#2 The Worthless of the Content, according to Jovanović, is a glove thrown in the face of the pathetic vision for the future, and the humor is the element which confronts the sterility, modernity and all dogmas. Reality interlaces with theater, the threads of the game are getting perplexed, and the characters within that game are subjected to unexpected turnovers in any possible mean. The rebellion against the rationalism and the emphasized morality of the previous generations – for Dušan Jovanović – is the most important thing in his art-work. He has wider vision of everything around him, and in his own way, he plays games with the theater, naming his deeds with purposely ‘over-length’ titles.
Later on, he slowly abandons his interests in the formal aspects of the theater aesthetics. In time, he becomes more and more interested in the excitement of the human voluminosity of the theater: less as aesthetics, and more as a play of humanity and human values. The theater becomes a story-gathering place with human destiny in its center. He starts a quest and enterprises realization of the ideas, characters, bodies, and of all that is human. The human material is his everlasting treasure for creation. Upon this simple truth of being, he creates his own personal theater that speaks only of the man, as his categorical attitude toward the fact that the human material is the single and only guide of/in the theater and that the theater can not speak of anything else but of the human. He abandons almost all abstract areas and landscapes with unknown names and countries, and he starts telling the stories with the concrete/actual context-location-country. That kind of a context-theater is undertaken in his play Liberation of Skopje. The action in this play takes place in 1943/44 in Skopje, and it speaks of the several human destinies in the midst of the concrete war and in the concrete city. In his play Karamazovs, the first story goes on in Belgrade in 1948 and 1956, and it speaks of one man’s destiny during and after the Inform bureau, and the second story speaks of the one man’s destiny in the rebellion 1968. Top Secret is written in 1983 as allegory, or as zoo linguistic miracle about the ghosts upon the Federal States of Yugoslavia, and of the actual decay of that country, where the actual ghosts are of animal origin. In his play The Wall, The Lake, written in 1989, action goes on 14 years after the event that took place at 8th of March 1972 in Slovenian city of Bled. In Antigone, written in 1993, the story is about the people and the events of 1992 in Sarajevo, a city that the author compares with the antic Theba, where antic story of Antigone took place. The monodrama Karayan Ce, written in 1998, is a comic mix for voice and body: Moderato / Scherzando ma non tropo / Adagio sostenuto. With this play, Jovanović steps out of the public-event spheres and enters the small personal human destinies of his heroes. Through convincing humor and sensitivity, he presents destinies of the depressed characters on the margins of the society. Exhibitionist is the play written in 2001, signed by the pseudonym O. J. Traven (after the premiere of the play and after the Award given to the play, the real identity of the author – D. Jovanović – is revealed). The idea for the story came to Jovanović from a newspaper article – daily ‘black chronicle’ – about one unusual love relationship between an exhibitionist and a social worker in a Slovenian prison.
Exactly that kind of theater – theater that speaks of the man and only of the man – is the kind of theater plays in this selection of Dušan Jovanović’s theater work in this book in Macedonian language. Actually, this is an anthology – maybe the largest by the number of plays involved in it – on Jovanović and his work; also, even three authors speaks of him through many various aspects on his work: as a theater writer, director, then as a pedagogue, as an essayist, and as an artist and art-worker with constant provocation, polemic and cynic author who dares to challenge all anomalies of the world he encounters, who creates with his eyes wide open, and who lives with the full and endless life energy all of his life and life-work.
Almost all of his plays, dramas, essays, TV & Radio productions, as well as his way of teaching his students – are made of human material. And his complete opus, also, has at least three flows/paths: creative – aesthetical – educational. In those parallel and only his personal, long and sincere theater love-game in which the human destiny is placed, Dušan Jovanović – the theater director and Dušan Jovanović – the writer, are constantly within the whirlpool of creative passion. The Game and the Destiny flow together. The darkest landscapes of the human world are revealed, which, in principle, aren’t necessary open for the common sense. They lead up to human integrity and freedom.
Translated from Macedonian by: Petar Volnarovski