THEATRE FROM THE EDGES OF EUROPE IN AN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT
by Gordana Vnuk *
Talking today about performing arts in the Balkan region (I will concentrate on former Yugoslavia and, being highly selective, on its creative highlights), takes into account, more seriously than elsewhere, the unreliable edges of historical contexts which have multiplied in the last 30 years.
After the death of Tito and Titoism thirty years ago, ex-Yugoslavia was passing through a tumultuous period of political disorientation. The arts, and theatre as its most vital branch, tried to stop this disorientation by either taking part in the national homogenization or in the transnational symbolization. Both paths looked anachronistic from the European point of view, but, if only somebody was willing to deal with it, also authentic.
While the theatre in Western Europe, in the sense of Badiou, turned towards totalitarianism, meaning self-referentiality, here the theatre still counted on playfulness and theatricality as an interspace between artistic use and political abuse. It had a sense for grandeur of a theme and some of the best Yugoslav directors were skilled in carrying these themes through a dialectical procedure, in contrast to self-referential purism which, instead of the deideologisation of social themes, abolished the social dimension altogether by putting a mediocre individual into a centrifuge, after which all laundry had to be white.
In the history of secondary cultures, as the Yugoslav ones were, we can find numerous art works that were created out of reach of artistic authorities, which enabled the creators to work with greater artistic freedom and, in this way, often come to radical and unique solutions which preceded the ruptures within a dominant style. (In Croatia there are examples from the Church of St. Cross in Nin and the Šibenik Cathedral to the visual arts movement of the fifties, EXAT, the 20th century poet Nikola Šop, etc.).
In the most influental discourse of the time it seemed that the new theatre of the eighties (later post-dramatic theatre), which rebelled against logo-centric statements in favour of media syncretism that opened the theatre towards new technology, other media, visual arts, dance and movement, was limited in its phenomenological aspect to Western Europe, which provided the examples for the theory of post-dramatic theatre. Although it pretended to be “European”, its promoters who tried zealously to devise a theoretical and critical background for this new generation of artists, did not move further than the western capitals (and let’s not mention non-European cultures).
The theatre in ex-Yugoslavia did not have a problem with the articulation of these post-dramatic aesthetics but had to accept playing with a reduced deck of cards. This kind of theatre would serve the purposes which Badiou refers to as étatiques and it would make a political and intellectual difference in Eastern Europe, however, mostly in its representational dimension through festivals. For a more serious and fundamental cultural purpose, it lacked the permission for a bigger stake.
No wonder that in the Yugoslav culture of festivals Robert Wilson appeared in Belgrade only a year after his European début in Nancy. The German hyper-realism (Stein, Peymann, Zadek, ..) was awarded many times at the same festival. We can say that Yugoslavia “kept pace,” though the best examples of Yugoslav theatre were created outside the governing trends and in opposition to the technology of selfishness which was already taking root in our soil as well.
The fall of the Berlin Wall took place at the right moment, just as post-dramatic theatre formalized its informality through institutions (IETM, cultural strategies of EU, etc.), so there was no time to listen to the Other and the Otherness. In this way East European theatre was supposed to smell of the reiteration of Kantor and Grotowski (Purcarete & Co.), and Russia of the Slavic soul and mysticism (Vasiljev & Co.), while the field of action was directed towards those who experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall as a gift from above and not as a result of deep, uncompromising, social and aesthetic battles led by previous generations. These young ones (like Arpad Schilling, Grzegorz Jarzyina, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Alvis Hermanis, etc.) were easy to uproot from their countries’ theatre traditions, with which they could no longer establish a dialogue. On the other hand, these traditions became politically hibernated, and furthermore, they showed a certain naivety, and aesthetically they were very fragile (for example, the video documentation of Grotowski’s performances were barely or not at all available, and the book Towards Poor Theatre was written in an impressionistic way with apologetic amendments and with only a very small number of Grotowski’s own texts).
So it was in the nineties, but in more recent times the approach has not been more profound either, as was shown by the notorious Theorem1 programme, which was never interested in taking the local context and meta-text into account. It could not exert a minimum of ethnological concentration on the variety of different culturological references – this was too much work for the European post-dramatic theatre.
The decisions about what is contemporary and innovative, and likewise the decisions about currency rates and the value of shares, were taken in the centres of economic and cultural power (Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, etc.) where several production and presentation organizations and theatres gathered, just as in the world of economics, in order to promote and protect their common interests. These were supported by invited critics and theoreticians whose task was to back up the aesthetics, coming mainly from Belgium, which were in the focus of the producing and touring funds. In the early nineties, one of these “clusters” was gathered around the magazine Theaterschrifft (1992 – 1995), edited by some of the major “players” on the scene in those times (Kaaitheater, Theater am Turm, Hebbel Theater, Wiener Festwochen, Felix Meritis), and who were connected by “like-minded interest” in certain artists. They started something that, in the course of the following years, would grow into a well organized and heavily funded platform for the inflated names (mostly from Belgium, Germany, etc.) whose artistic value has never been questioned because behind them stood the powerful structures and markets created by the consensus of producers and opinion-makers. The work of Jan Lauwers, Jan Fabre, Meg Stuart, Alain Platel, Lloyd Newson, Thomas Ostermeier, Rene Pollesch, etc., never posed perception problems, and so they became regular guests at festivals all over.
In those days the cultural West was quickly expanding its market towards the East of Europe, where it found another lucrative area for the export of its aesthetic concepts, its workshops and seminars, and its technology, giving in this way its contribution to the overall uniformity of the European theatre landscape.
Today these processes have gone even further, in the form of countless networks which work on creating a circle of artists who are then touring everywhere; the festivals provide alibis to one another (because what is good for Wiener Festwochen must also be good for Kunstenfestival or Festival d’Avignon). Everywhere we encounter the same names; the festivals neglect their creative potential and do not work on authentic selection decisions and programming concepts, what is, furthermore, highly supported by funding bodies and distribution organizations (like ONDA in France). If before everybody grabbed from the same sack, now they are all eating from the same plate.
But let’s get back to the eighties: ideas about the European Union were still in infancy, artistic exchange and information flow between the East and the West were almost symbolic and limited to a small number of festivals (in Yugoslavia, before the eighties, it was BITEF in Belgrade, and in Zagreb in the sixties and seventies, there was the propulsive festival of students’ theatre, IFSK, however these belong to another time period and would require a separate text). Thanks to its specific, eccentric position – neither in the East nor in the West – and to Tito’s political dystopia of the so called The Third Way (the movement of non-aligned countries, self-managed socialism as a milder variation of communism), Yugoslavia was one of the rare places where the West could encounter the East and where The Living Theatre could meet Grotowski, tête à tête.
In the eighties, after years of intelligent adjustments of Peter Stein-Botho Strauss models (in which the Serbian director Ljubiša Ristić and the Slovenian playwright and director Dušan Jovanović were at the forefront), there was a rupture – a new generation of Yugoslav directors (then all younger than 30) was running towards its creative peak. Among them we have to point out the Croatian Branko Brezovec, the Slovenians Dragan Živadinov and Vito Taufer, the Bosnian Haris Pašović, and into this group, following its aesthetic and dramaturgic affinity, we can also add the early performances of the Bulgarian Ivan Stanev. They were educated in the institutions of a rigid theatre system, but thanks to a free flow of information and cultural mobility (that allowed interesting aesthetic, cultural, and multilingual leaps) they could have produced strong concepts and erudition of the highest order comparable to any relevant European “generation” project (the generation of German directors in the seventies, the Flemish wave in the eighties). These directors did not belong to the so-called independent scene, the context in which the majority of new theatre in Western Europe was produced in often modest conditions, but they directed astoundingly radical performances in big repertory and national theatres, where the themes of social and political responsibility could be tested without the pressures of commercial exploitation.
About the semiozis of their work we have already said something at the beginning of this text. It was a socially relevant, we might say, engaged theatre of high budgets which, almost perversely, dared to include into its wild and amazing synthesis a ritual, almost cathartic memory of the Balkan region, an element that the European theatre had forgotten, although not renounced. They jumped with superiority through different, sometimes incompatible dramatic levels within one performance, where it was possible to create communication between the theatre of image and ancient ritual, Bosnian sevdah and Robert Wilson, emptied, recycled historical styles and technological schizophrenia. This gave a contaminated style that stood out against the formalism and hygiene of the theatrical languages that burdened the West European market.
The war which led to the break-up of Yugoslavia dispersed this generation which had experienced Yugoslavia as one cultural space. Newly formed states closed themselves inside national borders, within which these directors continue to provoke social and aesthetic claustrophobia, systematizing their own multiplicity (Brezovec carries on with the tradition of trans-national projects, as in his Slovenian-Croatian-Macedonian production of Caesar, and employs pop stars in the staging of Croatian literature; Živadinov radicalises his cosmic theatre by moving its visions into outer space; Taufer in his Psyche and Pašović in his Hamlet transcode and transform different dramatic myths either by destroying their pathos or turning them into pathology).
Although today many of the above mentioned proceedings are close to the usual stylistic repertory of so called multicultural projects, at the time when, in the eighties, this generation was applying them in their performances as an authentic theatre expression, their shift from the horizontal towards vertical multiculturalism2 was neither understood nor recognized on the European level.
At that time Europe decided to radicalise the protestant flavour of its theatre praxis and, under the aegis of the Flemish wave, insisted on aesthetic purity and hygiene, cold self-referentiality, epidemic of geometry, narcissism and cynicism, irony when it wants to be political, overdone wittiness. All these can be viewed today as overripe procedures that, in the meantime, have multiplied into thousands of variations in both Western and, without asking why, Eastern Europe.
In the nineties when Yugoslav theatre swiftly fell apart, a number of talented epigones made their way through by adapting their work to the aesthetics coming mainly from Belgium. The Slovenians were at the forefront: Betontanc and Matjaž Pograjc, Tomaž Štrucl, and Emil Hrvatin to whom the Croatian company Montažstroj and its director Borut Šeparović can also be added. European new theatre mainstream has had no problem with such performances – their contexts were minimized, their meta-text did not exist; you see what you watch.
The nineties are also the war years in the Balkans. The interest for the theatre from this region increased, but this interest would take us back towards The Living Theatre – La MaMa – like lyricism, the quasi-engagement of Eugenio Barba, and the theatre of political correctness. Here are the Serbs and Macedonians at the forefront. The Macedonian playwright Dejan Dukovski gains a European reputation with plays about the likeable, untamed savagery of the Balkans (Balkan is not Dead), and the Belgrade based Center for Cultural Decontamination interprets serious plays like Macbeth as a political-critical parallel (Milošević = Macbeth). Close to this understanding of theatre we can also place the Serbian playwright with European recognition, Biljana Srbljanović.
The late nineties bring onto the stage generations from the Balkans who take part on an equal level with other countries in the process of rendering uniform the European theatre landscape. They gain education with foreign bursaries, secured from all sides by workshops and seminars, and they do not mind the homogenization of global projects. They buy in one place and sell in another; sensation stands before confidence. Today they all dance to the same score, in Slovenia and in Macedonia (though here the influence of Russian neoclassicism causes some disturbances), just as in, for example, Portugal and Norway; it is impossible to determine the country of origin.
The romantic charm of the Balkans as a place of authentic energies, in the nineties, still inspired a generation of older artists, to whom the war gave a sporadic European alibi (the Roma director Rahim Burhan, the Macedonian Aleksandar Popovski, the Slovenian Eduard Miler). There were also a few intelligent directors who, with self-conscious refinement, imitated the heroic phase of the innovative theatre of the seventies and eighties and its authentic traits. In Slovenia Tomaž Pandur relies on the rigid monumentality of German theatre, in Croatia and Serbia, Paolo Magelli, in his early works, almost anticipated the procedures later used by Peter Sellers, and in Macedonia Slobodan Unkovski uses elegance after the model of Antoine Vitez.
Outside the formal parameters of new theatre but close to the concept of self-referentiality, the Croatian author duo who appeared in the mid nineties, Bobo Jelčić and Nataša Rajković, are tied to narratives cleared of their archetypal vocabulary. It is a theatre of spending time on stage in a very noble meaning of the phrase. Narrative structures are neglected, presentation is in the constant process of postponement, theatricality does not incite an event, the event is expected due to its dramatic absence in an interspace between sincerity and conditionality.
We are in the 21st century; among the generation of directors singled out above, only Brezovec has not lost his breath. In Živadinov’s cosmic-Orphic concepts we can identify self-irony, which comes in place of the aesthetic narcissism and prophetic character of his early projects in the eighties. Pašović and Taufer, on the contrary, lose their irony and, without any special liveliness, put an emphasis on the elegance of their performances. In the ZKM theatre Brezovec staged three politically vehement projects (Great Master of All Villains, Kamov, Necrology/Moulin Rouge and The Fifth Evangelium) that employ an immense energy and complex transpositions – it is a political theatre based on entirely new assumptions and perspectives.
In the past decade Slovenian theatre, with the exception of the hybrid performances of Bojan Jablanovec and his company Via Negativa, has lost that what made it interesting in the last twenty years of the 20th century. Serbian theatre has had very self conscious actors, but we cannot single out any particular director as important. In Macedonia, also with actors of exceptional quality and broad intuition, a young director Martin Kočovski uses Brecht’s texts and elements of Meyerhold’s constructivism. Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosovo se débrouillent.
But all these countries do not have shortage of festivals, which are abundant; here too, we can spot promiscuity on a European level.
And in the end – my Croatia: I can say that twenty years ago Croatia had strong festivals (among them, without false modesty, Eurokaz, which celebrated its 25th edition this year, but also summer festivals in Split and Dubrovnik), and weak theatre (especially in comparison with Slovenia).
Nevertheless, it seems that a new generation of directors (Oliver Frljić, Anica Tomić) who received their diplomas in recent years at the Zagreb Theatre Academy, is willing to engage on a social and political level, so hopefully the Croatian theatre will acquire a new sway. Among them Anja Maksić Japundžić shows a superiority on a formal level that can be seen in her performance Njarabum, where she starts from vertiginous concepts coming from spaces which are not yet occupied.
The Croatian director from the first half of the 20th century Branko Gavella said once: “I think that an uneven line of development is a characteristic of the literature of small countries and not their quantitative backwardness”.
Unfortunately, this diagnosis is still valid. It looks as if the new theatre in this region was more influential twenty or twenty five years ago than it is now. Today, in a majority of its achievements it is epigonic (meaning, it keeps pace only in relation to its quantity), though not many people in Europe, especially younger people, could tell where the originals of these copies are, or who their predecessors were. They are the relapses of unknown roots.
This was the worst thing that could have happened to European theatre as well as to the theatre of this region.
The best statement which could help this diagnosis could be summarized in the following: if there are no originals, then this theatre follows the matrix of deep sub-consciousness after Lacan who sees the subconscious as a translation without original.
* Gordana Vnuk is founder and artistic director of Eurokaz (international festival of new theatre) Croatia 2001-2007 she was artistic director of Kampnagel in Hamburg, Germany. Author of theatre reviews, texts on performing arts, symposium papers etc.
1. Theorem was a multi-annual programme conceived in 1998 by around 14 European festivals and theatres (among them: Festival d’Avignon, LIFT London, Hebbel Theater Berlin, Intercult Stockholm, de Singel Antwerpen, Berliner Festspiele etc.) and supported by the European Commission. In its essence it was an organized hunt for East European directors who would then be produced under the label of Theorem. Particular attention was given to a new generation of artists, but mainly to those who could be easily tamed and exhibited in the market, who would not question the criteria of Western taste but would work on low level provocation which, by its context and the tourism of its tradition, could produce charming results. Theorem managed, in only few years, to destroy all possibilities for an authentic East European theatre by closing the door to any aesthetic which was different from the one upon which the West agreed as the only one which corresponds to the « contemporaneity ».
2. Eurokaz articulated and inaugurated vertical multiculturalism during its symposiums on post-mainstream in 1994 and 1995. A distinction between vertical and horizontal multiculturalism should have helped in clarification of the multicultural fog that had been hovering over West Europe since the time of Peter Brook. Horizontal multiculturalism, means cultural and social activity focused on minorities or the decorative use of traditional forms of mostly non-European cultures (Brook, Barba, Mnouchkine), a musaka that, with a little Indian make-up, magnificent Japanese costumes, or the screams of a few black actors, tries to convince us that it is engaged with the rest of the world, while in fact its manner of piling up sensations is intrinsically Western. In opposition to this, to name it clearly, colonial approach, artists of vertical multiculturalism, working at the intersections of different cultures and penetrating through the simultaneity of different cultural identities by using a kind of schizo-analytical approach, build a unique, innovative artistic form. That kind of actor manages to keep together a multitude of different archaic combinations and procedures within his mental habitus. At the same time his physis emanates the gesture of modern theatre responsible for giving vertiginous dimensions to the inner ritual element and the ritual sense of time. The same can be said about the aforementioned directing procedures. (from the book: 20 Years of Eurokaz, 2006)