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Therefore, if we viewed it from a resolutely theatrological aspect, a long series of various theatrical performances which must be reconstructed, the phrase Macedonian drama”automatically refers to two categories which must be respected.
The first is eminently theoretical, and concerns the genre meaning covered by the term drama, understood as a literary type (which necessarily must /should be transported into a theatrical performance, whose description the drama presents).
The second is eminently historical, and concerns the temporal-spatial context to which the same phrase (“Macedonian drama”) necessarily refer, showing when and how the performances that affirms it, actually “happened.”
Macedonian literary criticism too, as well as Macedonian theatrology, can readily agree on the known/unique mythologization of the appearance of the Macedonian drama “as it is”: both, without dissention, agree on one and the same event that directly provoked it. The event occurred exactly one hundred years ago, in November 1900, in Sofia, with the production of the pseudo-historical melodrama Macedonian Blood Wedding, whose author, director and one of the protagonists, Vojdan Pop Georgiev Černodrinski, has acquired the status of the father of Macedonian theater.
Treated only in its written (literary) aspect, so as to be able to compare it with the development of the other literary genres, it can be stated with great certainty that the Macedonian drama has some very definite advantages: for an entire century its examples/texts have not only been produced on theatrical stages, but they have been also printed as books. The first edition of Macedonian Blood Wedding was published already in December 1900, immediately following its sensationally successful theatrical production. Since then, and maybe earlier, not a year has passed without one of the numerous and ambitions Macedonian self-taught dramatists publishing at least one of his booklets. As opposed to poetry and prose, which developed intensively only after 1945 when the Macedonian literary language was codified/standardized, Macedonian drama is the only literary genre able to document its continuity longer than a century. It is also important to note that this continuity is confirmed in both of its important dimensions/forms, literary and theatrical, since plays are not only printed, but also are permanently performed.
In order to discuss this century-long period more effectively, Macedonian theater studies have divided it into two “large wholes:” the first is referred to as popular-national and the second is contemporary and/or modern. As opposed to the former, which is relatively compact, the latter covers almost the final five decades of the twentieth century, “covering” the most varied trends, model and genre drama/theater examples, modern and postmodern.
Its own “border line” – that which Derrida would call the differance between the popular/national and contemporary/modern periods, occurred in 1957 with the production of A Twig in the Wind by Kole Čašule, which was “accepted”/”proclaimed” by plebiscite as the first modern Macedonian drama.
Completely superficially (and only in service of such global/popular overviews of Macedonian drama/theater history!), these two trends or temporal wholes or phases can be differentiated as Balkan (the first, so-called national-popular) and European (the second, the so-called contemporary, <M>modern/postmodern).
The emblematic type/model of the so-called Balkan phase is exactly the popular/national dramaturgy, whose one (but not the best!) protagonist is none other than the mythical Vojdan Pop Georgiev Černodrinski (1875-1951). What kind of dramaturgy is this? Specific, “narrative”, “illustrative”, “thesis”, “didactic”, if not utilitarian, a dramaturgy which – as imagined by but not practiced by its numerous authors– is mainly the staging of “pictures from Macedonian/folk life,” whether from the period usually called the “Turkish yoke”. As the rest of the Balkans, Macedonia was under Turkish occupation for five centuries, until 1912/1913; or from a more specific and concrete historical context (for example, “from the great Macedonian uprising in 1903”, as stands in the title of the drama Ilinden by Nikola Kirov Majski, written in 1923). The Ilinden Uprising, one of several Macedonian against the Turkish authorities, occurred in the town of Krushevo on August 2, 1903. Participants in the uprising took control of the town and there proclaimed the republic. Although it lasted only 6 days, the time needed for the Turks to reestablish their authority, the Krushevo Republic is regarded by historians as the first republic in the Balkans. These dramatized/staged “pictures from life” are always accompanied by a precise ambiance (by/through systems of visual theatrical signs: sets, costumes, etc.) and are also strongly “strengthened” with completely recognizable staged segments (dancing, singing, repeating traditional rituals on stage,) though which the audience emotionally identifies with the theater event. The most living characteristic of this dramaturgy – save for its undoubtedly “local color”, from which undoubtedly comes its “familiarity”, which always results in an exclusively emotional identification (support) from its simple, well-meaning public – is its suggestive, and in every way its dominant theatricality. Not even the most imaginative reading of any example of popular/national drama can adequately compare with the syncreticization/interaction which occurs during even an amateur attempt at producing this same text.
Theater studies has already explained that dramaturgy of popular/national drama figures as one of the most perfect examples of the successful functioning of that which theory calls the written theater: All its examples, including the best ones, have no other/ different goal then to note/describe the theater performance for which it is intended. Its literary quality, even when it is well-crafted, is always “secondary”in the most mundane meaning of this word. In other words, it is a result/note of the preceding intensive “testing” of that which – with more or less success – has already been “accomplished” through the (earlier) theater production, and in which a large number of various participants participated (from actors, to stage designers, to musicians and dances to the enraptured audience).
Why is this phase called Balkan? Is it only because theaterological research has proven that all Balkan drama (with the possible exception of Greek) has passed through the stylistic-formative episode that we call popular/national, regardless of whether this “passage” occurred fifty, thirty of a hundred years earlier or later?
In the 19th century, the century of national ideas, all modern Balkan historiographers to paraphrase Maria Todorova (Todorova 1997) under strong romantic and positivism traditions, then the dominant trends, refer to one simple fact: to the ultimate use of the “mass national awakening” in whose name all means (in the struggle of higher goals) were welcome. The theater – let us not forget! – even then, and even before that time, functioned as the sole medium for mass (cultural) communication. The possibility of influencing which could be harnessed by this medium – simply – could not have been foreseen. And even less ignored. If a comparative history of theater in these parts is ever written carefully (which will someday be done!) it would be easy to show that in all Balkan states for a very long time – even up to the period of late communism, which, as an attempt, would be common to all – the theater was used in the same Balkan popular-national way: as a medium for the national, ethnic and ideological propaganda. Simple Vojdan Pop Georgiev Černodrinski once or twice noted that he understood theater as a “weapon”. Almost all of this popular-national drama of this military theater should have served him simply as ammunition!