From the Political Theater in Yugoslav Socialism to the Political Performance in Global

Capitalism: The Case of Slovenian Performing Arts

Paper presented at the panel of Academia Europaea Barcelona 2014 Theater, Film and the Political, 18 July
2014

Marko Juvan
ZRC SAZU Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana
marko.juvan@zrc-sazu.si

Theater is inherently political because of its historical roles and societal position. It is
through the spectacle that various types of communities throughout history mimetically
represented symbols of events which they remembered and experienced as constitutive for
their existence or symptomatically encapsulating their endemic tensions. Mimetic
performances, with their aesthetic impact on the experience of spectators, enabled a
community to establish an outer (exotopic) ethical perspective on its political condition,
history and the present. The dramatic imaginary provided fictional/possible models for
evaluating factual behavior of persons in realms of family, clan, polis, or cosmos. Theater as
medium, although positioned similarly to structural autonomy of games, is a site where the
mimetic discourse is enacted in concrete physical presence and is thus able to intervene in
real interaction. Moreover, different forms of acting, spectacle, and performance abound in
politics (demonstrations of power) and everybodys daily life. Last but not least, theater,
having been temporarily or permanently located in a special place, room, or building, has
become one of the most important cultural institutions. It has served various social classes
and purposes, e. g. to display the prestige of national movements and states (national
theater) and reproduce the aesthetic autonomy of art.
When it comes to the term the political theater, the latter should be discerned between its
general and narrower historical meanings. In his seminal book on the history of political
theater, Siegfried Melchinger argues that the political theater begins as early as with the
Greek classics (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes) and giant auditorium of
Epidaurus, revives in Shakespeare, Corneille, and Moliere, to culminate in the period
between Bchner and Brecht. The main feature of the political theater, understood in
Melchingers unhistorical meaning, is that, foregrounding the themes of power, state,
governmental order, and societal contradictions, it criticizes the abuses of power and other
topical cases of social imbalance or injustice, which are deemed relevant to contemporary
audience. Granted, the matters of polis were constitutive of Western theater and drama
from Aeschylus The Persians to Shakespeares Coriolanus and Corneilles Cid. Moreover, the
modern political drama in a narrower sense of the word emerged in the aftermath of the
French Revolution, with Georg Bchners semi-documentary Danton's Death. However, the

political theater in its more specific historical meaning is a much more recent phenomenon.
Clearly pronounced, conceptually aware of its performative impact on social consciousness,
it started only in the late 1920s with Erwin Piscators modernist staging (in die Volksbhne
and Piscator-Bhne) and his 1929 programmatic book Das politische Theater. Along with
Russian theater avant-garde and proletkult and Bertolt Brechts epic theater and Lehrstcke,
Piscators work established a persistent and ramified tradition, stretching to post-1960s and
many contemporary artists, groups, and projects, such as Living Theater, Augusto Boals
theater of the oppressed, Heiner Mller, Caryl Churchill, Elfriede Jelinek, or Martin Kuej.
As art practice, theater could have become conceptually aware of its political profile at most
provided it has been able, having grasped the post-enlightenment functional differentiation
of society into seemingly autonomous fields, to critically transgress the ideological boundary
between the art and politics and reject the 19th-century bourgeois aesthetical
ghettoization of theater institutions. This happened for the first time in the context of
historical avant-gardes challenging of the art institution.
Notwithstanding the traditions I have been discussing so far, the term political theater as a
new trend gained currency in Slovenia and Yugoslavia in the 1980s. The Yugoslav type of
political theater, which soon got international recognition, gained momentum just after the
death of the charismatic post-WWII communist leader Tito in 1980, when the Yugoslav
federation and its particular self-management brand of communism came to a crisis,
exposed to pressures of the growing nationalist separatism, pluralist civil society, and
dissident initiatives for establishing a democratic multi-party political system. The term
political theater was at the time widely used in Yugoslav journalism, criticism, theater PR,
and theater studies to designate performances and projects by the directors such as Ljubia
Risti, Duan Jovanovi, Janez Pipan, and others.
Its prototype was Missa in A-Minor of 1980, directed in the Ljubljana Theater Mladinsko by
Ljubia Risti. The performance was based on the postmodernist faction-fiction short story
The Tomb for Boris Davidovich about an imaginary Russian dissident revolutionary, written in
1976 by the renowned Serbian-Jewish writer Danilo Ki. The spectacle in the Theater
Mladinsko was conceived as a kind of (post-)avant-garde cathartic ritual that, representing
an individual as an absurd victim of collective forces, allegorizes History and Politics in terms
of tragic fatum. Other important political performances in the years to follow were also
predominantly oriented towards history. They attempted to unveil the traumatic events
which, tabooed by the official ideology, founded the existing rule. The underlying narrative
of Missa and similar performances is Mallet du Pans adage the Revolution devours its
children. In this case, the phrase referred to the international communist movement, and
its fractional conflicts and Stalinist purge. Through the open dramatic form, collective acting,
multi-lingual montage of documentary material, testimonies, and fiction, and drawing on the
avant-garde Gesamtkunstwerk, the political theater of the 1980s advanced into a kind of
internally Yugoslav artistic international uniting left-wing Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, and
Macedonian artists. They strove to break with the theatrical conventions of the socialist

bourgeoisie and transgress the aesthetic formalism of socialist modernism. Later, after
the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the wars in the Balkans, and during the post-communist
transition, the political theater in Slovenia lost much of its edge. Intertextually rewriting
classical tragedy, the grotesque, or Brecht's epic theater, it hardly did anything better than
moralize about recent war atrocities and its ruining consequences.
At the turn of the millennium, especially in the wake of the recent global economic crisis we
are witnessing a rebirth of the political theater, represented in Slovenia by directors such as
Bojan Jablanovec and Via Negativa project, Emil Hrvatin alias Janez Jana, Matja Berger,
Sebastijan Horvat, Oliver Frlji, and others. The renaissance of the political theater is partly
conditioned by the general ethical/political turn in Western art and humanities; that is, by
the reorientation from conservative postmodernist formalism towards progressive
practices which, in the innovative creative process, link aesthetic conceptuality with
committed socio-ethical responsibility and identity politics. Further, turbulence in South-East
Europe (escalation of nationalism and xenophobia, ethnic cleansing, refugees, oppressed
minorities) along with Slovenias inclusion in the world-system of late capitalist economy,
which led from naive beliefs in EU-equality and consumerist paradise to the experience of
being peripheral and neo-colonized, called for a proper response also in the performing arts.
Rejecting models of tragic, comical, satirical, or absurd literary genres, the new political
theater morphed into a post-dramatic performance. Through the use of multimedia,
improvisation, and life documents, such a performance critically undermines any kind of
mimetic illusion. At the same time, it also addresses social contradictions of the present
Slovenian nation-state, which mainstream media tend to downplay, for example, widelyspread latent xenophobia and marginalization of minorities, such as the Roma people. Emil
Hrvatin, who officially changed his personal and artistic identity by adopting the name of
Janez Jana, a controversial right-wing political leader, staged in 2007 a performance entitled
Slovenian National Theater in one of Ljubljanas fringe theaters. Without any acting or
interpretation, the performers were merely neutrally reproducing the tape recordings of
riots that had broken up among the peasant population neighboring a delinquent Roma
family. Hrvatin/Jana thus ironically undermined national ideology which used to proudly
ground the institution of Slovenian National Theater. He did this by unveiling the political
unconscious, the xenophobic underground of nationalism, which is circulated by stereotypes
and prejudices.
Instead of rehearsing the master narrative of Revolution, the political performance in the
21st century focuses on small narratives and local happenings, in which class, gender, racial,
and other identity conflicts of the global capitalism come to the fore. What I find most
important, is the fact that such performances include meta-theatrical reflection on socioeconomic conditions and political impact of these performances themselves.
In the final part of my paper, I would like to schematically generalize about the differences
between the two periods of political theater in Slovenia, and demonstrate these differences

by a comparison between two prototypical examples connected both at the institutional,

thematic, and formal levels. How does the political theater in former Yugoslavia of the 1980s
differ from its heir in Slovenia since the 1990s with regard to the socio-political profiles of its
protagonists? On the threshold of Yugoslav crisis, left-wing and cosmopolitan theater
people, who opposed communist nomenklatura, wanted to refashion socialist ideas to adapt
them to the needs and ideals of contemporaneous civil society and its emancipating
projects. Through collaboration of artists from different institutional theaters, multinational
projects like KPGT (Kazalite Pozorite Gledalie Teatar, i.e. the word theater in Serbian,
Croatian, Slovenian, and Macedonian), and festivals like Shakespeare-fest in Subotica, the
political theater strove to infuse Yugoslavia, in which nationalist and separatist tendencies
were gaining momentum, with a kind of internationalist artistic cohesion and promote
achievements of this theater world-wide. Since the 1990s, in Slovenia a new generation of
radical artists, affiliated mainly to non-institutional producers and aware of their precarious
socio-economic condition and political responsibility vis-a-vis the global Empire, challenge
dominant self-representations and spontaneous ideologies of the newly born, seemingly
independent peripheral nation-state, and force their audience to become conscious of social
contradictions, inequality, and illegitimate power.
The political theater in the 1980s, focusing mainly on history, criticized totalitarian
deviations of revolutionary ideas from the unquestionable point of view of a brave honest
dissident or Hegelian beautiful soul. Its counterpart in the 21st century, however, finds
itself fully immersed in the experiences of the present. As a result, social critique ceases to
rely on an ideal evaluative position outside the observed phenomena. Instead, it implies a
painful self-critique of critical agency as an accomplice in what it finds to be wrong.
Notwithstanding their anti-realist, avant-garde, post-modernist, and post-dramatic poetics,
spectacles of the 1980s still treated politics in terms of mimetic representation. They stage
social problems through fictional relations between dramatic personae whose psychology
allegorization and ensemble acting tend to bracket. They also draw on literary texts to
establish semantic coherence between other elements of Gesamtkunstwerk. In the most
radical forms of the present-day Slovenian political performance, actors do not mimetically
represent other persons any more. They rather enact the political in the process of
presenting themselves as factual individuals with personal experience or as concrete bodily
and speaking instances of different social habita (Brechts gestus). It is documents, lifewriting, and dialogues, improvised or written by performers themselves, that occupy the
place of drama.
At the final part of my paper, let me briefly compare the examples of political performance
from the first and second periods discussed above. I have already outlined the first example,
Kis and Ristis Missa in A-Minor staged in 1980 in the Theater Mladinsko. The same
Slovenian ensemble, internationally renowned because of its experimental tradition, staged
in 2010 a performance Damned be the Traitor of His Homeland. The program leaflet states

that in his original project Oliver Frlji [i.e., Croatian director who conceived the
performance] radically approaches love and hatred towards theater, surrendering both the
actors as well as the viewers to the intertwinement of madness and pain. The actors produce
a scathing, disturbing, sometimes even shocking performance. They use wartime and
political traumas to ask universal questions about the boundaries of artistic and social
freedom, individual and collective responsibility, tolerance and stereotypes. The theatrical
framework of this laboratory is provided by stories from the break-up of former Yugoslavia;
the tile comes from the last verse of the national anthem of this now-defunct country.
Actors, in Brechtian way stepping out of their roles in which they embody social gestus,
collective clichs, and stereotypes, present their personal, partly fictionalized and ironized
memories, experiences, reflections, and opinions. Moreover, in a true backstage discourse,
they openly discuss painful dilemmas they were facing and arguing about during the process
of creating this performance (e.g., the conflict between their professionalism and personal
beliefs). Among these ethical, aesthetical, and political conflicts which have emerged in the
ensemble, I would like to point out the generation gap corresponding to the difference
between the nostalgic adherence of older colleagues to the political theater of the 1980s
and the view of younger generation that this kind of theater is no less challenging in the
present context of global capitalism.
Three sample scenes from Missa in A-Minor and Damned Be the Traitor of His Homeland
illustrate differences between the two performances as well as between two periods of
Slovenian political theater. I summarize the comparison in the table below:

Missa
POST-DRAMATICAL
Yes: Still based on singleTHEATER: DOMINANCE OF authored literary text

Damned
No: Life-writing of actors, stereotypes

LITERARY TEXTS

SPECTACLE

Ritual, documentary,
montage, ensemble, total
theater

Pop-show, backstage documentary,

agression towards actors and
spectators

MIMESIS

Yes: Actors represent

historical and fictional
characters

No: Actors present themselves and/as

embodiments of social gestus; they
interpellate the audience

TOPIC

Revolution, History vs.

Individual
Pathos of evil

Nationalist violence, xenophobia

Banality of evil

ATTITUDE

Critical via self-criticism (accomplice)

POLITICS CRITICIZED

Critical, exotopic
(dissident)
Protagonists of politics

METATHEATRICAL

No

Yes: focuses on the process of making

the performance; addresses the
history and presence of political
theater

DISCOURSE AND
INTERTEXTUALITY

Political unconscious

To summarize, the political theater is usually defined as the theater in which politics figures
as the dominant content and the ultimate goal. Granted, the matters of the polis were
constitutive of Western theatre and drama from Aeschylus The Persians to Shakespeares
Coriolanus. Moreover, the modern political drama in the narrow sense of the word emerged
in the aftermath of the French Revolution (Bchners semi-documentary Danton's Death),
while the pronounced political theater started in the 1920s with avant-garde practices of
Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. Notwithstanding these traditions, the term political
theater as a new trend gained currency in Slovenia and Yugoslavia in the 1980s. During the
crisis of Yugoslav socialist political system, the political theater (e.g., Ristis Missa in A-Minor
performed in 1980 by Mladinsko gledalie in Ljubljana) was conceived as a kind of (post)avant-garde cathartic ritual that stages politics as Fate and an individual as its tragic victim.
At that time, the political theater in Slovenia and Yugoslavia was predominantly oriented
towards the historical past, attempting to unveil the traumatic events that, although
tabooed by the official ideology, founded the existing rule. The underlying narrative of Missa

and similar performances is Mallet du Pans adage the Revolution devours its children. In
this case, the phrase referred to the international communist movement, its fractional
conflicts, Stalinist purge, etc. Through the open dramatic form, multilingual collective acting,
the montage of documentary material, testimonies, and fiction, and drawing on the avantgarde Gesamtkunstwerk, the political theater of the 1980s, aimed to break with the
conventions of the bourgeois stage and transgress the aesthetic formalism of socialist
modernism. During the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the wars in the Balkans, and the
transition period, the political theater in Slovenia lost much of its edge. However, it is in the
wake of the global economic crisis that it is again becoming topical. Rejecting the tragic
mode, it has morphed into a radically critical post-dramatic performance. Through the use of
multimedia and life documents, it undermines any kind of dramatic illusion and tackles the
social contradictions of the actual present, which the mainstream media tend to downplay,
for example, the position of the Roma people in the Slovenian national state (Hrvatins
Slovenian National Theater of 2007). Instead of rehearsing the master narrative of
Revolution, the new political performance focuses on small narratives and local happenings,
in which class, gender, racial, and other conflicts of the global capitalism come to the fore,
while also reflecting the very socio-economic conditions and the political impact of the
performance itself.
Note: I thank Toma Toporii for his generous help with documents, recordings, and bibliographical hints.
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