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The status of theater in the Balkans has changed significantly – especially in the Macedonian cultural context – in the last fifty years of the past century. A series of circumstances, not only Macedonian, converged and influenced this development positively: the opening of former Yugoslavia to the West after 1948/1950; the readiness of the West to accept a communist and Balkan state as its partner in the exchange of cultural goods; the sensational exhibition of medieval South Slavic art in Paris in 1950, after which followed a series of most exclusive foreign visits to Yugoslavia, art, music, film, theater; the beginning of a series of exceptional international theater and music festivals held in Yugoslavia, beginning in 1950 when the Dubrovnik Summer Festival began; the elite BITEF (Belgrade International Theatre Festival), where since 1967, the most renown international names and the most controversial international plays have participated: Peter Brook, Luca Ronconi, Giorgio Strehler, Living Theatre, La Mamma, Eugene Ionesco, Bob Willson, Eugenio Barba, Jerzy Grotowski… Even when it existed as a federation of six fraternal republics, former Yugoslavia was a relatively small country of some twenty million people so that it was both simple and economic to participate in all of these intensive happenings. Thanks to BITEF, for years the members of today’s middle generation of theater had the enormous privilege of watching, live, the absolutely most important European and non-European performances, performed by the best actors and directed by the most studied directors of their time.
As one of the most sensitive arts, theater could not help but to feel these sensational events most intensely, and to join them enthusiastically. The structure of feeling (Williams, 1961) of an every wider and numerous theater public, and also the genre/medium consciousness of Macedonian authors of all types, not only dramatists, were effected by such a modern-international influence.
It is completely understandable, then, that the theatricality of Macedonian drama which (with great effort!) was striving to be affirmed in this same modernistic period, could no longer be “conceived” as a descriptive, mimetic treatment of a simple “arranging the pictures from real life”. The reconstructions of some of the most important performances from that period (for example, of the already-mentioned A Twig in the Wind) refers to a difference/otherness and to its ultimate model principle: the acting was different the direction was different, different scenography and costumes, different lighting, music, mise-en-scene, make-up… And, of course, a completely different way of viewing that which happened on one such – different – theater stage.
A theater which was written into the texture of these different/modern plays and which is imminent of their drama works, a theater which transported its famous levels/stack of its literary qualities into a system of completely different theater signs, this theater really did not desire to be a weapon any longer, nor did it desire to fulfill any kind of “social function”. Such a “function” was rejected resolutely by Kole Čašule, who, in one phase of his creative life, subscribed to the existential engagements as espoused by Sartre to a large degree. His play, Darkness, even if it is set in a completely concrete historical/revolutionary time and even if it formally develops along a single concrete historical act (the murder of the leading Macedonian national revolutionary Gjorche Petrov, which actually did happened in 1921), still it cannot be called historical. Čašule’s play does not try to theatricize a so-called historical truth, nor does it try to dramatize such exhilarating episodes which is a part of any national history (especially if it is Balkan!). On the contrary, referring to a single historical/mythical event, the play develops as a typical existential drama of ideas, which is concerned with the tragic misunderstandings between a lonely individual and the “compact collective majority,” with moral dilemmas on the justice of violence in the pursuit of “greater goals,” with the fatal and eternal tension between every “final goal” (or “grand idea”, in whose name small nations seem to be always manipulated) and the dirty means by with such a goal is inescapably realized.
Modern/modernistic Macedonian theater from the late fifties, then through the sixties and seventies – I am discussing only the best examples, of course! – was very persistent in breaking with its own mimetic (“small popular”) popular/national and Balkan tradition, both on the repertoire and the performance levels. It wanted to create plays just as they were being created at the same time in London and in Paris, as the directors Ilija Milchin (born 1918) and Mirko Stefanovski (1921-1981) fought for already in the fifties. Nonetheless, until the radical replacement of the older generation of directors, which occurred in the Macedonian theater in the second half of the sixties and in the seventies, when the theatrical institutions were taken over, in the professional sense, by the directors Ljubisha Georgievski (born 1937), Vladimir Milchin (born 1947), and Slobodan Unkovski (born 1948), there was a great amount of aesthetic misunderstanding between the modern Macedonian theater and the then dominant Macedonian theater. It was Georgievski himself who was the first to successfully bring to the Macedonian theater stages two striking, modernistic, avant-garde plays by Kole Čašule, one which followed the paradigm of the theater of the absurd (A Musical Score for Miron, 1967), and one that experimented with the classic expressionistic dramatic matrices (Whirlpool, 1968).
This changing of the generations of directions coincided (naturally!) with the advent of the postmodern Macedonian drama, symbolically introduced by, perhaps, the most striking representative of this “exhibitionist school”, Rusomir Bogdanovski. All of his plays, comedies by genre, intentionally (tendentiously) flirted with their own (seemingly) flippancy and combined the so-called classic dramatic matrices (Plaute, Terence, Rabelais) with the stage and crafts belonging to the oral, ethno-theater, Balkan folkloric tradition. Strikingly postmodern in his methods, Bogdanovski once was seen also as a paradigmatic intellectual, or an intercultural author: using the inheritance of different European dramatic/theater traditions, at the same time without any formal preference, he managed to make his own comedies not only original/new, but also more universal than the “examples,” “matrices,” and the “cuts” which showed that he followed them superficially, but nonetheless respected them.
Goran Stefanovski has shown a completely different relation to other traditions, both his own near (Balkan) and afar (general civilizational). He debuted at the end of 1974, becoming a dramatist following the most natural course: through his experience in the theater like other classic popular-national dramatists (didn’t Lope de Vegas, Moliere and Shakespeare begin this way?). I should be so bold to state, paraphrasing George Lukac’s well-known quip regarding Hamlet, that the dramatist Goran Stefanovski has completely by created the technique and technology of the stage. His first play, Jane Zadrogaz, belonging to the genre of “folk fantasy with singing”, is in reality a dramatic/theatrical recycling of the incredibly powerful and practically inexhaustible ethnographic material, collected by the legendary Macedonian writer Marko Cepenkov (1829-1920). While reconstructing this production recently with a group of graduate students in theater studies, I was brought face to face with the most essential questions which it unavoidably poses: how to assess its extraordinary theatricality, which just as popular/national traditions only later (post factum) it was written down in its literary drama form – that is, how did the participants “influence” its fascinating staging at the end of 1974?
Based on many completely tangible facts and proofs, we concluded that many of the participants influenced it significantly, and that the written variant of Jane Zadrogaz can almost be seen as a type of collective work. Something like a theatrical variant of an opera aperta by Umberto Ecco or that lucid postmodern construct called a hypertext. The Skopje production of Jane Zadrogaz, masterfully directed by Slobodan Unkovski, can truthfully be seen as the Macedonian variant/variation of the then extraordinarily attractive and intriguing European and American attempts to discover new forms of theater, which among other things, allowed for the establishment of some new/different relations between all participants in the theater production (the director, the scenographer, the costume designer, the artists, audience…) from which sprung entirely new ways of writing for the theater. It was during these years (in America and a decade earlier in Western Europe, starting in 1960), the current avant-garde, ambivalent, impoverished and to use a term no-longer fashionable, urgennt/ultimate theater, desperately needed an entirely new type of dramaturgy, as shown through the writing of a completely different type of dramatic text. Theory refers to this type of text, simply as a synopsis, insisting exactly on its complete independence (difference) from the conventional dramatic or narrative/literary type of text. Eugenio Barba, Jerzy Grotowski, Richard Schechner, Peter Schumann, Julian Beck, Peter Brook… worked on such scenarios during this period, being so bold as to deconstruct even the most iconic, sacrosanct plays of Calderon or Shakespeare. I believe that the director Slobodan Unkovski and his then theater crew who shared the same ideas – exhilarated by the current European and American avant-garde of the sixties – wanted to enslave their own happiness with some domestic hypothetical (proto-Balkan) avant-garde variant. So, I believe that we must treat Jane Zadrogaz as an incredibly successful example of a classic Macedonian avant-garde synopsis.
Just like all other avant-garde theater adventures, this Macedonian variant did not last long. Its traces, later, can be found in concrete theater practice (especially in the manuscripts of Macedonian directors of the new generation, Ljubisha Georgievski, Vladimir Milchin, Slobodan Unkovski), but would never again surface in the drama writing of Goran Stefanovski himself. As much as some of his recent texts, which have been performed widely in the past few years (from Sarajevo, Amsterdam 1993 to Hotel Europe, Stockholm 2000) at first glance would seem to resemble open drama structure – conditionally labeled – “avant-garde,” a closer reading shows that this first impression lies. Even from the period of his first classic play Proud Flesh, produced in Skopje in 1979 (again in the masterful direction of Slobodan Unkovski), Stefanovski has continued consistently to produce formally tight, closed, even rigid in the literary sense, weighty dramatic constructions. Always – even in these, in the technical sense, the most fragmented, seemingly exemplary postmodern examples – Stefanovski’s dramaturgy has remained strongly impregnated with three typically modern (and not postmodern!!!!) postulates: they always tell a story, which refers to sometime very concrete and familiar (Skopje neighborhood of Debar Maalo, communism, the siege of Sarajevo, emigration, immigration in Europe…); this story is always told “from the beginning to end”; the strategy of the drama is always developed so that through it an important “message” is passed or serves to elucidate a universal “truth” which the whole world should discover. We know that modernism loved to work with theses – while postmodernism is simply allergic to any type of thesis. “Postmodernism, as is known, has sharply rebuffed modernism for its use of the illusion of the existence of a “final truth,” “absolute hero,” and “new style,” explains the Russian theoretician Mihail Epstein in his excellent study of postmodernism (Epstein 1999).