New Old Times in the Balkans: The Search for a Cultural Identity

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New Old Times in the Balkans: The Search for a Cultural Identity

THE ELUSIVE FUTURE

#6 What is to be done now? What can theatre do in that passionate part of the world? What can we expect to see and experience on that ever-changing map in the next decade or so? If Brecht were alive today he might say that we can’t have new meals with old forks. Maybe he would plead for reasonable acts, as he does in his poem “To My Countryman,”7F written after the World War II:

You who survive in cities that have died
Now show some mercy to yourselves at last.
Don’t march, poor things, to war as in the past
As if past wars left you unsatisfied. I beg you—
mercy for yourselves at last.

You men, reach for the spade and not the knife.
You’d sit in safety under roofs today
Have you not used the knife to make your way
And under roofs one leads a better life. I beg you,
take the spade and not the knife.

#7 Or, maybe he would suggest a new theatre for this new time. A theatre of truth that would open a real intellectual discussion on the shameful history of dishonesty and immorality in the lands of the former Yugoslavia. It could have been as well a form of new Shakespearian theatre where the “play is a thing,” and in which we should catch and expose “the kings”—the villains, criminals and their ugly faces. But, no matter what the new theatre model should be, it is paramount that it is a theatre where intellectuals and theatre artists from these newly formed countries will apologize to the victims and ask forgiveness for the crimes committed by their nationalist compatriots in their names. It is apparent today that the countries of former Yugoslavia need a theatre that will heal the wounds and reconcile; that theatre should be led and created by the young generation which is yet to come. Brecht,8F again:

You children, to be spared another war
You must speak out and tell your parents plain.
You will not live in ruins once again
Nor undergo what they’ve had to endure.
You children, to be spared another war.

This essay was published as “New Old Times in the Balkans: The Search for a Cultural Identity” in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art – PAJ 83 (Volume 28, Number 2), May 2006

#b
7. Bertolt Brecht, “To My Countrymen,” Poems 1913–1956. Methuen: New York, 1976.
8. Ibid.

AuthorNaum Panovski
2018-08-21T17:23:09+00:00 April 14th, 2007|Categories: Essays, Literature, Blesok no. 53|0 Comments