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light. He is more of a victim than a protagonist - a victim of society, unfortunate circumstances and women. Thus, Byron blames the society portraying Don Juan as an unsuspecting victim of a repressive catholic regime, and on the other side he twists the logic of desire by making Don Juan and his desire a result of a woman's desire. After Byron, he reappears in Spain, in 19th century - in the play entitled Don Juan Tenorio: Drama religioso-fantastico (Don Juan Tenorio: Religious-Fantasy drama) by Jose Zorrilla, written in 1844. This story, like Byron's, has a strongly romantic approach. However, Zorrilla’s Don Juan is very active. His is an irreverent individual playing with society norms; more of a cad than a devil, charismatic, adventurer and a gambler. Don Juan in this play possesses„human qualities"; he even shows that he is capable of love, albeit here-and-now, ....and a man in love is capable of goodness, circumstances permitting. This does not happen in Zorrilla's play, so bad men turn him into a murderer so he has to leave the country and in the end we find him asking for forgiveness. if in 19th century (in Byron and Zorriiia) Don Juan is portrayed as a person in search of freedom until he is thwarted by society, 20th century rejects moralism and takes the tension between an individual and the society to the extreme (in Shaw, Apollinaire, Horvat...). Don Juan becomes a rebel against the oppressive society norms; he questions and pushes the limits between what is permitted and what is not. Naturally, he loses, his hands tied by the impossible choice of life in society: Life or freedom!, where, if he chooses life he will lose his freedom, and if he chooses freedom, he will lose both. Bearing this twentieth century experience in mind, Mozart's opera, directed by Bojana Cvejic at the beginning of 21 st century, finds a new way of looking at Don Juan. She is quite radical in her approach to his status of a libertine, as a fluid autonomous individual in neoliberal capitalist society, where he is not a rebel any more but rather - like a„smooth operator" - becomes a pragmatist. ...Not more than two decades ago the post modernist theory declared the dynamic „nomadic subject" (Rosi Braidotti) as the final instance in the fight against the repressive and petrified society norms, only for Braidotti herself to come to a conclusion, a few years ago, thatthe„greatest modern nomad is capital itself", which changes the whole perspective. This essential question of the position of the society and its role makes us look back on the ways of Don Juan, wondering whether he is (was?) an excess, a symbol or« symptom of societies in which he appears and thrives... Ana Vujanovic BOJANA CVEJIC (Belgrade, 1975) came into theater through opera. Since 1995 she directed independent music theatre performances initiating with conductor Premil Petrovic collaborations at REX, Belgrade, produced by the Open Society Foundation): Mozart's Bastien&Bastienne (1996), Falla's Ei Retablo de Maese Pedro (1998), Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat (2000), which were also selected and performed in the festivals BEMUS, Budva Grad-Teatar in former Yugoslavia, BITEF (Alterimage). The last was Orfeo ed Euridice at The Museum of the History of Yugoslavia as part of the BEMUS Festival in Belgrade, produced by Jugokoncert in 2005.

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