THEATRE IN EXILE
Many theatre artists, playwrights, and intellectuals of all ages who actually fought for decades to broaden the horizons of democracy and individual freedoms in the former Yugoslavia, marginalized by the new bogus and quasi- elites, were urged by these new and very repressive nationalistic regimes to leave their “new” countries and to continue their work in exile. There is a long list of those who have been urged to leave. Some of them, like Dzevad Karahasan, Kaca Celan, Zijah Sokovic, and Hasija Boric, from Bosnia, or Goran Stefanovski, Rahim Burhan, and myself included, from Macedonia, or Predrag Matvejevic, Dubravka Ugresic, Rajko Grlic, Slobodan Snajder, and Mira Furlan, from Croatia, or Dragan Klaic and Vidosav Stefanovic, from Serbia, went into actual exile, while others such as Filip David, Borka Pavicevic, and Mirjana Miocinovic, from Serbia stayed behind in an internal exile. One may say they chose a self-imposed exile and became strong dissident voices within their own newly emerged “democracies.”
However, no matter where they were, many of these authors continued to raise their creative voices in an outcry against the walls between them and their friends from other parts of their once common country. They tried to view the poignant reality critically and to express their deep discontent with the violent transfiguration of their former country. In that context the creative and humanitarian work done by the people at the Center for Decontamination, lead by the inestimable Borka Pavicevic in Belgrade, made a significant difference to the community.
#4 Plays such, as Eastern Diwan or Withdrawn Angel by Dzevad Karahasan or Snake Skin and Innes and Denise by Slobodan Snajder, for example, or Sarajevo and Hotel Europe by Goran Stefanovski, or Boat of Fools by Filip David, reflect a sharp image of their ruined world, created not only by intellectuals, authors, and artists who ended up in exile, real or metaphorical, but also by people who have dared to raise their ethical voice and express deep discontent with the violent transfiguration of the Yugoslav landscape and its aftermath. Hardly any of these plays were ever produced and performed in their native countries.
In Eastern Diwan for example, based on a novel of the same title by Karahasan, at the core of the play is the relationship between the individual and the state, the intellectual and the tyrant, freedom and oppression, totalitarian blindness, and the horizon of imagination; death is seen as a continuous companion in human life and silence inhabits the fractured and fragmented world. Written and performed in the twilight of Yugoslavia, it anticipated in many ways the violent disintegration of former Yugoslavia and the exodus from Bosnia.
The Bosnian part of hell, with its extreme nationalism and bigotry and religious and ideological dogmatism are at center stage in Slobodan Snajder’s Snake Skin as well. As already extensively discussed in PAJ [PAJ 60, 1998], Snajder creates in Snake Skin a setting in which warlords, criminals, and war profiteers decide the fate of the Bosnian people. Violence, rape, and ethnic cleansing have placed the “gods,” “the kings,” and the owners of life and death in opposition to each other in their old new war for dominance over the other landscape. Furthermore, in his small masterpiece Innes and Denise, produced bilingually and directed by Milos Lazin in France, Snajder paints a distressing world of two bereaved mothers looking on the battlefield for their murdered children. This personal tribute to the unknown and unnamed soldiers who have fought on the opposite sides of the trenches and who can be reconciled only in their death suggests a new perspective on our broader community.
After his poignant Sarajevo of 1993 [PAJ 47, 1994], which was an immediate response to devastation of the interculturally rich city of Sarajevo, Goran Stefanovski introduces us to other equally poignant stories. In his Hotel Europe, performed in an old cable factory on the outskirts of Vienna in 2001, the spectator discovers a new category of people. The characters in Stefanovski’s metaphorical discourse come at the wall of Europe from the ashes, from under the rubble of the cities. It is a diverse group of emigrants from all over Eastern Europe, and one can see there in Stefanovski’s world smugglers, prostitutes, losers, lost souls, and people from the lower depths left alone in the dark and evil times. They are people waiting in Vienna at the closed doors of Europe to enter the new world. Each scene in this production was directed by a young director from a different Eastern European country.
“O God, look at this land, look at these people!” pleads Filip David, a Belgrade native, at the very beginning of his unpublished and maybe still to many unknown play The Boat of Fools. That opening line may be read as a prayer in reference to the women from Snajder’s plays, the refugees from Karahasan’s plays, or to those struggling at the doors of Europe in Stefanovski’s plays as well. Brechtian in nature, prayerful in its tone, and similar to a fresco in its imagery, Filip David imagines a world suffocated by a thick fog. His floating towboat is filled with all sorts of scams, villains and victims, kids without a future, hunger and death visible on their skins. That is a boat of fools and drunkards, a floating raft of the mad and afflicted, of bastards and war profiteers, a towboat that comes from the fog and darkness. Forgotten by all in the night, it goes nowhere. It is a bitter image not only of Serbia in the late nineties under Milosevic’s boot, but of the Balkans isolated by the huge wall of Europe and left alone with its own demons.
No matter how dark the worlds in these plays are, and no matter that their authors live in all corners of the world, the playwrights and other theatre artists living in exile are in fact in the same continuous pursuit of a new hopeful environment through their works. These can be seen also as the creative attempt to trace new maps and to envision a humane landscape for the years to come. Their vision of theatre is rooted in the idea of human resistance to any form of militant extremism, and to nationalism’s distortion of culture and history, and the belief in the integrative power of multiculturalism. They also try to suggest to their audiences to look beyond their differences to a New World based on other social structures and social justice. They envision an environment that crosses traditional borders and attempts tries to remove the newly raised walls. In that context, after the failure of traditional social structures based on a patriarchal concept of society, as evident not only in the “macho” contribution to the murder of Yugoslavia, some of these artists, such as Slobodan Snajder in Snake Skin, encourage and advocate journeys lead by women.