounded or were killed on their way to work. I worked on three plays during the Sarajevo siege: Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Wall, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, and Mrożek’s On Foot, and as of 1995 we were already kind of tired and at our last gasp. The last premiere happened in parallel to the massacre at Markale market, after which the last army action began. My entrance into the theatre, which formed me greatly, happened while I was working on the first performance. I made Sartre’s The Wall, a novel about the Spanish civil war, and we had this idea that the set-design solution of this wall should be movable, composed of a couple of elements, and these elements had to be made out of wood. At that moment, in the winter of 1993, wood was considered a fortune: we were living without gas and electricity. But being the good nerd that I was, I believed that one should never betray a

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directorial concept, so I came up with an idea to find this wood from the undertaker’s. And we really borrowed this wood from them—we actually never returned it—they literally smashed these burial caskets and gave them to us to use as stage set in our play. I guess this was the only poster in the history of theatre where you had just one sponsor mentioned on it—the undertakers Pokop. So, you could say I entered the theatre as an undertaker. But why am I telling you this? I guess because I realized how a certain absurdity from the play spilled over into my life, and vice versa. And there are dozens, if not even hundreds of these kind of anecdotes, stories and credible testimonies that, we the people of Sarajevo, haven’t yet told. I believe that we still haven’t paid our tribute to this notion of theatre under siege. And now I’m coming to this problem which is our internal, Sarajevo problem. We are a type of people who very e­ asily forget everything, we question everything and we are living in this discontinuity. Here, we have this problem of our cultural and historic heritage because every epoch comes with a bang, claiming to be the one creating the new world order. This so-called democratic epoch that came after the war, the sociologists would say that this is a dark epoch because it didn’t create anything new, but furthermore, it wants to erase what has already been. There are many of those who don’t like the way I’m talking about the theatre under siege, because they are trying—very consciously—to marginalize culture, they consider culture and what we do to be in some way a leftist hobby. I think that theatre is the column of national culture and identity; theatre is a place of social dialogue, a public space dedicated to freedom, and theatre under siege was important precisely for this reason. Back then, we won it as a place of freedom, and we will fight not to lose it as such.

Index

A Abbott, Scott, 253, 263, 264, 266, 269 Abdullahu, Adriana, 99 Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb, 173, 223 Achilles (hero in Greek mythology), 110. See also Troilus and Cressida (play) Achilles, 110 Adesni Aljevi (character), 133, 135. See also Bratorazvodna parnica (play) Ad Hoc Cabaret (theatre group), 16, 17, 126, 129–131, 135–137, 139, 141–144, 148 Adorno, Theodor W., 310 Adžić Ursulov, Bjanka, 235 Aeschylus, 239 Agačević, Rusmir, 72 Agamben, Giorgio, 304, 311 A House without a Roof (performance), 234 A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia (essay), 211, 244, 252,

253. See also Zimsko putovanje do reke (performance) Albania, 88, 89, 100, 102 Albanian Odyssey (play), 96 Albee, Edward, 94 Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (play), 208 Alisa, Alice (play), 231 Alisa, Alica. See Alisa, Alice (play) Amnesty International, 260 Amsterdam, 167, 194, 205 An Actor Is an Actor Is an Actor (play), 237 Ana Monró Theatre GAM (Ljubljana), 235 Anatomija Bola. See Anatomy of Pain (film) Anatomy of Pain (film), 268 Anderson, Benedict, 48, 58 And peaceful Bosnia! (performance), 234, 235 Andrić, Ivo, 231 Angelus Novus (Angel of History), 112 Anjoli, Igor, 234

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 J. Dolečki et al. (eds.), Theatre in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98893-1

321

322  Index Antigona. See Antigone (play) Antigone (daughter of Oedipus and his mother Jocasta), 22, 208, 229 Antigone (play), 22, 208, 229, 230, 312 A Pair of Shoes, One Life (performance), 301 Apollo (god), 190, 191 Arbour, Louise, 249, 266 Aretej (play), 216 Argentina, 115, 267 Arnolphe, 52. See also The School for Wives (play) Around the Grand Tribunal (essay), 245, 247, 248, 250 Arsenijević, Vladimir, 56, 60 Arsham Kuftinec, Sonja, 234, 235, 240 Artaud, Antonin, 165 Assimil (play), 210 Assmann, Jan, 283, 291, 292 Association of Drama Artists, Serbia, 183 A Summer’s Postscript to a Winter’s Journey (essay), 244 Atelje 212 (Belgrade), 30, 43, 47, 52, 59, 183 A Thousand and One Deaths (collection of stories), 163 Atlagić, Angelina, 50, 52, 56 Atlanta, 221 At least come to yourself if you have no one else to come to (performance), 234 A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (novel), 202 Audicija. See Audition (play) Audience (play), 97, 100 Audition (play), 96, 223 Auschwitz, 304, 311

Austria, 229, 231, 253, 297, 298 Autovideography (video), 184 B B–51 Cultural Society (Slovenian Student NGO), 232. See also Ex Ponto B92 Television, 42 Bajka bluz. See Fairytale Blues (performance project) The Balkan Trilogy, 230. See also Antigone (play); The Puzzle of Courage (play); Who’s Singing Sisyphus? (play) The Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh (play), 159 Balkanska trilogija. See The Balkan Trilogy Bakhe (play), 18, 166 Bakino srce. See Grandmother’s Heart (play) Bakunin, Mikhail, 202 Baljak, Janko, 268 Banja Luka, 8, 16, 69, 73, 75, 76, 78, 257 Banković, Ksenija, 258 Banović, Snježana, 18, 167, 317 Baron Munchausen (character), 26 Bašeskija, A Dream of Sarajevo (play), 84 Bašeskija, san o Sarajevu. See Bašeskija, A Dream of Sarajevo (play) Bata Životinja (character), 134, 136, 137. See also Bratorazvodna parnica (play) The Battle of Kolubara (play). See Kolubarska bitka Battle of Kosovo (play), 206 Bavoljak, Darko, 140

Index

Beckett, Samuel, 317 Begolli, Faruk, 90, 93, 94, 96, 103–105 Begović, Ena, 160 Bela Ruža (organization), 40 Belgrade, 13–15, 18, 22, 27, 30, 31, 37–41, 43, 46, 47, 49, 52, 53, 55–60, 69, 89, 90, 92, 95, 100, 103, 107, 108, 111, 113, 117, 145, 147, 156, 168, 177, 178, 182, 183, 187, 188, 191, 193– 196, 202, 205–210, 221, 223, 230, 233, 256–259, 261–263, 267, 268, 275, 301–303, 311, 316, 318 Belgrade Circle, 41, 111, 183 Belgrade Drama Theatre (BDP), 13, 38–41, 182, 275 Belgrade International Theatre Festival, 46, 58, 202, 206, 208, 209, 211, 221, 233 Benjamin, Walter, 299, 310 Benn, Gottfried, 267 Beogradski Krug. See Belgrade Circle Berenice (play), 191 Berger, Aleš, 236, 241 Bergman, Ingmar, 97 Bergson, Henri, 299 Berlin, 30, 31, 58, 78, 148, 238, 264, 302 Bernhard, Thomas, 297, 310 Besa (play), 102 Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti. See Roadless Tracts of Historical Reality (non-fiction) Bibanović, Dubravko, 26 Big White Rabbit (play), 23 Bistrović Darvaš, Katarina, 287 BITEF. See Belgrade International Theatre Festival BITEF teatar (Belgrade), 206, 208

  323

Blau, Herbert, 200, 215 Blažević, Marin, 166, 169 Blažinović, Antun Toni, 165 Boal, Augusto, 181, 194, 234 Bocokić, Zlatko, 253 Boeing-Boeing (play), 97 Bogdanović, Bogdan, 40 Boj na Kosovu. See Battle of Kosovo (play) Boltanski, Luc, 23, 300, 310 Borčić, Mirjana, 232 Bosanska Krajina, 69 Bosnia, 2, 38, 67, 69, 73–75, 91, 94, 99, 113, 134, 142, 145, 178, 183–185, 205, 208–210, 223, 231, 234, 235, 244, 249, 253, 255, 258, 263, 266, 268, 275, 306, 318 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2, 3, 7, 9, 11, 15, 16, 54, 64, 67, 79, 85, 119, 134, 135, 229, 231, 232, 234, 275, 315 Bosnia–Human Traces (exhibition), 178 Bosnian Army, 71, 223 Bosnian National Theatre Zenica, 16, 69, 71 Brajović, Vojislav, 109, 114–116 Bratorazvodna parnica (play), 131, 138 Bratunac, 257 Brecht, Bertolt, 55 Brezovec, Branko, 18, 163 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 251 Brnabić, Ana, 32 Broch, Hermann, 42 Brook, Peter, 274 Broz, Josip Tito, 89, 155, 228 Budak, Mile, 175, 278 Budva Theatre City Festival, 50, 108 Bukovac, Vlaho, 159, 165

324  Index Buñuel, Louis, 246 Burgtheater Wien (Vienna), 24, 244 Burina, Haris, 39 Burn Me! (play), 39, 41 Burn This! (play), 237 Busek, Erhard, 145 Butler, Judith, 306, 312 C Cabares Cabarei (play), 237 Cable News Network, 112, 251 Čaić, Đuka, 146 Čakširan, Boris, 54 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 207 Čale Feldman, Lada, 167–169 Camoletti, Mark, 97 Camus, Albert, 42, 101 Cankarjev dom cultural center (Ljubljana), 235, 238 Cassandra (Greek mythological prophetess), 229, 239. See also Cassandra (play) Cassandra (play), 231, 239 Celje, 201, 231 Centar za antiratnu akciju. See The Centre for Anti-War Action (organization) Center for Cultural Activities of the Union of Socialist Youth (Zagreb), 202 Center for Cultural Decontamination (CZKD), 206 The Centre for Anti-War Action (organization), 120 Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia, 203 Cervantes, Miguel de, 207 Cézanne, Paul, 247 The Chairs (play), 97 Cheese and Jam (film), 237 Childhood is a Happy Age (performance), 234

Christopher Columbus (play), 208, 216 City of Women (festival, Ljubljana), 233 Ćirilov, Jovan, 54, 58, 59, 108, 120, 209, 216, 217 Čista desetka. See Top-Notch (TV series) Ciulli, Roberto, 318 Claudel, Camille, 184, 195 The Claustrophobic Comedy (play), 109 Clio (goddess), 190. See also The Road Towards the Impossible, or the Quest for Goddess Clio (performance project) CNN. See Cable News Network Cohen, Stanley, 59, 300, 311 The Complex Ristić (play), 14, 18, 41, 42, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 88, 94, 97, 107, 109, 111, 113–116, 159, 164, 175, 181, 191, 201, 208, 214, 216, 231, 238, 240, 248, 251, 316, 318 Cologne, 205 Connerton, Paul, 179, 194, 280, 283, 291–293, 300, 305, 311 Council of Europe, 46 Creon (mythological ruler of Thebes), 229, 308 The Croatian Renaissance (painting), 159 Cressida, 14, 49, 50, 107, 108, 111, 120. See also Troilus and Cressida (play) Crnobrnja, Mladen, 140 Crnojević, Maksim, 48, 49 Croatia, 2, 3, 7, 16–18, 20, 21, 23, 30, 39, 56, 66, 68, 73, 79, 99, 113, 125–128, 130–134, 136, 138, 143–148, 151–153, 155, 157, 161, 162, 164, 167, 173, 174, 185, 196, 205, 209, 222, 223, 261, 263, 273, 275, 277, 278, 281–283, 291, 306, 315

Index

Croatian Art Forces, 127, 145 Croatian Artist Squad, 129. See also Croatian Art Forces Croatian Democratic Union, 153, 161, 164, 174, 175 Croatian National Theatre in Mostar, 73, 79 Croatian National Theatre in Rijeka, 16, 18, 30 Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb HNK, 17, 18, 68, 151, 160 Croatian Radio and Television HRT, 66, 151 Croatian Television HTV, 126 Croatian Territorial Army, 71 Crossing the Sierra de Gredos (novel), 245, 253, 254, 267 Cuckoos from Velika Hoča (travelogue), 245 Čudo u Latinluku. See The Miracle in Latinluk (play) D DAH Theatre (theatre collective, Belgrade), 14, 193 Daka, Luan, 98 Danchev, Alex, 280, 292 Dark Is the Night (play), 14, 107, 116, 119 Dayton, 3, 9, 50, 119, 223, 255 Dayton Accords. See Dayton Peace Agreement Dayton Peace Agreement, 67, 69 Deichmann, Thomas, 257 Deletić, Aleksandar, 258 Demeter, Dimitrije, 161, 175 Đeneral Milan Nedić, 70 Derrida, Jacques, 308, 312 Der Spiegel (magazine), 257, 258 Der Standard (newspaper), 230 Deva, Naxhie, 88

  325

Dević, Ana, 19, 215 Dežulović, Boris, 223 The Decline of Serbian Empire (play). See Propast carstva srpskoga Diamond, Elin, 48, 58 Dietrich, Marlene, 202 Diklić, Davor, 273 Dimitrijević, Olga, 214, 217 Dinulović, Radivoje, 52 Doctor Zhivago (film), 188 Dodona Theatre in Pristina, 100 Dogtroep (Dutch theatre collective), 210 Dolan, Jill, 234 Dolečki, Jana, 16 Domitrović, Damir, 232, 233 Dođi makar sebi, ako nemaš kome drugom. See At least come to yourself if you have no one else to come to (performance) Dragičević Šešić, Milena, 177, 194, 195 Dragojević, Dragorad, 258 Dragoljub Milanović’s Story (essay), 256, 258 The Dreamer’s Farewell to the Ninth Land (essay), 244 Druga Srbija. See The Other Serbia (activist group) The Drunken September Night of 1918 (play), 216 Drums in the Night (play), 210 Držić, Marin, 134, 146 Dubrovnik, 32, 54, 113, 128, 131, 133, 134, 141, 146, 147, 174, 216, 279, 319 Dubrovnik Summer Festival, 233 Dugalić, Nebojša, 118 Dukovski, Dejan, 14, 107, 113, 114, 116 Đurić, Branko Đuro, 232, 235, 237, 241 Đurković, Ljubomir, 240

326  Index E Ejdus, Predrag, 54, 118 Emira (play), 102 Enzo Fabiani (Slovenian string quartet), 232 “Epistulae ex Ponto. See Letters from the Black Sea (poem) Erveheja (play), 88, 103 Eteocles and Polynices (sons of Oedipus), 22, 229 Euripides, 166, 239 European Parliament, 305 European Union (EU), 46, 132, 134, 229 Eurovision, 251 Everybody Goes to Disco, from Moscow to San Francisco (performance), 222 Excavation and Memory (short text), 309 Exodos International Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts (Ljubljana), 233 Ex Ponto, 22, 231–233, 238 Ex Ponto International Festival, 231 Extinction (novel), 297, 310 F Faculty of Arts in Pristina, 103 Fairytale Blues (performance project), 188 Fehmiu, Bekim, 103, 183 Fehmiu, Uliks, 40 Feminist Theatre–Way 5A (play), 184 Festival Na obeh straneh meje. See Festival on Both Sides of the Border (Gornja Radgona and Bad Radkersburg) Festival on Both Sides of the Border (Gornja Radgona and Bad Radkersburg), 234 Fever (play), 23

Feydeau, Georges, 69 Figure leksičke sumnje. See Figures of Lexical Doubt (non-fiction) Figures of Lexical Doubt (non-fiction), 111 Filip Oktet i čarobna frula. See Philip Octet and his Magic Flute (play) Five Star Dumpster (play), 110 The Flag (play), 88 Flows of Theatre Communication (research project), 184 Fludd, Robert, 280 Ford, John, 246, 265 Foucault, Michel, 180, 194, 196 Frame for the Picture of Ulrike Meinhof (essay), 184 Franko, Mark, 155, 160, 168 Frasheri, Sami, 102 Fridolin Agramer (character), 133, 140, 142. See also Bratorazvodna parnica (play) Frljić, Oliver, 9, 18, 30, 166, 214, 224 From Shelter to Sarajevo War Theatre (film), 273 FTD Company, 96 Fuchs, Elinor, 51, 59 Furlan, Mira, 145, 147 G Gabrić, Saša, 207, 210 Gavran, Miro, 97 Geertz, Clifford, 283 General Milan Nedić (play). See Đeneral Milan Nedić Generation 1991–1995 (play), 21, 223 George Washington’s Loves (play), 97 Georgi and the Butterflies (film), 185, 196 Georgiou, George, 185 Germany, 30, 74, 212, 221, 274, 298, 318

Index

Gjakova, 88 Gjilan, 88, 98 The Glass Menagerie (play), 41 GlasSrpski (newspaper), 70 “Glumac je glumac je glumac. See An Actor Is an Actor Is an Actor (play) Goli Otok, 91 Golubnjača, 47 Goméz, Diego Andrés, 232 Goražde, 113, 235 Gorky, Maxim, 88 Gornja Toponica, 185 Goršič, Niko, 240 Gračanica, 101 Grad teatar Budva. See Budva Theatre City Festival Grandmother’s Heart (play), 23 Great Britain, 212 The Great Master of All Scoundrels (play), 18, 164 Grebo, Zdravko, 183 Greenhouse (play), 201 Grimm, Jakob, 76 Grotowski, Jerzy, 318 Groznica. See Fever (play) Grozny, 231 Gundulić, Ivan, 134, 146, 159 H Hadžići, 97 Hadžjibajramović, Hadžija, 71 The Hague. See ICTY Hague tribunal. See ICTY Hair (musical), 317 Halbwachs, Maurice, 286, 288, 293 Halilbašić, Senad, 15, 32, 78, 79 Hamlet (play), 188 Hamper (play), 318 Hana, Hyrije, 88 Handke, Peter, 24, 29, 211, 244, 264–268

  327

Harwood, Ronald, 55 Hasanaginica (play), 84 Hatipi, Tajar, 88 Hauzen, Mina (character), 26. See also Shelter (play) Havel, Vaclav, 100 The Hearth (play), 175 HDZ. See Croatian Democratic Union Hector (Trojan prince in Greek mythology), 110. See also Troilus and Cressida (play) Hedges, Chris, 255 Helen (daughter of Zeus and Leda), 110, 167. See also Troilus and Cressida (play) Herder, Johann Gottfried, 63 Heym, Gerog, 264, 266 Hiljadu i jedna smrt. See A Thousand and One Deaths (collectionof stories) Hippolyta (Amazonian queen), 50 The History of Croats (monument), 160 HNK Mostar. See Croatian National Theatre in Mostar HNK Zagreb. See Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb Hočevar, Meta, 22, 229, 231, 235, 239 Hopkins, John, 119 Horvat, Srećko, 289, 293 How to Tell the True War Story (essay), 288 “Hrup, ki ga povzročajo živali, je neznosen. See The Noise Animals Make Is Unbearable (play) Hrvatski narodni preporod. SeeThe Croatian Renaissance (painting) Hrvatsko Narodno Kazalište u Mostaru. See Croatian National Theatre in Mostar Human Rights Watch (organization), 259, 268

328  Index Huseinaga Hairlihadžimulajusufbegović (character), 134. See also Bratorazvodna parnica (play) Huskić, Mithad, 234 Hvar, 156, 168 Hysaj, Fadil, 97, 99 I I Am Missing Mira Trailović (essay), 184 ICTY. See International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia Idem u Lov. See Monsieur Chasse! (play) Igrajte tumor v glavi in onesnaženje zraka. See Play Tumor in the Head, or Air Pollution (play) “I mirna Bosna!. See And peaceful Bosnia! (performance) Incorrigible Optimists and Believers in the Soul of Sarajevo (theatre group), 234 Independent State of Croatia, 144, 167, 175, 291 Institute for Theatre, Film, Radio and Television (Belgrade), 184 Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research (Zagreb), 152 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, 2, 247 Ionesco, Eugène, 97, 317 I Paint Abroad (exhibition), 232 Iphigenia (play), 239 J Jakovljević, Branislav, 9, 11, 24, 31, 168 Janežič, Tomi, 239 Janić, Zoran, 260, 268

Janković, Milovan, 258 Jarry, Alfred, 205 Javacheff, Christo, 50 Jebo sad hiljadu dinara. See Who Gives a Fuck About a Thousand Dinars Now (novel) Jelačić, Josip, 158, 174 Jestrovic, Silvija, 25, 27, 121 Jevremović, Zorica, 18, 177, 183, 195, 196, 216 Joksimović, Milan, 258 Jontić, Slobodan, 258 Josipi, Katarina, 88 Jovanović, Božana, 48, 52 Jovanović, Branislav, 258 Jovanović, Dušan, 22, 41, 201, 203, 208, 229–231, 235, 239, 240 Jovanović, Željko, 56, 60 Jovanović, Zorica, 187 Jovićević, Aleksandra, 22, 60, 121, 195 Jurc, Aleksander, 240 K Kafka, Franz, 42 “Kajmak in marmelada. See Cheese and Jam (film) Kalemegdan fortress (Belgrade), 206 Kamen spoticanja. See Stumbling Block (performative installation) Karadžić, Radovan, 94, 185, 210, 254 Karadžić, Vuk, 76 Karahasan, Dževad, 316 Karamazovi. See Karamazovs (play) Karamazovs (play), 203 Karanović, Mira (Mirjana), 41 “Kasandra. See Cassandra (play) Kazalište Pozorište Gledališče Teatar, 19–21, 47, 177, 183, 195, 199–201, 203, 205–215, 221 “Kdo to poje Sizifa?. See Who’s Singing Sisyphus? (play)

Index

Kecmanović, Dušan, 182 Kennedy, John, 161 Kenović, Ademir, 248 Kierkegaard, Søren, 308, 312 “Klinika Tivoli d.o.o. See Tivoli Clinic Ltd (play) King Lear (play), 235 King Oedipus (play), 239 King Tomislav, 158 King Zvonimir, 158 Kiš, Danilo, 42, 202, 211, 216 Kišović, Enes, 312 Klaić, Dragan, 194, 199, 205, 213–217 Klaustrofobična komedija. See The Claustrophobic Comedy (play) Kleine Zeitung (newspaper), 230 Kluncker, Heinz, 202 Knežević, Dubravka, 183 Knežević, Dušica, 191 Kočić, Petar, 184 Kokotović, Nada, 203, 205 Kolubarska bitka, 47 Kompleks Ristić. See The Complex Ristić (play) Kontejner sa Pet Zvezdica. See Five Star Dumpster (play) Kopaonik, 257, 260 Kopitar, Jernej, 76 Koprivica, Stevan, 53 Koršunovas, Oskaras, 274 Korun, Mile, 239 Kosovac, Zoran, 104 Kosovo, 3, 7, 9, 15, 47, 56, 68, 88–92, 94–104, 134–136, 147, 185, 211, 253, 257, 259, 261, 263, 264, 268, 306 The Kosovo National Theatre, 92. See also The Popular Regional Theatre; Peoples Provincial Theatre Pristina Kostić, Laza, 48

  329

Kovačević, Dušan, 110 Kovačević, Siniša, 70, 182 KPGT. See Kazalište Pozorište Gledališče Teatar Kragujevac, 257 Kralj, Lado, 228, 239 Kraljevo, 257 Kraljica noći. See The Queen of the Night (performance project) Kraus, Karl, 54, 107, 111 Krenkler, Thomas, 230 Kreševljaković, Nihad, 25 Kreslin, Vlado, 232 Kreso, Amela, 16 Kresoja, Dragan, 119 Kristofor Kolumbo. See Christopher Columbus (play) Krk, 254 Krleža, Miroslav, 18, 38, 158, 159, 163, 169, 182, 208 Krstić, Radislav, 311 “Kuća bez krova. See A House without a Roof (performance) KUD France Prešeren Cultural Society (Ljubljana), 234 Kult Theatre (Belgrade), 107 Kusturica, Emir, 252 L Labiche, Eugène Marin, 53 Lakičević, Slavica, 216 Lalicki, Todor, 54, 112 Lane, Christel, 156, 168 The Last Days of Mankind (play), 14, 54, 55, 107, 111, 113 Last Night at Goli Otok (play), 91 Laušević, Žarko, 39 Laza Lazarević Psychiatric Hospital (Belgrade), 178 League of Communists of Yugoslavia, 201

330  Index Leb i sol (rock group), 201 Lefebvre, Henri, 180 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 200, 215 Lengyel, Gabor, 206 Lenin, Vladimir, 202 The Lesson of the Mount Sainte-Victoire (narrative), 248 Letica, Slaven, 185 Letters from the Black Sea (poem), 231 The Liberation of Skopje (play), 201, 208 Liberazione (newspaper), 114 Lijepa naša domovino (Croatian national anthem), 131 Linhartovo srečanje Festival, 234 Ljubljana, 22, 89, 199, 201, 202, 208, 231–235, 237, 238, 240, 245 Ljubljana City Theatre, 235, 237 Ljubo Kraljević, 163. See also The Great Master of All Scoundrels (play) Ljubovnici, 319 Logar, Matija, 231 Lohs, Lothar, 230 London, 29, 30, 59, 104, 167, 194, 196, 205, 208, 215, 240, 293, 310–312 Lope de Vega, 207 Los Angeles, 205, 266 Lošić, Saša Loša, 232 Louis XIII, 160 Lovers (play). See Ljubovnici Lukić, Darko, 23, 84, 194, 293 Lukić, Milan, 255, 260 Lyotard, Jean-François, 283 M Macbeth (play), 42 Macedonia, 2, 27, 68, 100, 113, 133, 263

Machado, Antonio, 253 Magelli, Paolo, 239 Maliqi, Shkelzen, 94, 95, 104 Mane (character). See Dark is the Night (play) Mane, 117 Mann, Klaus, 155 Mann, Thomas, 202 Marat/Sade. See The Persecution… Maraval, Jose Antonio, 168 Maribor, 233, 237 Maribor Theatre Festival, 233 Marin, Louis, 158, 161, 166, 168 Marinković, Pavo, 173 Marković, Dejan, 258 Marković, Goran, 40, 56, 195 Marković, Mirjana, 209, 210, 212 The Marriage of Figaro (play), 191 Matek Glembajec (character), 133. See also Bratorazvodna parnica (play) Matvejević, Predrag, 40 Mauritshuis Museum (The Hague), 249 McGlothlin Courtroom at William and Mary Law School in Williamsburg (Virginia), 250 Medić, Siniša, 258, 260 Mefisto (play), 155 Meils, Cathy, 230 Memorial Park in Potočari, 301 Menelaus (king in Greek mythology), 110. See also Troilus and Cressida (play) MESS, 25, 97, 173, 233, 271, 275, 315 Mesto žensk. See City of Women (festival, Ljubljana) Meštrović, Ivan, 160 Meyerhold, Vsevolod Emilevich, 165 Mićanović, Dragan, 118 Michelis, Gianni de, 146

Index

The Migration of theSerbs (play). See Seoba Srbalja Mijač, Dejan, 49, 51, 107, 108, 120 Milanović, Dragoljub, 256, 258, 260, 267 Milčin, Vladimir, 182 Milićević, Ognjenka, 117, 121 Milivojević, Nikita, 50, 56 Milošević, Slobodan, 2, 3, 20, 24, 31, 38, 53, 56, 94, 96, 116, 119, 206, 209, 212, 245, 247, 256 MiM Cabaret, 142 Ministry of Culture (Croatia), 130, 144, 222 Miočinović, Mirjana, 53, 145, 211 The Miracle in Latinluk (play), 316 Mirković, Srđa, 109, 112 The Misanthrope (play), 49, 51, 52 Missa in A Minor (play), 202, 205, 214 Mitrović, Tomislav, 258 Mitrović, Žika, 100 Mitrovica, 88 Mlač, Ruža, 232 Mladenović, Filip, 200, 215 Mladenović, Kokan, 207 Mladić, Ratko, 3, 12, 42, 254, 301 Mladi levi Festival. See Young Lions festival (Ljubljana) Mladinsko Theatre. See Slovenian Youth Theatre (Ljubljana) Molière, 49, 52 Monroe, Marilyn, 161 Monsieur Chasse! (play), 69 Montažstroj (theatre collective), 20, 21, 221, 222 Montenegrin National Theatre in Podgorica, 240 Montenegro, 2, 48, 50, 68, 104, 108, 146, 245, 263 The Moravian Night (narrative), 245, 253, 254, 256, 262, 267, 268

  331

Mostar, 16, 26, 70, 71, 73–76, 78, 79, 83–85, 235 Mother (play), 88, 231 Mother Courage and Her Children (play), 231 The Mountain Wreath (epic poem), 188 Mrkšić, Borislav, 91 Mrozek, Sławomir, 317 Mujičić, Tahir, 127, 129, 144, 148 The Muppet Show (TV show), 160 Mukasonga, Scholastique, 298, 310 Müller, Heiner, 230 Muntilak, Jelica, 258 Musafija, Mair, 206 Mustafić, Dino, 25, 275 Mustapić, Miša, 51 N Na Mihajlu (cabaret skit), 134, 141 Narodno Pozorište Bosanske Krajine Banja Luka. See National Theatre of the Bosnian Krajina Banja Luka Naša mala klinika. See Our Little Clinic (TV series) National Assembly of Serbia, 185 National Security Service (SOA), 175 National Theatre in Belgrade, 48, 55, 177, 203 National Theatre in Novi Sad, 20, 47, 48, 68, 203 National Theatre in Rijeka, 223 National Theatre in Sarajevo, 316 National Theatre in Subotica, 20, 203 National Theatre of the Bosnian Krajina Banja Luka, 16, 69 National Theatre Zenica. See Bosnian National Theatre Zenica Naylor, Kenneth, 75, 79 Nazor, Vladimir, 158 NDH. See Independent State of Croatia

332  Index Nedić, Nikola, 223 Nedostaje mi Mira Trailović. See I Am Missing Mira Trailović (essay) Nenad (character), 117. See also Dark is the Night (play) Nenad, 117 Nepopravljivi optimisti i povjerenici u sarajevsku dušu. See Incorrigible Optimists and Believersin the Soul of Sarajevo (theatregroup) Netherlands, 2, 222 Netherlands Theatre Institute (TIN), 205 New York, 30, 58, 77, 167, 194, 196, 215, 222, 240, 251, 255, 265– 267, 279, 292, 293, 310–312 The New Yorker (magazine), 249, 310 The New York Times (newspaper), 255 Neziraj, Jeton, 15, 103–105 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 299, 310 Nikčević, Sanja, 32, 144, 145, 292 Nikitović, Bojana, 50 Nikolić, Dragan, 114 Nikolić, Predrag, 232 Nikolić, Tomislav, 311 Niman, Shyqeri, 94 NIN (magazine), 56, 94 The Noise Animals Make Is Unbearable (play), 231, 238 Nokshiqi-Abi, Abdurrahman, 96 Nora, Pierre, 285, 293 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 3, 24, 48, 50, 55, 56, 59, 96, 99, 100, 211, 244, 245, 259, 260, 263, 306 Novak, Boris A., 229, 231, 239 Novak, Karel, 104 Novi Sad, 20, 47, 65, 103, 202, 203, 205, 215, 216, 233, 259

O Octopussy (play), 23 Offending the Audience (play), 212, 248, 251, 256 Of Ways of the Cross the Final End (performance), 157 Ognjenović, Vida, 177 Ognjište. See The Hearth (play) Oh, Serbia, Nowhere to Hide from the Sun (play), 183 Ohrid Summer Festival, 233 Oj Srbijo, nigde ‘lada nema. See Oh, Serbia, Nowhere to Hide from the Sun (play) Omarska detention camp, 266 On Foot (play), 319 Ontological-Hysteric Theater (New York City), 251 Opening of the Victoria Restaurant (performance project), 188 Open Society Foundations, 206, 221, 222. See also Soros, George Operation Allied Force, 3, 55 Operation Belgrade (TV series), 100 Oppenheim, Meret, 52 Orel, Barbara, 21, 239 Oresteia (three part tragedy), 239 Osijek, 32, 128, 131 Osman, Nedjo, 205 Osti, Josip, 232 Osvoboditev Skopja. See The Liberation of Skopje (play) The Other Serbia (activist group), 41, 183 Otpisani. See The Written-Off (TV show) Otpor. See Resistance (organization) Otvaranje restorana Viktorija. See Opening of the Victoria Restaurant (performance project)

Index

Our Little Clinic (TV series), 241 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 231 O’Brien, Tim, 288, 293 P Palić, 206 Par cipela–jedan život. See A Pair of Shoes, One Life (performance) Paris, 3, 40 Parma, Bruno, 232 Paro, Georgij, 216 Pašović, Haris, 205, 208, 216 Pasternak, Boris, 202 The Patriots (play), 49 Patroclus (Trojan hero in Greek mythology), 110. See also Troilus and Cressida (play) Pavelić, Ante, 167 Pavićević, Borka, 13, 183, 194, 206, 208, 212 Pavletić, Vlatko, 160, 169 Pehar, Robert, 79 Peja, 88 PEN International, 231 Peoples Provincial Theatre Pristina, 90. See also Popular Regional Theatre Pristina; Kosovo National Theatre Pera Ražnatović (character), 134. See also Bratorazvodna parnica (play) The Perfect Circle (film), 249 The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (play), 181 Persona (film), 97 The Persians (play), 55 Pesnik revolucije na predsedničkom brodu. See The Poet of the Revolution on the President’s Ship (poem)

  333

Petrovci, Enver, 92, 103 Petrović-Njegoš, Petar II, 188 Petrunjela (character), 133. See also Bratorazvodna parnica (play) Petrunjela, 133, 134, 140 Peymann, Claus, 244, 264 Philip Octet and his Magic Flute (play), 173 Philoctetes (play), 173 Philoctetes, 174, 239 Picrraku (play), 104 Pigeon Cave (play). See Golubnjača Pijana novembarska noć 1918. See The Drunken September Night of 1918 (play) Pink Television. See TV Pink Piscator, Erwin, 165 Plakalo, Safet, 26 Plavi orkestar (pop-rock band), 232 Plavšić, Biljana, 40 Plays International (journal), 230 Play Tumor in the Head, or Air Pollution (play), 201 Plenković, Andrej, 30 Pocket Theatre M (Belgrade), 184, 186, 187, 190 The Poet of the Revolution on the President’s Ship (poem), 211 Polič, Radko, 235, 236 The Police (play), 318 Policija. See The Police (play) Politika (newspaper), 42 Polynices. See Eteocles and Polynices (sons of Oedipus) Poos, Jacques F., 146 Popović, Aleksandar, 14, 107, 116, 118 Popović, Jovan Sterija, 48 The Popular Regional Theatre, 88, 89, 103. See also Kosovo National Theatre; Peoples Provincial Theatre Pristina Porodin, 253

334  Index The Portrait of the King (non-fiction), 161 The Possessed (play), 42 Potočari, 301, 311 Potočnjak, Draga, 214, 217, 231, 233, 235, 238, 240 Povijest Hrvata. See The History of Croats (monument) The Powder Keg (play), 14, 107, 113–116 Powolny and Pokorny (characters), 54. See also The Last Days of Mankind (play) Požarevac, 256 Pralipe. See Roma Theatre Pralipe Prince Rastko–Monk Sava (play), 69 Princ Rastko–Monah Sava. See Prince Rastko–Monk Sava (play) Pristina, 15, 26, 88–92, 94, 96, 99–101, 103, 104 Private–Public (exhibition), 178 Prizren, 88 Professor… I Am Talented… It’s not a Joke (play), 92, 93, 96 Project X (installations and roundtables), 178 Prokić, Nenad, 54, 111 Promocija džepnog pozorišta M. See Promotion of the Pocket Theatre M (performance project) Promotion of the Pocket Theatre M (performance project), 190 Propast carstva srpskoga, 47 Ptuj, 237 Put u nemoguće ili potraga za boginjom Klio. See The Road Towards the Impossible, or the Quest for Goddess Clio (performance project) The Puzzle of Courage (play), 231

Q Qena, Melehate, 91, 104 Qena, Muharrem, 88 Qirezi, Ahmet, 88 Qorraj, Xhevat, 91 Qosja, Isa, 99 The Queen of the Night (performance project), 189 Questioning While Weeping (travelogue), 245, 264 R Radaković, Žarko, 253, 263, 265, 269 Radić, Stjepan, 158 Radio B92, 178 Radio Television Serbia, 46, 195, 256, 258–260 Radivojević, Jug, 212 Radulović, Ksenija, 14, 58, 59, 120 Ram za sliku Ulrike Majnhof. See Frame for the Picture of Ulrike Meinhof (essay) Rašković, Jovan, 182 Ratković, Zoran, 52 Ratno Kazalište HVO, 73 Ražnatović, Željko, 147 Redgrave, Corin, 208 Redgrave, Vanessa, 97, 208 Regional Popular Theatre in Pristina, 91 Reigen (play), 114 Remembering and Marking Important Dates in the History of the Non Violent Opposition to the Regime (performative installation), 306 Repetition (narrative), 253 Republika (magazine), 184 Republika Srpska, 2, 3, 11, 12, 27, 67, 69, 257, 275

Index

Resistance (organization), 87, 200 Reston, James, 281, 292 Rhinoceros (play), 318, 319 Richard III (play), 318 Ricoeur, Paul, 304, 311 The Ride Across Lake Constance (play), 248, 251 Ristić, Ljubiša, 20, 29, 177, 183, 195, 201, 202, 205, 209–213, 215, 217 The Road Towards the Impossible, or the Quest for Goddess Clio (performance project), 190 Roadless Tracts of Historical Reality (non-fiction), 158 Rocco, Davor, 235 Rodoljupci. See The Patriots (play) Roma Theatre Pralipe, 205 Romčević, Nebojša, 56 Rome, 114, 159 Rožanc, Marjan, 201 RTS. See Radio Television Serbia RTV Palma. See TV Palma Russia, 212 Russian Orthodox Church in Greenwich Village, 119 Rwanda, 298 S Sablić, Jelisaveta, 118 Saint Sava (play), 182 Salome (play), 191 Salzburg, 267 Šantić, Jelena, 183 Santori, Anton, 102 Sarajevo, 2, 24–27, 31, 38, 39, 43, 49, 53, 84, 89, 97, 104, 113, 169, 173, 183, 205, 208, 209, 217, 223, 231–234, 237, 262, 266, 271–275, 315–320 Sarajevo Chamber Orchestra, 232

  335

Sarajevo War Theatre. See SARTR Sarajevo Youth Theatre, 273 Sarajevski Ratni Teatar, 25, 26, 232, 272, 273, 275, 316 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 319 SARTR. See Sarajevski Ratni Teatar Satirical Theatre Jazavac (Zagreb), 142 Savić, Obrad, 111 Savin, Egon, 107, 118 Savršeni krug. See The Perfect Circle (film) Scarry, Elaine, 300, 310 Scena (journal), 185, 200 Schechner, Richard, 234 Schnitzler, Arthur, 114 The School for Wives (play), 49, 52 Šećerana, 208–212 The Secret of the Black Hand (play). See Tajna crne ruke Sedlar, Jakov, 175 Seh križneh putov konec i kraj. See Of Ways of the Cross the Final End (performance) Senečić, Željko, 144 Senker, Boris, 144, 167 Sense Agency, 251 Šentevska, Irena, 14, 31, 45, 57, 78, 200, 215 Seoba Srbalja, 47 Šeparović, Borut, 20 Šerbedžija, Rade, 39, 41, 145, 205, 208, 235, 236, 240 Šerbek, Vinko, 138 Serbia, 2, 3, 7, 15, 19, 40, 41, 45–50, 53–55, 57–59, 68–70, 78, 95, 99–101, 104, 107, 114, 116– 121, 128, 135, 145, 147, 178, 182–186, 190, 192, 193, 205, 206, 209, 211, 212, 221, 230, 244, 245, 252, 253, 256–258, 261–264, 267, 273, 274, 299, 301, 302, 306–308, 311

336  Index Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad, 48, 68, 203 Serb Volunteer Guard, 147 Seven Against Thebes (play), 40, 239 Shakespeare, William, 107, 120 The Shame Pillar (performative installation), 302 Shelter (play), 26 Šibenik, 128 Simon, John, 119 Sirmium, 245, 256 Sklonište. See Shelter (play) Skopje, 183, 201, 208, 264 Škrabe, Nino, 144 Sládeček, Michal, 283, 292 “Slikam na tujem. See I Paint Abroad (exhibition) Slovenia, 2, 21, 58, 205, 227–232, 234, 235, 237–241, 244, 246, 253, 263, 306 Slovenian National Theatre Drama in Ljubljana, 22, 228–231, 235 Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana, 239 Slovenian National Theatre Maribor, 239 Slovenian National Theatre Nova Gorica, 240 Slovenian People’s Theatre SLG in Celje, 231 Slovenian Permanent Theatre in Trieste, 239 Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra, 235 Slovenian Youth Theatre (Ljubljana), 202, 214 Smith, Adam, 310 Šnajder, Slobodan, 43 Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), 3, 15, 64, 67–69, 71, 74 Socialist Party of Serbia SPS, 209

Sokolović, Zijah, 235, 236 Sontag, Susan, 25, 194, 272, 303, 311 Sophocles, 173, 239, 307, 308 Soros, George, 206, 212. See also Open Society Foundations Soviet Union, 201, 202 Spain, 254 Špas teater (Mengeš), 237 Split Summer Festival, 166 Srbljanović, Biljana, 56, 110, 317 Srdarević, Igor, 234 Srebrenica, 3, 11, 22, 24, 31, 42, 54, 113, 231, 257, 262, 301, 302, 304, 305, 308, 311, 312 Srebrenica 8,372 (performance), 22, 301, 302 Sremska Mitrovica, 245, 246 Sretno doba, dok si dijete!. See Childhood is a Happy Age (performance) Stalin, Joseph, 202 Stamenković, Vladimir, 58, 59, 110, 115, 116, 118, 120, 121, 216 Starčević, Ante, 158, 165 Štefanija (character), 133. See also Bratorazvodna parnica (play) Štefanija, 133, 140 Sterijino Pozorje (festival, Novi Sad), 103, 202, 215, 216, 233 Stevanović, Slaviša, 258 Stewart, Ellen, 119 Štiks, Igor, 289, 291, 293 Stoimenovski, Darko, 258 Stojanović, Alisa, 41 Stojanović, Gorčin, 31, 48, 107, 111, 317 Stojanović, Nebojša, 258 Stojko, Tone, 230, 236 Strindberg, August, 240 Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade, 178, 183 Stukalo, Ivan, 258

Index

Stumbling Block (performative installation), 303 Subotica, 203, 205, 206, 208, 210, 214 Šukar (music group), 232 Suk-Young, Chwe, 283, 292 Supilo, Frano, 158 The Surrealists’ Top Chart (TV series), 237 Suša, Anja, 53, 59, 216 Sušec Michieli, Barbara, 68, 167, 228, 239, 240 Sveti Sava. See Saint Sava (play) Szabo, Istvan, 155 T Tabački, Miodrag, 50, 52, 56, 58 Tablas of Daimiel (account), 245 Tadić, Duško, 266 Tadić, Ljuba, 41 Tajna Crne ruke, 47 Tal, Kalí, 279, 292 Tamna je noć. See Dark Is the Night (play) Tasić, Dragan, 258 “Teater Paradižnik. See The Tomato Theatre (TV series) Teatar &TD. See Theatre &TD Teatar u ratnom Sarajevu, 1992–1995. See Theatre in wartime Sarajevo, 1992–1995 (book) Teater 55 (Novo Mesto), 237 Teatron (journal), 200 Teuta (play), 161, 175 Thalia (goddess), 190, 191 Theater an der Wien (Vienna), 229 Theater Heute (journal), 202 Theater im Keller TIK (Graz), 231 Theatre &TD, 174, 195 Theatre and Dance Weekend in Ljubljana, 238

  337

Theatre During the Yugoslav Wars (conference), 7, 31 Theatre Festival MESS Sarajevo. See MESS Theatre in wartime Sarajevo, 1992– 1995 (book), 273 Theatre of Youth, Children and Puppets (Pristina), 91 Thersites (Trojan hero in Greek mythology), 109, 110. See also Troilus and Cressida (play) Thompson, James, 234 Thompson (music group), 224 Tito, i.e. Josip Broz Tito, 38, 64, 66, 156–158, 202 Tivoli Clinic Ltd. (play), 237 TKO Theatre (Cologne), 205 Tobelija–The House of Dolls (play), 240 To Damascus (play), 240 Tolimir, Zdravko, 311 Tomašica, 268 The Tomato Theatre (TV series), 237 Tomić, Milica, 178 Topla greda. See Greenhouse (play) Top lista nadrealista. See The Surrealists’ Top Chart (TV series) Top-Notch (TV series), 241 Toporišič, Tomaž, 200, 215, 216 Trieste, 237 Trifunović, Matilda, 111 Trilogija o hrvatskom fašizmu. See Trilogy on Croatian Fascism (assemblage of plays) Trilogy on Croatian Fascism (assemblage of plays), 166 Trnopolje camp, 268 Troilus (Trojan Prince), 14, 49, 50, 107, 108, 111. See also Troilus and Cressida (play) Troilus, 120 Troilus and Cressida (play), 14 Trotsky, Leon, 202

338  Index Turudić, Ivan, 30 Tuzla, 84, 235 Tuzla National Theatre, 71 Tuđman, Franjo, 17, 39, 66, 75, 139, 142, 148, 153, 168, 169, 174, 248 TV Palma, 189 TV Pink, 189 TV Slovenia, 237 U Ubu Roi (play), 205 Uganka korajže. See The Puzzle of Courage (play) undefined, 47 Underground (film), 252 UNICEF, 100 United Nations (UN), 2, 31, 46, 56, 148, 186, 263 United States (of America) U.S., 2 University of Vienna, 7 Unkovski, Slobodan, 107, 113, 115 Upper, Nick. See Goršič, Niko Uršič, Mario, 239 Uspenskij, Boris Andreevič, 167 Uytterhoeven, Michel, 238, 241 V Vance-Owen Plan, 49 Vancouver Law Courts, 250 van den Broek, Hans, 146 Vasiljević, Jelena, 283, 292 Végel, László, 216 Velika Hoča, 245, 253, 264 Velika Plana, 254 Veliki bijeli zec. See Big White Rabbit (play) Veliki meštar sviju hulja. See The Great Master of All Scoundrels (play) Veljović, Srđan, 302, 303 Vermeer, Johannes, 249, 250

Vermeer in Bosnia (magazine article), 249, 266 Vevar, Rok, 214, 217 Vidić, Ivan, 23, 277, 278, 283–286, 288, 290–292 Vidmar, Josip, 202 Vienna, 9, 24, 74, 76, 78, 83, 130, 145, 159, 221, 223, 229, 230, 237, 244, 271, 279, 298 Vietnam, 279, 281, 287, 288, 292 Vilenica, Ana, 214, 217 Višegrad, 255 Visits to Difficult Places or Visiting Places Where the Crimes Were Conducted in Our Name (performative installation), 306 Vitez, Zlatko, 158 Vitezović, Milovan, 69 Vitrac, Roger, 240 Vojnović, Ivo, 147 Vojvodić, Radmila, 41 Vojvodina, 68, 203 von Clausewitz, Carl, 9 Voyage by Dugout, or the Play of the Film of the War (play), 24, 244 Vreme (magazine), 42, 59, 184 Vrgoč, Dubravka, 284, 293 Vučić, Aleksandar, 311 Vučjak. See Wolfhound (play) Vučković, Tamara, 118 Vukićević, Sonja, 41, 42, 112, 318 Vukojčić, Mirjana, 191 Vukovar, 40, 53, 54, 113, 231 W Wäger, Elisabeth, 229 Waiting for Godot (play), 25, 41, 97, 272 The Wall (short story, performance), 319 We Are Ludists–Let’s Play! (performance project), 187

Index

Week of Slovenian drama (Kranj), 233 Weil, Simone, 307, 312 Weiss, Peter, 181 Welcome to Sarajevo (film), 266 The Werewolf (play), 240 Weschler, Lawrence, 249, 266 Who Gives a Fuck About a Thousand Dinars Now (novel), 223 Who’s Singing Sisyphus? (play), 231 Wiener Festwochen (festival), 229 Wilson, Lanford, 237 Wilson, Robert, 274 Winterbottom, Michael, 266 Wolfhound (play), 216 Women in Black, 22, 120, 301–303, 305–311 The Wooster Group (New York City, performance collective), 251 The Written-Off (TV show), 113 Y Young Lions festival (Ljubljana), 233 Youth Initiative for Human Rights (YIHR Belgrade), 311 YU-Fest (festival), 203, 205, 207, 210 Yugoslav Drama Theatre (JDP), 14, 47, 51, 52, 54, 58, 107, 108, 111, 113, 115 Yugoslav People’s Army (YPA), 2, 126, 133, 134, 145, 148 Yugoslav United Left (YUL), 20, 209

  339

Z Zabela prison (Požarevac), 256 Zadar, 32, 128, 131 Zafranović, Lordan, 43 Zagreb, 18, 21, 23, 30, 32, 58, 66, 77, 79, 89, 91, 111, 126, 127, 142, 143, 147, 153, 163, 164, 167–169, 174, 175, 194, 195, 202, 222, 223, 279, 292, 293, 316, 318 Zagreb Academy of Dramatic Arts, 173 Zagreb City Council, 222 Zagreb Youth Theatre ZKM, 318 Zarić, Geroslav, 50 “Zažgi!. See Burn This! (play) Žene u crnom. See Woman in Black Zenica, 47, 84, 182, 292 Zetkin, Clara, 202 Zilk, Helmut, 145 Zimsko putovanje do reke (performance), 212 Živojinović, Velimir Bata, 136 Zlatanović, Radoslav, 94, 96, 104 The Zoo Story (play), 94 Zrinski, Petar, 158 Zupančič, Milena, 235 Zvečan, 100 Zvornik, 11, 12, 31, 257, 274