NEW VOICES
At the end of the last century in the midst of the fragments of former Yugoslavia, a new, younger generation of playwrights, directors, actors, and other theatre artists appeared on the chaotic and confused “Yugoslav” scene. These young people were born in the former Yugoslavia but grew up and appeared mostly after its death in several newly formed countries, on isolated islands.
In that cold environment, where the old ways of life were destroyed by war and the new cultural or moral principles that replaced them were still not yet in place, these new young theatre people started to look for their own creative place in their “new” countries. For them what it was now important was their own life and theatre work at home in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro. Now these young people started, each one in his or her own way, to look not to Yugoslavia as a model, but to Europe. Dejan Dukovski, Zanina Mircevska, Almir Imshirevic, Ljubomir Djurkovic, Lada Kastelan, Ivana Sajko, Lydia Scheuerman Hodak [her play Maria’s Pictures appears in PAJ 77, 2004], Filip Shovagovic, Biljana Srbljanovic, Ana Lasic, and Milena Markovic are just a few of the young artists who may be considered paradigmatic representatives of this new generation of playwrights and theatre artists.
What brings this group together is the fact that in their works they addressed more directly the issue of disintegration and their search for identity, rather than the consequences of war. This is the case with Balkan Powderkeg by Dejan Dukovski, which was later made into an internationally successful film. This young generation is close to its contaminated ground and in their works there is less optimism, fewer utopian images and more postmodern nihilism and cynicism. Their plays and productions are self-oriented and self-confined products that correspond with their own reality.
In their responses to the bestial “tradition” of ethnic intolerance and the war, to the confrontations in the name of “blood and soil,” they create their own, closed, dark, and bitter worlds. There one discovers poignant and lost figures and destroyed families on the outskirts of the war. Life is compared to existence in a garbage can or a dump. In his most revered play Dump Ljubomir Djurkovic from Montenegro explicitly suggests that the war desensitized people, made them feel as if they were garbage; the world according to him is a dump. For this young generation the war and those responsible for it almost do not exist. It seems that war is somewhere there behind the horizon. It is not their war, it is someone else’s war. They ignore it or try to get away from it, as the characters do in the most acclaimed and most-produced play from the late nineties, Belgrade Trilogy, by Biljana Srbljanovic do. Here the characters are immature teenagers and young adults, someone’s victims who refuse to grow up and take responsibility. They live in a world in disarray, a world without direction and compass, a world that has lost its sense. There is no love, hope, or any other form of empathy, kindness, or expression of humane feelings. Everything human is gone. In another play, Family Stories, Srbljanovic suggests that the past is destroyed, the present is unbearable, the future does not exist. Complementing that view, in Balkan’s Devil Shame and How to Make a Performance, Almir Imshirevic from Sarajevo contends that life makes no sense any more, nor is creating theatre or nurturing culture and human values of any relevance in that part of the world. Everything is broken and cannot be fixed. Pessimism, loss, and doom dominate their theatrical landscape. In their broken world, which excludes idealism and hope, there is only brutal sex, violence, drugs, despair, and death. Who the Fuck Started All This Mess curses Macedonian playwright Dejan Dukovski from behind the title of one of his most popular plays, performed equally successfully in Skopje, Belgrade, Zagreb, and Bonn. That is how out of the ashes and despair the “Yugoslav” version of “the aesthetics of blood and sperm” (a common phrase of Balkan critics) was born in late nineties.
Many of the works of these new playwrights and directors, this lost generation, as some of them call themselves, have been created under the influence of Sarah Kane and Quentin Tarantino. As a matter of fact, after the unquestioned success and popularity of Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and later on of Pulp Fiction, and following the explosion of productions all over Europe by Sarah Kane, many of the young theatre artists from the former Yugoslavia embraced and adopted Kane’s and Tarantino’s views in their own work, resulting in a blend of gruesome fragmentary dramaturgy mixed with “pulp” images of the brutal Yugoslav reality. However, on the other hand, here is evidence, as some recent research of her work and particularly her play Blasted suggests, that Sarah Kane was equally influenced by the brutality and the violence of the wars in former Yugoslav countries.
Instead of intellectually and imaginatively distancing themselves from their pulp world to create responsible and engaged theatre, many of these young theatre artists unfortunately remained trapped in that same caustic setting. Consequently, this extremely talented theatre generation missed the opportunity to create a theatre scene that expressed their discontent with the crime and prostitution, the smuggling of arms and people, and the corruption of their newly-formed countries. They lost the opportunity to build a theatre that heals wounds and brings reconciliation to their own “new” world. In many cases, some of them in their naïve and uncritical desire for overnight celebrity status, became easy alibis for the “existence of democracy” in their oppressive systems. No matter that some of them have individually expressed and publicly voiced critical stands and personal opposition to the despotic and corrupt regimes of the nineties; in actualization many of them did not have the courage to resist the temptation of the new times. They adjusted well in the current cultural milieu, adapted to the dominant cultural ideology, and became a part of the ferocious circle of whining and self-pity.
One more element is peculiarly visible and characteristic in the work of this generation. In their plays everything happens behind their own walls and within their own ethnic tradition, mythology, and national heritage. The focus is relocated from the whole to the fragment. The “other,” including other cultures, is mostly seen as an enemy, appearing as destroyers and conquerors. They are responsible for the disaster, for suffering, for life without light at the end of the tunnel. It is a bitter and shocking picture of a claustrophobic, desperate, and devastated environment offering no exit for the next new generation, and one that seems willfully ignorant about the others.
It is also significant that in the plays of this young generation Yugoslavia either does not exist or the young generation doesn’t know what it means. The new countries are still not truly theirs. America and Europe although cruel and frightening in their eyes, are somewhere out there like hidden desire, behind the walls, and they are wandering in dark. Their space is filled with loneliness, desperation, corruption, and suffering of all kinds, while oppression is their everyday reality—a reality they never chose. As Milena Markovic from Belgrade makes clear in her play Pavilions, written in the late nineties as a graduation piece, this is a generation of young people who came center stage in their countries’ life from nowhere. There is nothing for them in their nationalistically driven environment and there is no place for them where to go from there either. These young people are in a continuous search for identity, for the meaning of life. Who are we? Where do we come from? What shall we do? Where shall we go? These are the questions they ask themselves. Accepting the prestigious Ernst Toller Award on December 1, 1999, in Noeburg on the Danube, Biljana Srbljanovic, the strongest public voice among them, voiced her generation’s concern about its lost identity in this way: “Ladies and Gentlemen, it is difficult for me to thank you for awarding me this prestigious award. For, who am I? My identity is stolen by world politics, national politics. It is definitely lost somewhere during the last war. I can’t find it, no matter how hard I try. I can’t find it at any ‘lost and found’ office at the airports I have been to. I can’t find it in any language, in any culture.”5F
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5. Quoted according to Darinka Nikolic’s essay “Children of Autism or Small Stories about Small People,” which appears in Dramatic Text Today in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro. Sterijno Pozorje: Novi Sad, 2004.