Bitef

★ ‘The mankind produces Bibles and rifles, tuberculosis and tuberculin. It treats democratically kings and nobility, it builds churches and in front of them universities, turns convents into barracks yet attaches to barracks military chaplains. It goes without saying that the society supplies also ruffians with rubber tubes filled with lead so that they can batter their neighbour, and then prepares in advance the bed for the tormented, for the surviving and unfeeling bodies...” Robert Musil, The Man without Properties

Reflections about this year’s selection could not but start from the hundredth anniversary of World War I. In part, because it is a historic date of great significance for the territory we live in, and in part because the anniversary has been accorded a special place and importance in most European countries, particularly in the field of culture. The reinterpretation of World War I from the perspective of the historiography has opened a new battle-ground between the advocates of the traditional, 20th century perception ofthat war and the proponents of the current "revisionist" concept relativising the aforementioned traditional approach which has predominated in text-books until recent times: this causes confusion as to the identity of the aggressor and the victim and arouses renewed passions demonstrating that World War I was not just a time-defined historical event but rather the beginning of a long process which has not seen its end yet and the political use of which can be, and is, the source of new conflicts. The shots fired in Sarajevo thus become the shots fired by a potential fighter for freedom or a potential terrorist, and World War I becomes the immediate cause and means of modern political repositioning.

At this moment the European theatre is deeply involved in reflections about World War I and projects addressing the anniversary predominate in a way in the European theatre practice. Needless to say. we are talking about the artistic interpretation of historical events, free of the obligation of be ''objective" which, at least on paper, binds the scientists but, nevertheless, inevitably raises the question whether the "objectivity" in theatre is at all possible and whom is it, after all, intended for and who needs it. The question also arises whether the theatre of our time is capable of provoking the same thrill and the same mass identification with an historical event such as, for instance the theatre of the late 1980 s which, as the historian Dubravka Stojanovič writes, with the production of The Kolubara Battle contributed to the creation of a mythical image of World War I and transformed a theatre ritual into a religious one. At that time in the auditorium of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre one could hear cries "Forward“ accompanied by mass weeping and sloganeering and the excitement which, Dubravka Stojanovič says, resembled the initiation to a newborn nation. Is the theatre of neoliberal capitalism, movingly anachronous in a way because it still rests on the bourgeois system of balancing between the box-office success and satisfaction of its own illusion of political subversion which is accessible to few citizens (ac- ‘ cording to European statistics, mostly middle-aged women of the dying middle class) truly the place of critical awareness and possibly a place of a revolution? This year’s Bitef will try to ask this question.

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48 Bitef 14

Past is Present