TEN
YEARS AFTER THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL
Isterpolitana International Theatre Festival
Academy of Dramatic Arts, Bratislava, Slovakia 2000
ONE WALL DOWN, MANY WALLS UP
Few reflections on theatre and drama in the countries of former Yugoslavia
in the last decade of the Millennium
Today, ten years after, I have a distinct image of the fall of the Berlin
Wall in my mind. That is a piece of cement, a stone taken from the rubble,
well packed and sold for five American green dollars, laying on a bookshelf
in a friend's [a distinguished university professor] office at UTD in
Dallas, Texas. I am sitting in that office, in the Fall of 1990, looking
at that piece of "memorabilia", a symbol of a new freedom,
and I don't know why I think of a Miljkovich's - a distinguished Serbian
poet - famous verse written in some other time of enthusiasm and risen
hopes: "Is the freedom going to sing, in the same powerful way
as the oppressed sung about it?".
Back
then the fall of the wall for most of the Eastern European Countries
meant, as Adam Michnik will put it later, a leap "from dictatorship
to democracy, from monopoly to pluralism, from the status of a satellite
country to a sovereign country, from the Warsaw Pact to NATO, from economy
of scarcity and planned economy to a market economy and economic growth,
from censorship to freedom, from closed borders to open borders, from
state ownership to privatization."
At
that time no one thought that the arts, and theatre and drama as well,
with the arrival of freedom will undergo a substantial transformation
as well. As a Washington Post journalist referring to the achievements
of freedom in the light of the fall of the wall put it these days "the
idea of the artist as tribune withered with such speed in the first
bloom of democracy. What 40 years of communist oppression did not erase
was quickly silenced by its own success: the achievement of freedom.
Under communism, a whisper of defiance echoed like a gunshot; under
capitalism, a whisper is just a whisper. The vast sponging up of Western
popular culture--music, movies, television, fashion, advertising, gambling--is
the most visible change in Central Europe over the last decade. Not
only have an unrestricted press and free speech taken root, but also
some of its more corrosive or absurd expressions: sex shops nestled
in street arcades in Warsaw; naked men and women providing the weather
forecast on Czech television; Playboy bunnies handing out flyers outside
casinos on the streets of Budapest." That is probably why Ivan
Klima noted Czech novelist and dissident will say cynically. "We
have a new God. The new God is called Entertainment." "In
a way", British writer Timothy Garton Ash will say, " Central
Europe is a mirror, held up to ourselves in the West, a mirror in a
very bright or a cruel light, a mirror you are looking in at 7 o'clock
in the morning when you have a particularly bad hangover, a mirror in
which we see ourselves in a rather unflattering light."
Back
then, sitting in that professor's office I did not see that just in
a year from that moment my native country Yugoslavia will be disintegrated,
destroyed, turned into rubles and pieces of burnt stones and bones that
no one would like to pack, buy and sell as "memorabilia" of
a "wasteland in which century old hatred is taking its toll."
That is unfortunately how it is regularly seen through the inaccurate
Western blurry Glasses. But we lived there in peace for forty years
at least. Well, I could not imagine that in contrast to the transformation
of the countries of the Eastern Block, my country will be a subject
of a typical postmodern, fragmentation, violent transfiguration, and
dehumanization. I could not imagine that many of its citizens will be
displaced, turned into appatrides, refugees, people who are losing their
identity. Also, in that time of hope and belief in a better life that
the new freedom brings, unfortunately I didn't see the new invisible
walls that started to rise on European soil for the people of my brutally
killed country. I did not see the destructive and brutal "beauty"
of post-modernism. I did not see the walls that separate the people
from Former Yugoslavia, who until yesterday lived together, from each
other, and I did not see another one more dangerous wall who separates
them from Europe.
Since
then, many plays were written in the new emerged self-centered countries
who have surrounded themselves with new real walls and proudly erected
borders marked by nationalism and hatred, walls that reinforced their
narcissism of small differences.
How did authors and theatre practitioners in my unhappy corner of the
world respond to these new challenges? How did the playwrights address
this new freedom?
Some
of them followed their ethnic impulses, their blood, choose "to
belong" to their tribes, and got stock in their nationalistic trenches.
Nothing new in Europe. They became adversaries and advocates of their
small countries affirming once again the "beauty" of the "soil
and the blood", blending their communist's and nationalist's sentiments
into new breed: war profiteers.
Many
of the theatre artist and playwrights, especially those who fought for
decades for broadening the landscape of freedom, under the new very
repressive nationalistic circumstances left their countries and went
to continue their work in exile. Some of them like Goran Stefanovski,
Dzevad Karahasan, Kaca Celan, Slobodan Snajder, Filip David, raised
their voice in an outcry against the Balkan madness and disintegration,
against the new walls that were built there, in their former country,
between them and their friends from the other parts of their homeland.
In their plays like Sarajevo, Hotel Europa [Goran Stefanovski], Boat
of Fools, [Filip David], or Snake Skin,[ Slobodan Snajder], they tried
to critically see the poignant reality, to express their deep discontent
with the violent transfiguration of our humanity and to suggest their
audiences to look beyond our differences, to look for a New World based
on different principles of social structures. To look for a multi-cultural
and tolerant world. They were envisioning an environment that crosses
the borders and tries to remove newly raised walls. Their plays spark
with bitter optimism and utopian sentiment.
The
new, younger generation of playwrights who grew up and appeared mostly
in the newly emerged small feuds on the ruins of former Yugoslavia,
addresses the issue more directly and in terms that are closer to their
contaminated ground, with less optimism, less utopian images and more
post-modern nihilism. In their plays dominates brutality, violence,
despair, sex, vulgarity, and bad taste. Most of them are on the edge
of pornography and kitsch. Instead of sharpening their criticism and
dissatisfaction with the current violent transfiguration of the land,
which brought the crime, prostitution, lawfulness and overall corruption
of the society, they unfortunately remind trapped by that same cancerous
environment. In spite of their personal critical stands and personal
opposition to the current despotic and corrupt regimes they in fact
without being able to reach needed critical and aesthetic distance in
their plays, become part of that brutal and contaminated world that
serves that new god that Klima names - entertainment and profit.
Dejan Dukovski, the author of Balkan Powderkeg and Who the fuck stared
all this mess and Biljana Srbljanovic the author of Belgrade´s
Trilogy are paradigmatic representatives of these new generation of
playwrights who write self-oriented self-confined plays that correspond
with their own reality losing their step with the world at large. In
their plays and productions that appeared on the grounds of former Yugoslavia,
which was once culturally diverse environment/society and which is now
fragmented, fractured, disunited and devastated landscape, they portrayed
a world which is thematically local, parochial, and self-contained,
and aesthetically based on the twentieth Century tradition.
Biljana
Srbljanovic's play for example, is emotional and moving, more or less
realistic story about a group of friends, army drifters from Belgrade
who due to the European, in this case particularly Serbian tradition
of wars for dominance over the others - mostly over the neighbors, live
all over the world from Prague to Sydney and Los Angeles. Although the
play has significant attributes to become theatre discourse on lost
wealth of multicultural possibilities it remains within its own cultural
identity and painfully digs into its own Serbian open wounds. The other,
the different one is only the enemy while the new culture is just a
distant backdrop that is almost irrelevant. It may be any environment
in the world any culture, the meanings and the relationship will not
change. The main frame will be Serbian suffering and need for growing
up and maturing.
Dejan Dukovski´s response to the European tradition of ethnic
intolerance and confrontations in the name of “blood and soil”
in his disturbing play Balkan Powderkeg and Who the fuck stared all
this mess is quite different. He creates a closed world of imaginary
and mythological figures on the outskirts of the war theatre. His world
is filled with brutality and vulgarity, and desperation and the luck
of any sense of love or any other form of compassion dominate the landscape.
What really exists is brutal sex, violence, drugs, and death. There
are no multicultural references. Everything is within its own Macedonian
tradition, mythology and national heritage, while the other cultures
are seen exclusively as enemies, destroyers, and conquerors. It is a
bitter and shocking picture of a desperate and devastated environment
with no exit for its forthcoming new generation that even does not like
to know about the others. At the end, must be said that for many people
from former Yugoslavia the Berlin Wall is still there. Not that one
turned into rubbles that decorate professors' bookshelves, but invisible
one not seen by many in the western world, and one more dangerous. For
all those who come from the Balkans they see it immediately very moment
when they express a human wish to go to any of the Western European
countries, to go to the promised Shengen's Europe. United Europe without
walls and boundaries where there are no walls and no visa is needed.
From the moment when they apply for visa and they are humiliated by
the Western embassies’ and consulates’ personnel, to the
moment when their planes land in Vienna, Frankfurt or Paris or London
or somewhere else, to the moment when their trains enter the European
Union, to that very moment when they are subjected to the humiliation
of the customs and immigration officers and when they are seen and treated
as if they are people who have leprosy or some other dangerous disease
and who should be put in quarantines - those dangerous barbarians from
the Balkans - the wall is there. The highly raised walls of the Hotel
Europe are there. And there is no play in the United Democratic Europe
about these invisible walls. That play waits yet to be written.
N A U M P A N O V S K I
