Prelude To War
Naum Panovski
THEATRE, NATIONALISM, AND DISINTEGRATION
OF THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA
"They won't say: the times were dark,
Rather: why were their poets silent?"
Bertolt Brecht, In Dark Times
Maps
As a result of nationalistic madness many theatre artists from
the former Yugoslavia now live as emigrants all over the world.
All that remains of their former cold-bloodedly murdered country
are old maps reinforced by tapes to last longer, images of places
that do not exist any more, and memories of years living in a
country which had a good chance of becoming a multi-ethnic democracy
based on equality, justice, freedom, and creative intercultural
integration.
What were the processes--historical,
political, social, economic, cultural, artistic--that brought
about the violent disintegration, fragmentation, and collapse
of the former Yugoslavia? What was the role of the theatre in
that collapse? What did theatre artists--playwrights, directors,
actors, scholars--do to prevent or to enforce that destruction?
Why was theatre transformed into an instrument and misused, while
life was theatricalized to the utmost?
National sentiment
and general party line
At the end of 1990 there were 88 professional and state-subsidized
theatres in the former Yugoslavia. They all looked alike. Most
of them were built in the tradition of the old mid-European Burghtheater-style
in the second half of the last century. In one way or another,
they all had, and still have, the same prefix "national"
in their names regardless of the ethnic identity: Macedonian National
Theatre, Skopje; Serbian National Theatre, Beograd; Serbian National
Theatre, Novi Sad; Croatian National Theatre, Zagreb; Slovenian
National Theatre, Ljubljana; National Theatre of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Sarajevo, to name a few.
This conception of art
dominated by national sentiment emerged in Europe during the nineteenth
century as part of the Romantic philosophy and its rediscovery
of [End Page 2] national values. In that period the first nation-states
were formed; immediately along with them the first national theatres
in Europe were founded. Theatre as an art, therefore, was intended
as a means to serve the nation-state; its purposes and aims were
to protect and affirm state policy. Under such circumstances any
form of theatre was, and still is, perceived as an expression
of the collective consciousness and the will of the nation. 1
This "theatre" represents the very identity and emancipation
of the nation. In return, the nation-state protects and supports
the theatre, a conception that by and large characterized the
theatre in the pre-war Yugoslav republics.
In addition to this
"national" element, the theatre in Yugoslavia was significantly
dominated by party ideology. The party interfered in all matters
of society, political, economic, cultural, artistic. Following
the general party line, the party strategists and ideologists
required theatre to be an ideological means of expression of the
"class struggle." In fact, they imposed a form of theatre
which accorded with Lenin's writings on the importance of literature
and the arts to society and with his idea of art as a weapon in
the hands of the working class. Yugoslav theatre was, as a consequence,
generally dominated by two contrasting elements: a) a publicly
declared socialist ideology striving for a classless society,
and b) a covertly supported, protected, and encouraged repository
of national sentiments.
In this complex conglomerate
of divergent forces and conceptions, there was no aesthetic diversity.
No matter what kind of punctuation mark stood in front of a given
kind of theatre--one which emphasized the national sentiment or
one which displayed ideological meaning--it signified a politically
colored form of art dominated by its ideological content. Either
way, the aesthetic point of departure was within the framework
of the traditional psychological realism inaugurated by Stanislavski.
Any artistic attempt which focused on development of the form
was seen as meaningless formalism and/or liberalism, while the
artists were accused from both sides, nationalists or communists,
of attacking either the national dignity or, even more seriously,
of attacking the fundamental values of Yugoslav society.
This secret alliance
between official party ideology (supported by a demagogic and
faceless bureaucracy) and expressive national passions (represented
by drunk counselors in the male dominated "Balkan bar")
was hidden behind various masks. This alliance trapped many theatre
artists, transforming them into passionate warriors fighting for
dubious ideologies. Fortunately, many theatre enthusiasts, lunatics,
lovers, and poets also had the strength simultaneously to raise
their voices against these small islands of imposed communist
happiness and nationalist pride.
Years of illusions
The early eighties was a period known as "Yugoslavia after
Tito." Although he was gone, the majority of people behaved
as if he were still alive. Many immature Yugoslav politicians,
on the one hand, were obsessed by their own narcissism and hunger
for power and, on the other, were incapable of carrying Tito's
legacy on their [End Page 3] paper shoulders. They artificially
cultivated and maintained that "pale copy" of continuity
in order to remain in power. As a result, no one thought or saw
that the country was falling apart, that the center could not
hold any more, and that their politics could be the beginning
of the end because, behind the official political and cultural
scene, the nationalists had already raised their heads. No one
believed in that period that the peoples of Yugoslavia would begin
to fight and kill each other again as they did during World War
II. No one could have imagined at that time that it could happen
again in Europe--in "civilized" Europe. The world seemed
united, and no one dreamt at all that we are going to witness
the most violent destruction of a culture on European soil.
That disintegration,
which shares many forms and characteristics similar to postmodernism,
was experienced many times before in history as a tragic consequence
of the nationalist blindness and madness in that corner of the
world. It's now a generic political term: "Balkanization."
This similarity can be briefly clarified. Balkanization is a "genuine"
invention introduced to occidental culture in the period of Romanticism
and national awakening as a process of the disjuncture and fractioning
of the Ottoman Empire during the last century, forced by the immature
national tutors on that doomed Balkan peninsula. Consequently,
for a century and a half, Balkanization has shown that it is a
retrograde state of mind and a degenerative process which violently
transforms society, brings destruction, deconstruction, death,
and disappearance of humanizing culture, including theatre. As
a result of this partition, fragmentation, and confrontation of
the Ottoman Empire, new words were invented. "Balkanization"
and to "Balkanize," which means a) to divide (a country,
territory, etc.) into small, quarrelsome, ineffectual states and
b) to divide (groups, areas, etc.) into contending and usually
ineffectual factions. Balkanization also means deconstruction,
disintegration, fragmentation, confrontation, self-orientation,
isolation, break up of a whole into smaller and often hostile
units, and a return to experienced forms from the past.
Test balloons
Balkanization as an old/new process in the former Yugoslavia began,
on the one hand, as a recycling of the national mythology (Ihab
Hassan would say that history is "palimpsest"). On the
other hand, it is a disassemblage ("a will of unmaking"
in Hassan's terms) of the communist federal system which was hidden
behind the republic's outcry for independence. This glorious return
to national values and ethnic roots in the self-isolated nationalist
beauty parlors and "the ideology of fracture," which
later brought a violent discourse between the fragments, began
in literature in the first half of the eighties. A few novels
like The Pigeonhole by Jovan Radulovic, A Book About Milutin by
Danko Popovic in Serbia, A Life With My Uncle by Stojan Aralica
in Croatia, along with some other similar novels and plays created
in other parts of Yugoslavia, became raised banners in the hands
of the nationalist gurus. Once again art was dominated by the
century-old Slavic syndrome of self-pity, national pride, and
martyrdom. From many sides one could hear pathetic and farcical
outcries: "Our nation was victimized the most in the past.
We have suffered [End Page 4] the most. We have been conquered
and partitioned the most. We have the most enemies. We have sacrificed
for our nation the most. We gave up the most intellectuals for
our freedom. They are our national martyrs."
In the grotesque context
above, A Book about Milutin (13 printings in 1985) is a story
about an old Serbian peasant, a courageous and decorated soldier
in Serbia, who is arrested after World War II by the communists
as a kulak. During his term in prison he tells his life story
to his young inmate. Actually it is his message to the new generation,
emphasizing Serbian suffering, the sacrifices and heroism of earlier
wars in which his father and two brothers were killed. He is skeptical
of "liberation projects" undertaken in his Serbia by
the communists and is very critical of the basic tenets of all
ideologies, including the ideology of "Yugoslavism."
This straightforward narrative implies that the whole of twentieth-century
history has conspired against Serbian national interests. Everyone
on all sides of the world has been against the poor, unprotected
Serbian people. The Vatican, the Comintern, the West, everyone
has been plotting against Serbia.
In the case of The Pigeonhole,
the flame of nationalism is even more explicit. This novel, which
was turned into a theatre production, focuses on war atrocities
committed during World War II by the Croatian Nazis, the Ustashis,
against the Serbs in Croatia. The bottomless "pigeonholes"
and caves that were used as mass graves during the war in Krajina
serve as a metaphor for Serbian national suffering as well as
a backdrop for settling old national accounts from the violent
past between Serbs and Croats now living in a common country.
Who has done what to whom in the mutual fatherland? Who was victim
and who was villain? Who was fighting for liberation and who was
a traitor in the war?
Adapted for the stage
and presented by an independent theatre company in Belgrade, 2
The Pigeonhole provoked a volcano of controversial reactions and
a storm in Yugoslav artistic circles. While it was glorified by
Serbian nationalists as "a renewal of the antic tragedy on
the Yugoslav stage" which bravely treats and heals the wounds
of a glorious past and proudly discloses the crimes against the
Serbian nation that the communists would have liked to hide and
forget, it was simultaneously denounced by Croatian intellectuals,
criticized for its national hatred by party officials, "diplomatically"
avoided, and banned at the Sterijino Pozorje Festival in 1985.
The production was broadly supported by the majority of liberal--democracy-oriented--intellectuals
in Yugoslavia who, paradoxically, defending the essential principles
of freedom of artistic expression, did not recognize the danger
of these divisions, separations, segmentations, and recyclings
of history. Underestimating and neglecting the power of nationalism
disguised behind the mask of a call for democracy, freedom of
speech, and artistic expression (including freedom of expressing
nationalist sentiments), they did not see the growing nationalist
hot-air balloon expanding overhead. Many theatre artists felt
it but did not want to admit that the catastrophe was impending.
Is it that this production was just a test balloon floated by
the nationalist gurus to judge the receptivity for their future
demonic experiments?
Rebels
In opposition to the national choruses, significant theatre artists
resisted official policy and were permanently searching for a
different kind of theatre, culture, and society, and quested for
real democracy, freedom, tolerance, and justice. The people around
Kazaliste, Gledaliste, Pozoriste, Teatar project may be considered
a good example of these resisters. Founded and led by a group
of theatre artists from Serbia (Ljubisa Ristic, director; Dragan
Klaic, dramaturg and writer), from Croatia (Nada Kokotovic, choreographer;
Rade Serbedzija, actor), and from Slovenia (Dusan Jovanovic, playwright
and director) KGPT included theatre artists of varied ethnic backgrounds
from all over Yugoslavia. KGPT's actors, directors, playwrights,
set and costume designers, and composers were Bosnians, Macedonians,
Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Albanians, Gypsies, Slovenians, Turks,
and Hungarians. They created theatre in various cultural centers
in different corners of the former Yugoslavia. In so doing, they
expressed Yugoslavia's rich and diverse ethnic community, and
focused on the enormous possibilities for intercultural integration
in the region as a microcosm of United Europe. KGPT, in fact,
advocated cultural pluralism on the Yugoslav theatre stage, sought
to overcome national boundaries, and wanted to create a Yugoslav
theatre.
At that time--the early
eighties--the founders of KGPT and its leading artists were very
often accused of "Yugoslav unitarism (centralism) from the
position of Serbian hegemonism," or for being elements who
would like to see the disintegration and disappearance of Yugoslavia,
or for ambitiously attempting to establish their personal monopoly
over Yugoslav theatre in general. Unfortunately, some of them,
like Ljubisa Ristic who took the Serbian side and recently became
a president of the United Yugoslav Left (a political party founded
by Slobodan Milosevic's wife), proved that there was some truth
in these accusations.
Simultaneously with
KGPT, another process (or rather, an unformulated movement) was
carried out mostly by a group of theatre directors of various
ethnic backgrounds who lived in different republics. These directors
were not willing to be part of the nationalist choruses inaugurated
and protected by their republic's bureaucracy. They worked mostly
out of their native environments but felt equally at home everywhere.
Liberally and democratically oriented, they perceived Yugoslavia
as a united multicultural environment. Instead of national self-isolation,
their work suggested a particular artistic braiding among the
people and the cultures of the former Yugoslavia. Although not
always personally close, they had as individuals aesthetically
similar approaches to many current issues, shared many ideas,
and respected each other's differences. They comprised a significant
artistic force aware of the resurgent ghosts of nationalism. Most
of their performances anticipated the tragic events of balkanization,
but unfortunately they were a minority in their own country and
lived in a curious state of internal exile.
Paradoxically, these
artists (mostly from Slovenia and Macedonia, and including a naturalized
Yugoslav of Italian descent, Paolo Magelli) were both praised
and [End Page 6] blamed for their theatre work by all sides. While
praised by party officials for their creative achievements and
international affirmation of Yugoslavia, they were often accused
of anti-communism, liberalism, and/or for not being politically
correct. While praised by the nationalists for attacking the communist
system, they were also accused of betraying national interests,
of selling out to their enemies (i.e., those of another ethnic
group) and of not showing enough patriotism.
Significantly, state-sanctioned
neo-Stalinism and neo-nationalism, assuming shapes and meanings
similar to those explored by postmodernist performances, conquered
the mainstream theatre, opened "the discourse of fragments"
and began with "good intentions" to pave the road to
hell. One could often hear the apparatchiks' voices in the mid-eighties:
"The only good theatre is the one which serves the party
and praises the working class and socialism." On the other
side of the barricades the national prophets and apologists screamed:
"The only good and valuable theatre is one that affirms and
praises the nation and protects the national interest." The
new red Nazism or rather black communism was on the horizon.
Festivals
The major Yugoslav theatre festivals--MESS 1986 (Festival of the
Yugoslav Theatre) and Sterijino Pozorje 86 (Yugoslav Festival
of Domestic Drama)--had a special place on the Yugoslav theatre
map and played a crucial role in the future developments of the
theatre and political life in Yugoslavia. Special attention and
treatment was accorded theatre festivals in the former Yugoslavia.
These festivals, like those of ancient times, were organized as
professional competitions and existed mainly to serve non-artistic
aims. Victory was the most important goal for the competitors.
They dreamt of returning home with as many "golden laurel
wreaths" as possible, which meant that they were winning
politically and ideologically rather than artistically. For many
parties (political, social, artistic, cultural) involved in the
Yugoslav struggle for power, they became places where political
goals could be achieved and ethnic dominance established. Awards
received at these festivals were celebrated in the "victorious"
republic for days, if not weeks. The festival meant everything:
affirmation, emancipation, the apology and confirmation of certain
ideas, the superiority of a given national community.
The forces of power
in the former Yugoslavia, both official (communist party, republic
governments, cultural and artistic institutions) and unofficial
("intellectual" circles, "artistic" groups,
"nationally concerned patriots"), interested in obtaining
various types of power, knew very well the significance of victory
at one of these festivals--and they fought for it. If one looks
at the Sterijino Pozorje 86 and MESS 86 programs today, one should
rather say that these two festivals became more divided than ever
that year. Each was definitively transformed into an open battlefield
where everyone was fighting for his or her own side on behalf
of his or her nation-state, each glorifying respective national
values at the expense of all others, confronting and contrasting
in that way their small corrals with the small corrals of the
others. The battles were merciless.
Losers and
Winners
MESS and Sterijino Pozorje festivals 86 could be remembered today
for their "losers" and "winners." Namely,
for productions like The Metastable Grail, The Petit Bourgeois
Wedding, Croatian Faust, and Titus Andronicus, which resisted
the hypocrisy and totalitarian idea of community, and productions
like The Traveling Theatre Sopalovic which danced to the nationalist
drums. The former group of performances courageously, critically,
and openly questioned the real possibilities of theatre expression
in Yugoslav society at that time. They tried to identify theatre's
humanistic endeavor to influence social changes, to differentiate
truth from falsehood, art from kitsch, culture from barbarity.
This "loser" theatre anticipated what happens to theatre
and society when they experience deepening social and political
crises in which society begins to fall apart at all levels, and
tried to admonish what happens when theatre loses the sense of
decency, beauty, and truth.
A significant representative
of the first group was the production of The Metastable Grail
3 by Nenad Prokic. This production brought to the stage the unbearable
conditions of intellectual life in a totalitarian community and
became, as well, a symbol of that intellectual life. In so doing,
it touched a raw nerve with both nationalists and communists.
Attacking the party bureaucracy and ridiculing the nationalists'
primitivism in a way not presented then on Yugoslav stages, Prokic
questioned the fundamental principles of art, democracy, freedom,
and existence in a single-party Yugoslavia. What is the place
and the role of the theatre artist in a time of deep social, economic,
and political crisis? What can theatre artists do when society
and the prevailing times are unstable, or rather metastable, when
the evil of Nazism and fascism overshadow the future? Is the artist
able to do anything in such an authoritarian and xenophobic environment
to stop the madness and prevent slaughter?
The Yugoslav artist's
dream--the longing for freedom--was transformed, as it was presented
in The Metastable Grail, into the nightmare of a rebellious artist
who refuses to be a house pet in the backyard of insane and primitive
authorities. The only move that the theatre artist could make
in such a society was either to be a servant to despotism or to
withdraw, leaving the field open to the "artists" and
another theatrical form: a totalitarian and theatricalized society
in which illiteracy, hypocrisy, passions, and immorality prevail.
The only means of escape, the last exit from this nightmare and
from the ruthless theatre that takes place in reality, in which
no room remains for poetry, imagination, love, and beauty is Death.
It is the exit to definite silence, 4 silence in a metaphoric,
theatrical, and literary sense. Further developments of events
and the current Nazification of the remaining fragments of Yugoslavia
confirm the apocalyptic vision expressed in The Metastable Grail.
In the group of productions
which defended the revival of the national cause, The Sopalovic
Traveling Theatre 5 by Ljubomir Simovic (the official winner of
Sterijino Pozorje 86) played a particular role and accelerated
the inflaming of nationalism in [End Page 8] Serbia. This play,
produced in the traditional framework of poetic realism, was praised
by the designated representatives of the nationalist block as
a real artistic break-through! Break-through to what? Back to
the state of hatred, Nazism, and barbarism?! Writing about that
production, many nationally concerned critics expressing their
highest concern about the health of their nation claimed that
The Sopalovic Traveling Theatre is about love and transformation.
They wrote: "Simovic brings the actors of a traveling company
to [Nazi] occupied Uzice in 1941. The wandering troupe of four
actors becomes, in the setting of a merciless war between the
people and the occupying forces, a vehicle of an eternal message
of love. Around them cluster the oppressors and those who fight
for their freedom. In the play, the function of the traveling
theatre is to condemn both the fascist evildoers and the people
who rise up against them--and all in the name of love and art.
Under the beneficial influence of the actors, the most brutal
occupying bully is transformed into a human being. This metamorphoses
is supplemented by a melodramatic situation, realistic characters,
juicy humor, unexpected turns in the plot and, especially, superb
acting. Moved by this, the spectators are entertained, and accept
the arbitrariness of the fairy tale for the moral and the message."
What was the message
and the moral conveyed by this production? Hiding their real beliefs
and intentions behind the colorful fan of expressions like "poetic
language," "rich characters," "excellent dramatic
plot," "message of love," "superb directorial
approach," these "critics" were actually applauding
something else: a déjà vu world. Digging in the
backyard of recent Serbian national history, The Sopalovic Traveling
Theatre supporters used the production as an attempt to rehabilitate
the dark forces of the past and to reconcile the ideological divisions
in Serbia that appeared during World War II. 6 What the spectators
were offered was the notion that those who fought against Nazism
were just as violent as their murderers. According to these critics,
a Chetnik, a Nazi collaborator and executioner in the play, was
a pure personification of love. As for the theatre, these passionate
lovers of the past argued that regardless of what happens in reality,
the theatre is an "illusion" which should stand above
reality and remain disinterested in any currents of interest to
the community. What kind of reality is it in which the theatre
exists in a vacuum? What kind of theatre is that which is not
at the center of society, which does not harmonize and humanize
life, but turns its back to it and closes its eyes to terror,
violence, and destruction, or even participates in it? Unfortunately,
these issues were not raised, neither among the Yugoslav "intellectual"
supporters of The Sopalovic Traveling Theatre, nor among those
who really fought for freedom.
This outspoken piece
was meant to open the process of reconciliation between the Serbian
fascists' sordid World War II past and the actual communist reality
of the eighties. But not only that: it seems now that within the
framework of this production the Serbian nationalist gurus planned
to introduce the villains from the past as old-new national heroes
who would reappear and become leaders chosen to form a devastated
archipelago of nationally purged fragments/fractions called Greater
Serbia.
SANU Memorandum:
forward in the mud of the past
The foggy fall of 1986 will be remembered as the beginning of
the end for Yugoslavia. While many Yugoslav theatre artists unsuccessfully
struggled for freedom and the enhancement of theatre possibilities,
some other "theatrical" or rather paratheatrical processes
were taking place in society. The Yugoslav disintegration and
fragmentation, which began with the Albanian riots in Kosovo in
1981, moved toward the final stage of balkanization. The publication
of the semi-official declaration of the famous SANU Memorandum
was a catalytic event in the escalation of the deepening crisis.
That document, inspired and conceived by Dobrica Cosic and his
lieutenants--fellow members of the Serbian Academy of Arts and
Sciences, like Antonie Isakovic, novelist and playwright; Dusan
Kanazir, scientist; Matija Beckovic, poet; Slobodan Selenic, playwright
and professor of theatre and drama, to name a few--was in fact
an expression of Serbian nationalist discontent found in many
of Cosic's writings.
Cosic, called "The
Father of the Nation," was an advocate of the xenophobic
idea that Serbia's tragic fate had been to win her wars and then
lose the ensuing peace, because the postwar arrangements made
by the great powers on behalf of Serbia's neighbors have robbed
her of her wartime gains. This pathetic idea, expressed in various
ways in his novels Roots, Divisions, Time of Death, as well as
in the dramatic adaptations of these writings, would prove a solid
foundation for the Serbian war-manifesto, SANU Memorandum for
National Renewal and Prosperity of Serbia. This document was,
in fact, a detailed action-program which promoted hatred, national
separatism, return to the glorious and heroic past, ethnic cleansing,
self-isolation, national purity and, finally, the unification
of all Serbs under one banner in the state of Greater Serbia.
This program came about as "a resolute defense of the nation
and its sovereign territory" attacked by the Serbian enemies.
The Serbian state had to be reunited and its people protected
by all means necessary, even by undertaking "violent transhumanization"
of the environment.
March of ghosts
from the past
The Serbian intellectuals who resuscitated the ghosts of the past
were not alone in their outcries of discontent. Militant nationalists
in the other republics were also significantly visible. They played
a dominant part in their miniature feudal societies: in artistic,
political, and in everyday life on the streets. These self-proclaimed
"caretakers" of the national health from Slovenia and
Croatia, through Bosnia and Montenegro, to Serbia, Kosovo, and
Macedonia used theatre, literature, rock-music, film, and television
not as aesthetic forms but as negative socio-political matrices
for inflaming nationalist sentiments. In so doing, and supported
by the narcissist Yugo-politicians, the Yugoslav "intelligentsia"
paved the road to neo-Nazism masked by hopeful demands for freedom,
democracy, and independence. Yugoslavia began to look like a wolf's
den in which people, with uncontrolled passions and senses dulled
by hatred, bit each other and raged furiously.
And while theatre stages
all over the country were overloaded with sentimental, neo-romantic,
and insignificant "rediscovery-of-the-national-past"
productions, life itself was becoming more and more dramatic.
In that galvanized atmosphere of deepening social and political
crises, theatre and reality exchanged places. Instead of the communists'
ideologized art and life, in a short period of time Yugoslav neo-Nazis
and neo-Stalinists theatricalized life. In a period of only three
years a list of spectacular paratheatrical events took place across
the country, and in that poignant parade of the shadows of forgotten
ancestors, anarchy, intolerance, and hatred, enthusiastically
supported by the official media, became part of everyday life.
The unbelievable acceleration of disaster was structured like
a perfect theatre script which ultimately led to balkanization
and the violent transformation of Yugoslavia into a landscape
of burnt bones and ashes.
Triumph of
styles of radical will
In a very short period after 1986, the people of Yugoslavia witnessed
the death of communism, the birth of a multi-party system, the
emergence of nationally exclusive political parties, a renewal
of militant Croatian nationalism, the reappearance of Macedonian
national consciousness, a surge of Islamic fundamentalism in Bosnia,
Sanjak, and Kosovo, the establishment of new non-communist republic
governments, the rise to power of the new primitivism and neo-Nazism,
the appearance of petit bourgeois kitsch and mediocrity, and .
. . instead of a birth of democracy, they witnessed how the totalitarianism
of Party ideology was replaced by the totalitarianism of the nation.
After that, war broke
out and the most horrible world surfaced: an entire community
of clashing armies, paramilitary troops, clans, and gangs of both
old-timers and newcomers had lost their minds in a bloody orgy
in which every violent act was answered by the opposing side with
a violence ten times greater, more out of pure relish in revenge
than out of a sense of justice. It was, and still is, as the theatre
critic Dalibor Foretic put it, "a barbarian world in which
there is no longer anything human, a tribal world which yearns
only for blood, suffering, and slaughter. A world in which war
has seeped into the blood of these monsters, and no one can free
himself from it anymore. The maelstrom of evil, aggression, and
brutality, once accelerated, trapped innocent people in its jaws
and prevented anyone from getting out of its hellish circle. Individuals
became victims of the force which has thrown the whole fragmented
community into the witches' cauldron. Evil and violence increased
geometrically in this ghastly environment, in this orgy of gloomy
atavism coming from what was once Yugoslavia." And the world
saw it and still sees it there, in that land of demons, all on
television, drinking coffee and pretending that it happens in
some other world, not here among us.
Dubrovnik, Vukovar,
Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Mostar. And . . . no more bridges. What
next? The narcissism of the small ethnic differences made large
by the "bright," "responsible," and "respected"
Yugo-politicians, intellectuals, and academicians brought about
the horrifying future. That future is the result of the triumph
of their styles of radical will for power in their small, fragmented,
irrelevant, ruined, burnt down, devastated lands. The final deed,
the deconstruction and balkanization of Yugoslavia is complete.
This is the end of humanism. The rest is . . . post-history. Silence.
Naum Panovski, a native
of Macedonia, was for many years one of the leading theatre directors
and writers in the former Yugoslavia. Currently he is the director
of the Theatre Program at Christopher Newport University in Newport
News, Virginia. He is the author of Theatre as a Weapon (Kultura,
Skopje) and Directing Poiesis (Peter Lang, New York).
Notes
1. Nation as ethnos, a group of people with similar lingusitic,
cultural, ethnic, and territorial specifics, not as demos, a group
of people of diverse backgrounds living together in the same state.
2. This production was
presented by the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade led by Milorad
Vucelic, currently general manager of Serbian Radio-Television,
a mouthpiece of Serbian nationalism. The production was directed
by Dejan Mijac.
3. The Metastable Grail
was produced by two theatres only--by Atelje 212 in Belgrade (directed
by Paolo Magelli) and by the National Theatre of Basanska Krajina
in Banja Luka (directed by Naum Panovski).
4. Boro Draskovic, one
of the most gifted directors in the former Yugoslavia, did exactly
that. In protest against the officials who banned his production
of When the Pumpkins Blossomed in the late sixties, Draskovic
chose creative silence and stopped directing for the theatre.
5. The production was staged
by the leading theatre in Belgrade, Yugoslav Dramatic Theatre,
and was directed by Dejan Mijac.
6. These divisions were
mainly between the partisans led by Tito, who fought the Nazis,
and the Chetniks, who were royalists and Nazi collaborators.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/performing_arts_journal/v018/18.2panovski.html.
