10.13125/2039-6597/4006
The aim of the essay is to throw some additional light on the politics of dissent in the Slovene and Yugoslav theatre of the 20th century. It focuses on the specific Central and East European area of non-aligned Yugoslavia as a Second World cultural model in the period of socialism and post-socialism. It thus outlines the alternative culture that emerged after Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948 and continued with neo-avant-gardes and movements of dissent in the postmodern era marked by a severe crisis of self-management socialism. The essay starts from the definitions of the political in the post-dramatic by Hans-Thies Lehmann, and the theatre of opposition or dissidence and theatre of consensus by Valentina Valentini. It outlines the specific character of the Slovene theatre and the ideology of mild socialism that continued to define many aspects of the political within the one-party system of the former Yugoslavia. Thus, it maps a new geography of this specific East European theatre of dissent from the experimental theatre of the 1960's and 1970's until the retro-avant-garde subversive theatre of the Neue Slowenische Kunst.
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The Theatre of Dissent in Non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia from the 1950-ies till the Fall of the Berlin Wall
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Tomaž Toporišič
2020/05/30
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434
University of Ljubljana, Accademy for Theatre (AGRFT)
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The Theatre of Dissent in Non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia from the 1950-ies till the Fall of the Berlin Wall
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        The Theatre of Dissent in Non-aligned
        Slovenia and Yugoslavia from the 1950’s
            until the Fall of the Berlin Wall

                                 Tomaž Toporišič


Abstract
     The aim of the essay is to throw some additional light on the politics of
dissent in the Slovene and Yugoslav theatre of the 20th century. It focuses on
the specific Central and East European area of non-aligned Yugoslavia as a
Second World cultural model in the period of socialism and post-socialism. It
thus outlines the alternative culture that emerged after Tito’s break with Stalin
in 1948 and continued with neo-avant-gardes and movements of dissent in the
postmodern era marked by a severe crisis of self-management socialism. The
essay starts from the definitions of the political in the post-dramatic by Hans-
Thies Lehmann, and the theatre of opposition or dissidence and theatre of
consensus by Valentina Valentini. It outlines the specific character of the
Slovene theatre and the ideology of mild socialism that continued to define
many aspects of the political within the one-party system of the former
Yugoslavia. Thus, it maps a new geography of this specific East European
theatre of dissent from the experimental theatre of the 1960's and 1970's until
the retro-avant-garde subversive theatre of the Neue Slowenische Kunst.

Keywords
     dissent theatre; theatre of consensus; retro avant-garde; post-dramatic;
politicised art


Between, vol. X, n. 19 (Maggio/May 2020)
ISSN 2039-6597
DOI: 10.13125/2039-6597/4006
Tomaž Toporišič, The Theatre of Dissent in Non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia




         The Theatre of Dissent
 in Non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia
from the 1950’s until the Fall of the Berlin Wall1
                                 Tomaž Toporišič2


      Dissent in non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia
     In my reflections on the politics of dissent in the second half of the
20th century I will concentrate on Slovenia and non-aligned Yugoslavia,
and its specific character within the context of Eastern Europe as a
Second World cultural model in the period of socialism and post-
socialism. I will outline the specific alternative culture that emerged
after the Tito-Stalin split of 1948 and continued with neo-avant-gardes
and finally the movements of dissent arising in the postmodern era
marked by a severe crisis of the Yugoslav type of self-management
socialism.
     Let us start with some statements that Herbert Blau quotes in his
outstanding book To All Appearances, Ideology and Performance:

         «It is very hard to know what is political and what isn’t». Jerzy
      Grotowski in an interview. (Blau 1992: 22)
         «I am truly sorry that Marshal Tito did not imprison our
      playwrights». Jovan Ćirilov, the artistic director of the Bitef Festival
      in a colloquy at the Festival of Avignon, 1990. (Id.: 24)



      1
       The author acknowledges the financial support from the state budget
by the Slovene Research Agency (project No. P6-0376).
     2 UL AGRFT, Trubarjeva 3, 1000 Ljubljana




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        «Today our theatres are half-empty. Since last October (the fall
     of the Berlin Wall), the public has left the theatre for the street. Very
     few of them have returned. The large majority have rather made the
     trip to the supermarkets of the West». Eva Walsch, dramaturge of
     the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin in a colloquy at the Festival of
     Avignon, 1990. (Id.: 13)

       Blau applies the statements as deconstructive tools in his book on
ideology and performance. He supplies them with his own statement
about the situation after the fall of the Iron Curtain and other events of
the 1990’s: «Meanwhile [...] nothing recent in our given circumstances –
from deconstruction to perestroika [...] suggests that the situation of crisis
has in any way abated. [...] At best, we might be able to say, [...] that the
situation of crisis has been put into the subjunctive» (Ibid.).
       Today, twenty-five years later, we have to agree with him.
Manifestations of power remain as risky as at the time after the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the communist USSR and socialist
Yugoslavia in the 1990’s. New ideological practices and new political
contexts demand new forms of politicised art. Even in Baudrillard's
postmillennial world of the transpolitical, transhistorical and
transeconomic, art returns to the tactics of the political and politicised.
With less certainty about the possibility of their usage and with stronger
consciousness of the utopic and marginalised nature of its own being,
but nevertheless.
       Together with Grotowski, we are hardly in a position to define the
borderline between political and non-political art. Together with Ćirilov,
we cannot say we are truly sorry that Marshal Tito did not imprison our
playwrights. Historical fact shows that imprisonments did take place
even in the soft version of Yugoslav self-management socialism. This
apparently cosy story about non-aligned socialism ended in a terrifying
war. And we can agree with the East Berlin dramaturge that the public
still prefers supermarkets to theatre. In spite of the fact that they are both
politicised, in one way or another.
       The starting point for our reflections on the tactics of dissent theatre
will be the fact that in the First and Second World of today it is very rare



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Tomaž Toporišič, The Theatre of Dissent in Non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia



to speak about the classical forms of political theatre. Within this scheme
we can refer to the epic theatre of Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht and
within the same period, the early 1920’s, first the Russian Avant-garde
with its restaging of revolutionary events and – after its suppression by
Stalin’s regime – agit-drama and agit-prop.
      We can furthermore trace some signs of utopia in the theatre of
Augusto Boal in its opposition to the tradition of European theatre, as
well as its focusing on the binary model theatre-performance. Its wish to
surpass the dichotomy between the stage and the audience by creating
a theatre as a process, which enables society to objectivise the forms of
repression in order to overcome them. What remains is nothing more
than politicised art and politicised theatre in its various incarnations.
«The discourse on Ideology» (Blau 1992: 28), that – according to Herbert
Blau – was initiated by Bertolt Brecht’s critique of the bourgeois theatre,
is today transformed and marginalised in a specific feature of theatre, as
defined by Hans-Thies Lehmann (in his Ljubljana lecture):

         It is impossible to overlook the fact that compared to earlier
      times, theatre no longer has the function of a centre of Polis, as a
      place of communal reflection on fundamental questions facing
      society. It can also no longer be a tool for confirming a national,
      historical, or cultural identity, and it simply does not work well and
      efficiently as political propaganda. Mass media are more efficient
      in all these matters; at least they are faster as actuality is concerned.
      (Lehmann 2002: 74)

     Thus, the very notion of political theatre has to undergo some
changes, becoming (according to Lehmann) the post-dramatic, an art
that «can deconstruct, suspend, and question the very notion, logical
and teleological structure of the political itself» (Id.: 76).




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The 1960’s - The theatre of consensus versus the theatre
              of the opposition, dissidence
     Let us plunge into the layers of history, into the specific Slovene
and Yugoslav sphere of theatre and ideology of a mild version of
socialism that defined many aspects of the tactics and manifestations of
the political within the one-party system of the former Yugoslavia. To
avoid the danger of a monologic investigation, I will try to define the
specifics of the political during the first decades of the second half of the
20th century in a dialogue with Italian theatre theoretician Valentina
Valentini, specifically with the assumptions elaborated in her lecture
Aesthetics and politics in East European Theatre.
     Valentini proposes a thesis about two types of the Eastern
European theatre:

      -   The theatre of consensus with the text and the actor as its
          dominant tools. The first being socialist-realistic or classical,
          the second a perfect incarnation of the political activist faithful
          to the powers from which he emanated.
      -   The theatre of the opposition, dissidence. Its protagonists being the
          author and the director, the space and the body its tools.

     In a brief overview of the history of the Slovene and other Yugoslav
theatres of the 1950’s and 1960’s we would not come across terms like
the theatre of consensus and dissident theatre. But nevertheless the
typology of Valentini would hold. In the theatre of the period, we can
clearly see the two distinguishable poles:

      -   A repertory and amateur variant of the political and agitational
          theatre controlled by a soft version of the prolet-cult ideology
          and (according to communist party ideologists) designed as a
          special tool of defence from the Western, capitalistic
          propaganda of authors like Tennessee Williams, existentialist
          theatre, the drama of the absurd.



                                                                                437
Tomaž Toporišič, The Theatre of Dissent in Non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia



          -   The so-called other theatre consciously staging existentialist and
              absurd plays and along with them contemporary Slovene
              drama. This theatre did not name itself as political, but
              experimental, a theatre of research: Eksperimentalno
              gledališče [Experimental Theatre] of Balbina Baranovič (1955),
              Gledališče Ad Hoc [Theatre Ad hoc] of Draga Ahačič (1958)
              and Oder 57 [Stage 57]. In parallel with introductions of new
              European and American texts, this theatre examines new
              directing and acting principles and generates the new Slovene
              (politically committed) drama (Ionesco, Beckett, Sartre, Albee,
              Anouilh; Smole, Božič, Kozak, Zupan, Rožanc, Zajc, Strniša).

      The tactics of the political in the theatres mentioned above were
primarily linked to the boldness of the repertoire; but they were
nevertheless linked also to the new theatricality, new concepts of acting,
the autonomy of la mise en scène, the demolition of the barrier between
the stage and the auditorium. However, Oder 573 was part of a broader
underground intellectual, cultural and political contestation movement
adopting its artistic-literary strategies as a form of dissent.
      The history of Oder 57 is thus not just the history of the Slovene
theatre, but also the history of the struggle of Slovene culture and
consciousness against totalitarianism and a struggle for the autonomy
of free practice, for a civil society. And the political repression of Oder
57 was linked to its contestation and political activities, more specifically
the theatre enacting its decision to «put the actors in the middle of the
audience, which has to actively participate in the play and accept a


      3
       Oder 57 (Stage 57, 1957-1964), which began by introducing the theatre
of the absurd but later focused on the production of Slovene contemporary
plays, was the most influential and the strongest group. During its relatively
short existence, Oder 57 presented several contemporary plays by seven
young socially critical Slovene playwrights. The last of them, Topla greda [The
Greenhouse], produced in 1964, was banned by the courts and the theatre
closed.



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conflict situation, taking a stand in it» (Tomše 1975: 175). However, loud
shouts from the public of «Let Rožanc (the dramatist) milk the cows!»
interrupted the opening performance. Moreover, the newspaper Delo
wrote that the interrupted performance (that was banned for years)
«depicts country life in an inappropriate and deceitful way and
furthermore deeply insults the emotions of the WW2 partisans».
      This comment shows us that the experimental theatre in Slovenia
and Yugoslavia was thus – as in other Eastern European countries – at
least during its initial period, from the mid-1950’s to 1970, dissenting
and in opposition in the wider sense of the word. In opposition to the
repertoire-driven, socialist-realist, traditional theatre of consensus, the
experimental theatre consciously staged contemporary, existentialist
and absurdist drama, including contemporary politically engaged
Slovene plays, and revolutionised the stage in the sense of Artaud and
re-theatralisation. This basic situation does not neglect the fact that in
Slovenia and Yugoslavia to some extent even institutional theatres were
important in promoting new playwrights and searching for new ways
of representation. Thus the national theatre SNG Drama Ljubljana [SNT
Drama Ljubljana] announced an anonymous call for new plays in 1956.
The awards went to Povečevalno steklo [The Magnifying Glass] by Jože
Javoršek, Potovanje v Koromandijo [Travels to Neverland] by Dominik
Smole and Igor Torkar’s Delirij v dvoje [Delirium in Two]. All three texts
were written by dissident authors and followed Western trends
(existentialist drama, poetic drama and drama of the absurd). But only
two of the plays were immediately staged, the play by Javoršek was
withdrawn from the repertoire after only six performances and the play
by Torkar was not staged until 1959. The dramatists were not “socialist”
enough4.
      Taras Kermauner, one of the founders of Oder 57 and a highly
influential critical intellectual of the time, states that for the young
«critical generation»5 theatre was not an aesthetic pleasure, a lively

     4
        For further details, see Troha 2015: 38-39.
     5
        The “Critical Generation” was a group of Slovene intellectuals and art-
ists (Taras Kermauner, Dominik Smole, Dane Zajc, Primož Kozak, Veljko Rus,


                                                                                439
Tomaž Toporišič, The Theatre of Dissent in Non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia



movement in space, but a moral, ontological mission to pronounce the
truth, including at the margins of political truth. Ethical, certainly: even
though tragic, cruel, bitter, scornful and desperate:

         It was no coincidence that we established Oder 57. We did not
      want to go to the official theatre; we wanted to create a competitor
      to it, the first one. And to defeat the national theatre SNG Drama
      Ljubljana, saying that it showed the world of the withered, non-
      inventive, clerical, morally subservient, spiritually sterile
      generation, whilst we brought truth into the world and into theatre,
      and freshness, penetrative force, a stance of honesty, courage, the
      Spirit (Kermauner 2002: 293).

     The Slovene experimental theatre of the 1960’s thus combined
aesthetic challenges with political opposition. The example of the
banned performance illustrates the drawing of the limits for
experimental theatre by politics. Two days after the banning of the play
Topla greda [The Greenhouse], representatives from Oder 57
(Kermauner, Smole, Kozak, and Dušan Jovanović) met with Bojan Štih,
the director of the Slovene National Theatre Ljubljana. Štih, who had had
no problem restaging Antigona by Smole just three years before, rejected
a highly political text by Marjan Rožanc as weak and Dominik Smole
reproached him that “such explanations are typical of UDBA” (the
Yugoslav state security service at the time, author’s note) (Bibič 2003:
379). Again, it was all about the repertoire tactics of a political theatre.
The play was not staged again until nearly a decade later. The
consensual theatre set the limits of “democracy”.




Janko Kos, Jože Pučnik, Veno Taufer) that fought in 1950’s and 1960’s against
the fake perceptions of the bureaucracy and middle classes, the Communist
Party. They published several journals, such as Revija 57 and Perspektive, which
challenged the cultural policies of the Titoist system in the Socialist Republic
of Slovenia.


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     Dissent in non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia
     In her lecture, Valentini proposes a thesis that in East European
experimental theatre «aesthetic challenge coincides with political
opposition». This holds true also in the case of Slovenia, where (as in
other Second World countries) «experimentation with new languages
has always been reabsorbed and reintegrated by the dominant system»
(Valentini). Because of this, the trespassing of dramatic texts and theatre
directors from the field of the experimental into repertory theatre was
also marked by a mitigation (transition) of the aesthetic challenge, as
well as political radicalism. Throughout its history, experimental theatre
produced ever new attempts to liberate new micro-spaces for its
research. This research has been always interpreted by the political
authorities as political theatre, as something the limits of which have to
be clearly defined and marked. A possible consequence of this was
political suppression of the theatre concerned.
     Nevertheless, it was precisely a dramatist and theatre director of
the new, performative turn generation, Dušan Jovanović (who had
already had a bad political experience with his first play Norci [The
Madmen] in the mid 1960’s) that realised new tactics for political theatre.
His role was that of a devised theatre director with the Pupilija
Ferkeverk group in 1969 and the performance Pupilija papa Pupilo in
Pupilčki [Pupilija, Papa Pupilo and the Pupilceks], an iconic event of the
Slovene neo-avant-garde theatre that introduced elements of
happening, body art, performance, improvisation, contemporary dance,
everyday life, pop culture, ritual theatre, cabaret and political protest.
His turn to Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, the ritual, were linked to the neo-
avant-garde cult of primitivism, the Living Theatre, Richard Schechner
and his Performance Group, particularly the performance Dionysus in 69
with its ritual structure and orgiastic stress on the naked body and ritual
dance. This was the theatre of the generation which linked the theatre of
dissent to the sexual revolution. Thus, theatre transcended its borders
and entered the domain of happening and performance.
     A similar case was the Pekarna [Bakery], another experimental
theatre of the 1970’s and its first staging of Dane Zajc’s poetic play


                                                                              441
Tomaž Toporišič, The Theatre of Dissent in Non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia



Potohodec [Pathwalker]. This play was directed by Lado Kralj, a Richard
Schechner disciple, who linked his ideas to those of the Performance
Group and Jerzy Grotowski, «the idea of social therapy as theatrical
consequence and even goal», «the ideological stand that the group is not
interested in the audience» (Kralj 1990: 6). This radical return of theatre
to theatre was a political act provoking strong reactions from the
audience and the critics. The tactics it developed were those of the neo-
avant-garde, a mild shock liberating the spectator of his prejudices and
therefore leading to therapeutic results for the performers as well as for
the public, united in the act of ritual sharing.
      The politicality of the 1970’s neo avant-garde was primarily in its
resistance to all forms of authority and not in the direct expression of
political protest. Pupilija and the Pekarna distanced themselves,
mocking and subverting the authorities, from the external (state, nation,
party, church, market) to the internal (theatre and aesthetic). The
participation of the public was understood as a political act, in which the
spectators liberated themselves together with the performers. In the
experimental theatre of the 1970’s the tactics of the political moved from
the field of repertory theatre and the textual to the very medium of the
theatre, its process of self-liberation, leading (as in the case of Tadeusz
Kantor) to what Valentini defines as an openness to the field of the visual
and the plastic arts.

            The political in the 1980’s and the crisis of
                   self-management socialism
     The most evident apogee and crisis of the dissent political theatre
as well as its passage to the postmodern politicised theatre occurred in
the 1980’s. This period introduced new aesthetic phenomena that led art
and culture for the last time in the century to the zenith of the Polis at
the time of the collapse of the Yugoslav and East European story of
socialism and communist utopias. Parallel to this transformation and
decomposition of the social status quo was another process of the
transformation of the static culture and art.



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      The literature and theatre of this period were marked by various
nuances of politicised aesthetics, as well as the first marks of the
predominance of «occularcentrism» (Jay). This predominance took place
in a period of the decay of socialism and the development of post-
socialist society in the Second World that combined in itself the logic of
late capitalism and the decomposition of the socialist values and
ideologies.
      The return to tradition was firstly marked by a manic fixation with
the history of revolutions that substituted part of the totality of the
history of the Western civilisation with all its dilemmas. Within the
predominance of the visual and a hyperproduction of images, theatre
turned to history as a utopic period in which contemporaneity can be
glimpsed. In the first phase of hyper-politisation, the theatre kept
escaping the ideological barriers and lived in the faith that it was
destroying these barriers and undermining the social norms.
      The political theatre of the Eighties established itself at the
crossroads of literature and spectacle. It developed from readings of
tradition such as those by Brecht, Brook, Heiner Müller, and Arianne
Mnouchkine (1789, 1793: The Revolutionary City is in this World).
Textually it was linked partly to European drama (Mrožek, Bernhardt,
Havel, Kroetz, Müller, Brešan), and to an even greater extent to Slovene
drama productions by Dominik Smole, Rudi Šeligo, Dušan Jovanović,
Ivo Svetina, Drago Jančar, Dane Zajc, Veno Taufer, Emil Filipčič and
others.
      Let us have a closer look at some examples. Dušan Jovanović’s
staging of Hlapci [The Servants] by the Slovene modernist classic
dramatist Ivan Cankar in 1980 developed an understanding of drama
almost as Barthes’s writerly text and developed a documentary theatre
inspired by Joseph Chaikin, Heiner Müller and Arianne Mnouchkine.
Jovanović staged Cankar as a reactualisation with political connotations
featuring fragments of various textual materials: lengthy abstracts from
textbooks and schoolbooks of the period, flashes from geography,
religious education, history, chemistry, physics and Cankar’s article
«How I became a Socialist».



                                                                             443
Tomaž Toporišič, The Theatre of Dissent in Non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia



      As a second example of the dissent political theatre of the 1980’s we
will take Ljubiša Ristić, a Serbian director working in Slovenia. We will
concentrate on probably his most influential performance Maša v a molu
[Missa in A Minor] (1980): a highly individualistic montage of fragments
from the text A Tomb for Boris Davidović by Danilo Kiš6, as well as various
political proclamations by Lenin, Trotsky and Proudhon, anarchist
manifestos by Mihail Bakunin, Pjotr Kropotkin and Eric Malatesta and
so on.
      The performance made active use of political ideology, towards
which it seemingly adopted an entirely serious approach, with a
cathartic effect upon the audience. Extensively using various visual and
acoustic attractions, the performance created a typical postmodern
«opera aperta» (Eco), that undermined the basis for any kind of
interpretation. The performance kept the polyvalence of the writerly
fragments or texts and came dangerously close to the binary approach
(Erjavec) as a special means of the political subversion which was deftly
employed by the NSK group some years later. Ristić thus created the
first performance of a specific form of the postmodern political or even
politicised theatre, characteristic of the Second World.
      Political theatre was produced at the Mladinsko theatre in the
period when the Yugoslav system of self-management and socialism
were breaking up. The rhetoric of space used by this theatre can be
linked to that of the Russian historical avant-garde: in many respects, it
crossed the line between art as an autonomous social phenomenon and
art as a stepping stone into the realm of life as a social utopia. In the



      6
       A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Гробница за Бориса Давидовича) is a collec-
tion of seven short stories, written in 1976, based on historical events and deal-
ing with themes of political deception, betrayal, and murder in Eastern Europe
during the first half of the 20th century. The characters are caught up in a
world of political hypocrisy, which ultimately leads to death, their common
fate. Although the stories Kiš tells are based on historical events, the beauty
and precision of his prose elevates these ostensibly true stories into works of
literary art that transcend the politics of their time.


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“occupied space” of Plečnik’s building on the outskirts of Ljubljana, the
utopian social practice and the utopian artistic practice met.
       When Ljubiša Ristić created and premiered Missa in A Minor in
1980, the Mladinsko was a somewhat marginal cultural institution on
the periphery of the semiosphere of the Republic of Slovenia and
Ljubljana as its capital. In Missa in A Minor a speciﬁc politics of the stage
emerged, which powerfully linked the post-dramatic theatre of images
and political theatre. With this performance that won the Grand Prix at
Bitef Festival in Belgrade and was praised in Theater Heute, the Mladinsko
became one of the most popular theatres in Yugoslavia and in Europe.
       Ristić claimed: «Theatre must ﬁght for a status equal to that of the
world. It must take part in the production of the world. Theatre either
has this status or it is only a service station of the state, just like trafﬁc
police, a hospital, or a school» (Jovanović 2006: 31). And in this sense we
can see the Mladinsko of the 1980’s as a public space on the margins of
society within an enclosed space, already separated from the centres of
political power in Ljubljana as a capital of the late socialist Yugoslav
society. Moreover, it was as precisely this speciﬁc rhetoric of space that
enabled this theatrical organism on the very borders of the cultural and
political semiosphere to establish itself as a centre of the performative
and political “revolution”. This made the Mladinsko considerably more
subversive than any dissident theatre that deliberately went against ideology.
       As an example of the dissent theatre of the period we could also
cite Šeherezada [The East-West Opera Scheherezade] by Ivo Svetina,
directed in 1989 by Tomaž Pandur for the Mladinsko Theatre. Svetina’s
text relies on a broad referential scope, among which we can state Alain
Grosrichard’s Structure of the Seraglio and his analysis of despotism. The
parallel staging of the fairy tale atmosphere of The Arabian Nights and an
analysis of Eastern despotism breaks free from the orbit of the
aestheticism and collective spirit of current political theatre, and
establishes its own, specific, autonomous theatre organism. The staging
of Scheherezade thus gave rise to «an interpretation which is new text,
within which the elements of the interpreted basis are inscribed, with
every interpretation being a contextualisation of the object text» (Helbo
et al. 1987: 121).


                                                                               445
Tomaž Toporišič, The Theatre of Dissent in Non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia




                     From the 1980’s to the 1990’s:
                 retro avant-garde and the NSK State
     A new intensity of ideological controversy and subversiveness was
introduced into the Slovene and East European theatre space by Dragan
Živadinov. If Ristić’s, Jovanović’s and Jančar’s opposition and criticism
were still comprehensible or at least partly explicable to political power
as their target, the subversive tactics of Dragan Živadinov, his Scipion
Nasice Sisters Theatre7 and Neue Slowenische Kunst8 collective became
impossible to understand due to an ideological inability to recognize the
means employed in the double coding system of the retro-avant-garde.
From today’s perspective it seems clear that NSK had its own political
agenda, but it kept it offstage, strictly separating its artistic programme
from its clandestine guerrilla actions. The first two performances of this
retro avant-garde collective, the Retro-garde Event “Hinkemann” (1984)
and the Retro-garde Event “Marija Nablocka” (1985) took place in private
apartments before very small audiences. The third and last performance,
the Retrogardni dogodek “Krst pod Triglavom” [Retro-garde Event
“Baptism Below Triglav”] (1986) “occupied” the biggest and newest

      7 The Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre (Slovene: Gledališče sester Scipion
Nasice; abbreviation: SNST) was founded on 13 October 1983 in Ljubljana by
Eda Čufer, Dragan Živadinov and Miran Mohar. The founders also wrote a
manifesto ("The Sister Letter"), setting this theatre group a time frame of oper-
ation—four years—and described its stages from formation to self-destruc-
tion. The name refers to Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Corculum, a Roman
Republican politician who passed a decree in 151 BC ordering the destruction
of the first Roman theatre. The Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre (1983–1987) con-
stituted—along with Laibach and IRWIN—one of the three pillars of the Neue
Slowenische Kunst retrogarde movement. In 1987, the Scipion Nasice Sisters
Theatre performed self-destruction.
      8 The NSK art collective based their production on a specific method that

the groups interchangeably called «retro-avant-garde» (Laibach), «retro-
grade» (SNST) or «retro-principle» (Irwin), and which was part of a broader
artistic action of the collective. In sum, «retro» was «a method of writing that
mobilises existing texts and images of art and culture as building material».


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Ljubljana stage in front of a sold-out audience of 1,500 spectators in the
newly built Cankarjev dom Arts and Congress Centre.
     In a severe polemic after the premiere of the performance of Baptism
Below Triglav, the philosopher Tine Hribar defended the performance’s
principles and noted that:

        The performance by no means represented an artistic
     performance in the traditional and classic sense. Not only did it
     reach beyond the dramaturgy of Aristotle and Lessing, but also
     beyond Brechtian and Artaudian theatre. At the same time,
     however – definitely through the experience of Peter Brook, Bob
     Wilson, Jerzy Grotowski and Pina Bausch – it returned to Artaud
     and further back even, to ancient liturgical procedures (Hribar 1990:
     288).

     Baptism Below Triglav can be interpreted as a result of “other
grounding concepts” of logocentrism (Philip Auslander), namely the
director’s or visual concept. These are a result of a specific crisis of
“theological stage” (Derrida), its structure comporting with elements of
the author-creator regulating it. Premiered in 1986 as a retro-avant-
garde happening conceptualised as an example of explicitly non-
dramatic or (to use Lehmann’s terminology) post-dramatic structure,
Baptism was a result of the deconstruction of the dramatic theatre and a
replacement of the textual with increasingly visual and spatial forms
(Eda Čufer). The performance also deliberately distanced itself from the
explicitly ideological sphere of the political theatre of the 1980’s and
turned to the aesthetic sphere. The tactics of «other grounding concepts»
of logocentricity, were established by intertextual references to well-
known images from the history of modern art: from Romanticism to the
historical and neo-avant-garde, namely Appia, Caspar David Friedrich,
Mayerhold, Marinetti, Tatlin and two constructivist Slovene avant-
garde artists from 1920’s, influenced by both Italian Futurism and
Russian Constructivism: August Černigoj and Ferdo Delak. The
performance made extensive use of the deconstructive tactics of
mapping, using and reappropriating the past.



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Tomaž Toporišič, The Theatre of Dissent in Non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia



      Ristić’s Missa in A Minor built a communication model, which
facilitated the identification of the audience, but Baptism Below Triglav no
longer did so. It offered only its visible and audible physicality and
existence. However, it inscribed an order and ideological meanings,
enabling and disabling the identification at the same time.
      Within the history of specific Slovene and Yugoslav dissent culture
under socialism, Baptism Below Triglav represented (as described by Eda
Čufer) «a moment of seismic shift, a moment when the doors briefly
opened to allow a monumental work of alternative culture and radical
structure to occupy a central position in Ljubljana's cultural arena. True
to their word, the founders of the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre held a
press conference shortly after their succes de scandale announcing the end
of their experiment. In September of 1986, at the BITEF international
theatre festival in Belgrade, they declared the death of their theatre»
(Čufer 2003: 394-395).
      The Baptism truly radically established the dramaturgy of the
Wilsonian landscape play. Within this structure, the Lacanian Real
suddenly did not appear on the set but became that around which the
symbolic and the imaginary appeared on stage with all the strength of
the Central European illusionary melancholy of expression and «the zeal
of the Balkan desire for something to be expressed and offered: a
simultaneous vision of the avant-garde, totalitarianism and
heterogeneity» (Šuvaković 2001: 230). NSK’s retrogarde theatre of
images, in comparison to Wilson, also did not nurture a pure and
accidental play of signiﬁers without the signiﬁed, but a play of
denotations and connotations, a speciﬁc, politicised art of late-socialism,
a clear voice of dissent.
      Nevertheless, the self-extinction of Scipion Nasice Theatre declared
at Bitef was but a starting point for a new incarnation of retro-avant-
garde theatre, this time named “Red Pilot” after the historical avant-
garde magazine from the 1920’s. Similar tactics were explored in its
highly unusual performance Dramski observatorij Zenit [Zenith Drama
Observatory], which took place in a transformed railway carriage-rocket
as a fragmentary restoration of T. S. Eliot’s Death in the Cathedral and
used, as Aleš Erjavec points out, «motifs from Slovene Catholic


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tradition, alluding to issues of political and religious authority etc. The
audience, crammed into the carriage, continually attempted to find
meaning in the goings-on. What they sensed, however, were occasional
fragments of it» (Erjavec 1995: 200).
      While the 1980’s were marked by «tectonic ruptures in the
relationship between literature and society» (Juvan 1994/5: 26) as well as
strong ruptures between theatre and society, the 1990’s were marked by
at least two political moments that took place in the beginning of the
decade. These were the attainment of independence of the Republic of
Slovenia and the end of the socialistic self-management system. Within
the field of contemporary art, a withdrawal of the political coincided
with a specific hyper-politisation of Slovene society.
      Let us look at some specific cases. Firstly, Uganka korajže [The
Courage Riddle] (1994), a performance written by the playwright Dušan
Jovanović and directed by Meta Hočevar: a personalisation and
transformation of the political epic theatre, the formation of which the
director described in the following words:

        I have been interested in Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children
     for some years, mostly its theme of a woman in wartime, the theme
     of a mother, who cannot decide between her children and profit.
     However, the closer the theme was to me, the more I felt distanced
     from the text. Suddenly Brecht did not function any more. It was
     because of this that I asked Dušan to write his own version of the
     play (Hočevar 1994/5: 7).

     Jovanović as the playwright paraphrased Brecht as material that
enabled a basic reflection about the state of the world and theatre today.
Meta Hočevar used his text in a specific interaction with the space, the
visual. She created a story about a contemporary Mother Courage in the
time of local wars, specifically the slaughter in Bosnia.




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Tomaž Toporišič, The Theatre of Dissent in Non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia



      A political dimension of the spectacle function was used as a
deliberate homage to Brecht also by Matjaž Berger 9, who developed it
with reference to the field of theoretical psychoanalysis (Lacan, Žižek).
His performance Kons 5 can be interpreted as a conscious homage to
Brecht and the Russian historical avant-garde, whilst also being
theoreticised theatre exploring Lacanian psychoanalysis. Berger is
interested in the theatre as a «three-part structure: absolute theatre,
artistic action and big rituals, dedications» (Berger 1997: 10). He
combines different disciplines: theatre, performing arts and sports,
stages unusual spectacles in unusual environments, exploring
Suprematism, Cubism, Dadaism, Cubo-Futurism, Expressionism and
materialist Conceptual art.
      In his staging for the official celebration of five years of
independence of Slovenia in 1995 (its title Kons 5 being a quotation from
a poem by the Slovene 1920’s constructivist poet Srečko Kosovel), Berger
practices a deconstructive reading of the Slovene historical avant-garde.
He combines this reading with an eclectic reading of big open-air avant-
garde events. A reinterpreted avant-garde thus regained a part of its
former political power and indirectly led to a political crisis that spoke
about the state of Slovenia in the post socialism of the Nineties.
      Let us have a closer look at the structure of this specific
appropriation of the form of the official celebration by the procedure of
dissent. The title Kons 5 refers to a famous constructivist poem by Srečko
Kosovel. Performed by actors, musicians, athletes, members of the
Slovene army, mountain climbers and others, the performance was a
specific deconstructivist reading of the Slovene historical avant-garde. It
deconstructed and paraphrased three poems by Kosovel, the poem
Electric Saw by his contemporary Anton Podbevšek and texts written by



      9
       Matjaž Berger (1964), director and scenographer of more than 30 per-
formances, celebrations and events, and long term collaborator and program
director of the Mladinsko Theatre, has since 2006 been the director of the An-
ton Podbevšek Theatre in Novo mesto, the youngest professional Slovene the-
atre.


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Vladimir Bartol, which were included in the eclectic reading of the great
avant-garde events in the open, particularly the following two:

      -    Nathan Altman’s celebration of the ﬁrst anniversary of the
           October Revolution of 1917 in St. Petersburg with its
           decoration of the central obelisk of the great square in front of
           the Winter Palace with huge Futurist abstract paintings and
      -    Leni Riefenstahl’s ﬁlms Triumph des Willens [Triumph of the
           Will] and Olympia [Olympiad].

      It thus produced a speciﬁc, unusual rhetoric of space: performed in
a symbolic location within the capital, Republic Square, this large-scale
event conﬁrmed and subverted the cultural identity of the community.
Its centrifugal structure puzzled the spectators as well as the politicians,
with inserts from Slovene ﬁlms combined with a ﬂyover by Slovene air
force planes, a ballet-like performance of parachute jumps, and a
military parade, combined with a parade of American veteran cars. In
spite of the fact that the performance structure was sufﬁciently non-
theological, the political discussion accompanying it was not triggered
by the postmodernist eclectic structure of sliding signiﬁers, but by the
title itself or, rather, the unspoken Kosovel poem, particularly the
following verses in it:

          Dung is gold
          and gold is dung.
          Both = 0
          /…/
          Whoever has no soul
          doesn’t need gold.
          Whoever has a soul
          doesn’t need dung.




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Tomaž Toporišič, The Theatre of Dissent in Non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia



           EE-AW10

      Most representatives of the Slovene right-wing political parties
interpreted the use of Kosovel’s title of the poem for the large-scale
performative event celebrating the fifth anniversary of the independent
Republic of Slovenia as an insult and boycotted the event. They took the
poem literally and made the equations: If gold is dung, then all the
struggles to obtain Slovene independence are equated by Matjaž Berger
and his artistic team with dung. Thus the historical avant-garde,
reduced to empty aesthetic pleasure in which all its political aspects
were supposed to be lost, produced through the deconstruction tactics
of Kons 5 a speciﬁc rhetoric of space. This gave to the performance at
least some of its political power and indirectly led to a political crisis that
produced a discussion of the political situation in the post-socialist,
1990’s Slovenia.

                                     Conclusions
     Baptism, The Courage Riddle and Kons 5 are just three cases of a
specific postmodern politicised art, which flourished in most of the
countries of the former Eastern Bloc. They depict East European history
while paralleling two historical periods: the period of socialism and
post-socialism. This problematisation does not lead to a Brechtian
arousal of the observer’s capacity for action but to the deconstruction of
theatrical and social sign systems. The performance is a reaction to
utopianism. It perfectly suits Mikhail N. Epstein’s idea of
postmodernism and its approach to history:

        Postmodernism, with its aversion to utopias, inverted the signs
      and reached for the past, but in so doing, gave it the attributes of the




      10Translated by David Brooks, http://www.saltpublishing.com/saltmag-
azine/issues/01/text/Brooks_DFavid_02.htm, accessed on 26 July 2019.



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     future indeterminateness, incomprehensibility, polysemy, and the
     ironic play of possibilities (Epstein 1995: 330).

      In the three performances – to paraphrase Epstein’s analysis of
contemporary Russian culture – the Yugoslav and Slovene communist
future became a thing of the past, while the present approached in a
decontextualised and recontextualised condition from the direction
where we had expected to meet the future.
      In the 1980’s and 90’s the politicised art of the late- and post-
socialist world dealt primarily with its own history and reality, whereas
a considerable part of the political art of the First World closely occupied
itself with reflections and questions about what Gómez-Peña calls the
terrifying post-democratic era of globalism. Its themes were a collapse
of all binary models of understanding the world, a new ethical crisis in
a world of transcultural business, translating each artistic gesture into
the logic of the possibility of exploitation on the part of the transpolitical,
globalistic economic and political lobby.
      However, in both cases artists deliberately place themselves in a
position defined by the scepticism of Guillermo Gómez-Peña. I will
conclude this essay with some of the statements and arguments he
elaborates in his paper “The New Global Culture”, published in 2001 as
an indirect commentary on the possible tactics of the politicised theatre
of today:

        We are entering a new, terrifying era. All our ideological
     parameters and political certainties were crisscrossing under our
     feet. Suddenly, binary models of understanding the world were no
     longer functional- us/them, right/wrong, progressive/reactionary,
     local/global, Third World/First World, alternative/mainstream,
     centre/periphery, etc. were constantly shifting fault lines in an ever-
     fluctuating landscape. /…/ In this unprecedented ‘post-democratic
     era’ /…/ humanism has become either a mere corporate ‘interest’ or
     ‘goal’ or a trendy marketing strategy for computer firms (Gómez-
     Peña 2001: 7, 11).




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Tomaž Toporišič, The Theatre of Dissent in Non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia



      A postscript. In this bizarre context of a post-democratic society of
cyberspace and simulacrum, artists transformed themselves into what
Gómez-Peña calls performers in the role of «decorators of the
omnipresent horror vacui and entertainers of a new and much more
cynical consumer class …» (Id.: 11). Art in the era of the post-racial, post-
racist, post-sexist, post-ideological etc. globalism of the multinationals
after modernism had to face a new globalist ideology, «a new
transnational multiculturalism that is actually devoid of ‘real’ people of
colour, true artists, outcasts and revolutionaries» (Id.: 12). The
omnipresent spectacle has replaced content, form is heightened, more
stylised than ever, as «‘meaning’ (remember meaning?) evaporates, or
rather, fades out, and everybody searches for the next ‘extreme’ image
or ‘interactive experience’. /…/ TV specials on mass murderers and the
obsessive repetition of ‘real crimes’ shot by private citizens or by
surveillance camera, we are all becoming daily voyeurs and participants
of a new cultura in extremis…» (Id: 13).
      Theatre and art have to live and survive in an era of post-modernity
in which the aesthetics of the Telicity and its pure, technically perfect
surface became a substitute for ethics. Politicised art is an attempt at a
response to this state, a highly marginalised attempt. Piscator’s and
Brecht’s utopic projections into the future no longer exist, but politicised
art persists nevertheless. And this is good.




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                             The Author
Tomaž Toporišič

       Tomaž Toporišič is a dramaturge and theatre theoretician, an
associate professor and a vice-dean of the Academy of Theatre,
University of Ljubljana. He was the artistic director and a dramaturge of
the Mladinsko Theatre, co-founded the Exodos Festival of
Contemporary Performing Arts, a guest programmer of Maribor
European Capital of Culture, and curator of exhibitions for Prague
Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space (PQ). His primary
research interests are contemporary performing arts, literature and
visual culture. He is the author of four books on contemporary
performing arts. His latest essays are: The new Slovene theatre and
Italian futurism, (Re)staging the rhetoric of space, Deconstructive
readings of the avant-garde tradition in post-socialist retro-avant-garde
theatre and Death and Violence in Contemporary Theatre, Drama, and
the Novel.

      Email: tomaz.toporisic@agrft.uni-lj.si




                                                                              457
Tomaž Toporišič, The Theatre of Dissent in Non-aligned Slovenia and Yugoslavia




                                      The Article
Date sent: 11/02/2020
Date accepted: 20/04/2020
Date published: 30/05/2020

                            How to cite this article
Toporišič, Tomaž, “The Theatre of Dissent in Non-aligned Slovenia and
Yugoslavia from the 1950’s until the Fall of the Berlin Wall”, Le culture
del dissenso in Europa nella seconda metà del Novecento, Eds. C. Pieralli - T.
Spignoli, Between, X.19 (2020), http://www.Between-journal.it




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