{"id":176,"date":"2020-04-11T07:44:56","date_gmt":"2020-04-11T07:44:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/?p=176"},"modified":"2022-02-05T12:54:40","modified_gmt":"2022-02-05T12:54:40","slug":"staging-postcommunism-alternative-theatre-in-eastern-and-central-europe-after-1989","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/staging-postcommunism-alternative-theatre-in-eastern-and-central-europe-after-1989\/","title":{"rendered":"Staging Postcommunism: Alternative Theatre in Eastern and Central Europe After 1989"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Edited by Vessela S. Warner and Diana Manole<\/strong>
268 pp.  University of Iowa Press<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reviewed by Don Rubin<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alternative theatre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or Pocket Theatre. Or Free Theatre. How about Caf\u00e9 Theatre? Or Off-Theatre. Or even Off-Off Theatre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever one calls it, all these terms\u2014coined by experimental and\/or confrontational theatre artists world-wide over the last half century or so\u2014represented (and still represent) artistic, political and social challenges to the theatrical mainstream. These terms began to emerge as far back as the 1950s. Before that, scholars, critics and artists themselves were satisfied with the simpler and more generic term avant-garde, <\/em>out in front. But whatever these developments were called, they were absolutely fascinating to observe, none more fascinating than those evolved in the communist\/socialist world, especially during the so-called Cold War years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the 1970s and \u201880s, I particularly looked forward to going to Poland and Russia for their theatre festivals and their theatre conferences, not so much for the official events in these two important theatre centres, but because of their hidden samizdat <\/em>work. Invariably, someone would whisper to me during these visits about a secret performance going on at midnight or tell me about a clandestine reading of some new theatrical manifesto or other. Once, someone slipped me what was described as an unpublished letter written by Stanislavski that had been buried in the state archives that I should keep hidden for the moment and then get translated and published when I got home. Turned out to be nothing of the sort, but I sweated as I left Moscow with it hidden in a theatre program. Going behind the \u201cIron Curtain\u201d back then was always a theatrical adventure and knowing that my responses could actually put the safety of colleagues there at risk made it an adventure that would never be taken lightly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was Russia and Poland as well which oddly pioneered the idea of having \u201cofficial\u201d confronters\u2014artists who were \u201callowed\u201d to do their experimental and\/or confrontational work right out in the open without apparent state approval, and sometimes even with state support. I am thinking here of the late poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko in the Soviet Union, whose daring and often critical writings were permitted publication and performance in and especially outside of the USSR, all the better to show how officially \u201copen\u201d the country was even to dissidents. I actually visited him once at his beautiful dacha outside of Moscow, where he read excerpts to me from a play he was hoping to have staged there. He also showed me some of the \u201cdissident\u201d art he proudly owned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I recall as well my many visits to Moscow\u2019s Taganka Theatre, a company which consistently challenged ideas of Socialist Realism on its stages\u2014and more\u2014especially when it was under the direction of the great Yuri Lyubimov. Yes, he was finally stripped of his Soviet citizenship in 1980, and yes, he did become a non-person while living outside of the USSR for the next decade of his life. But it took the authorities many years to get him out, and they certainly offered him a lot of creative rope before things reached that tipping point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Poland too\u2014one of the world\u2019s truly great theatre cultures\u2014historical precedents for dissident theatre writings go back into the nineteenth century (their works produced in the socialist twentieth) by giants such as Adam Mickiewicz, Stanislaw Wyspianski, and even the expressionistic and often outrageous Witkacy. More recently, one could only admire the state\u2019s public toleration for the theatre work of a visionary such as Jerzy Grotowski and the stage experiments of Tadeusz Kantor, and even the daring anthropological work of the Gardzienice collective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All this came back to me when I learned of a new book claiming to study exactly this kind of work in eastern and central Europe\u2019s socialist countries since 1989, the \u201cpost-communism\u201d period. New secrets to be revealed, new light to shine on dark corners and new understandings to be gained from the new revolutionary work. I looked forward to digging into the absolutely required historical background essay making the links between the years prior to 1989\u2014the period I knew best\u2014and this post-communist theatrical era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sadly, I found no such historical essay in this new volume looking at alternative theatre post-communism. Nor did I find a single essay about Polish alternative theatre. And the two short essays included on Russia lacked any historical context whatever. What I found was a bloodless and disparate collection of short case studies about specific companies and specific creative experiences from some ten countries\u2014Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Moldova, Serbia, Slovenia, Belarus and the Czech Republic. As case studies, virtually all were missing context. And without context, without historical connections, the centre of the volume simply did not hold for me. Its worlds and its reports\u2014for the most part\u2014simply spun themselves out in some oddly neutral space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, they were all reasonable and generally well-written studies\u2014reading like a series of academic papers from some generic academic conference, some focusing on specific plays or directors or creators; others focusing on style or content (of course, usually political). But all seemed badly in need of a compass, a coherent editorial GPS to help us through this vast post-communist territory. For me, that compass would obviously have been an historical one. But only generalized hints are offered by the two editors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some companies, we are told, are still doing Grotowski-style work\u2014or variations on it\u2014and the term \u201cPoor Theatre\u201d is tossed around regularly here without anyone really defining it. Are these groups simply eschewing significant \u201crich theatre\u201d production values (surely too obvious), or are they trying to connect on a deeper sociological or anthropological level with the later ideas of this Polish visionary? We all know he had numerous variations on his themes. My kingdom for some clearer hints.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Names such as Vakhtangov and Meyerhold are also mentioned as forerunners at several points, though no one really shares what exactly was taken and what left out from these earlier masters of experiment and form. I noted that many of the groups discussed were described as taking an Artaudian approach in their work, but that description says little, is far too general. In the 1970s, several of those Polish theatre festivals I attended\u2014 especially those run for years by the iconoclastic student group Kalambur\u2014also spoke of Artaud and, in some instances, gave us examples, showing that a little real blood was truly necessary\u2014Squat, for example, and Terayama. Is that what today\u2019s Artaudians mean?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be fair, both editors\u2014Vessela Warner, a professor at the University of Alabama and dramaturg for the Overground Physical Theatre in New York City, and Diana Manole, a Romanian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist and scholar teaching at Trent University\u2014do take a stab at creating such a roadmap in their separate introductions to the volume. But neither one looks back in time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manole\u2019s introduction is called \u201cRestoring Theatre Activism,\u201d a title suggesting that theatre activism had somehow disappeared from the socialist world during this period, but this is looking with blinkers. Perhaps, the blinkers are really her Romanian background. Romania was one of the few socialist theatre cultures that arguably never really developed a significant alternative theatre during this time. Arguable, of course. Manole speaks in a generalized way about how \u201cFreedom of speech was reinstated\u201d after 1989 (xi), noting that today alternative theatre artists across the socialist board are still struggling with \u201cconsumerism and the commodification of art\u201d (xii). She argues for \u201cthe necessity . . . and the effectiveness of alternative theatre as an agent of sociopolitical change\u201d (xiv). Her conclusion is that some of the case studies included \u201chave not yet been discussed in-depth in English-language scholarship\u201d (xiv).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that may well be the real virtue of the collection. I was certainly not familiar with all of them\u2014Bulgaria\u2019s Theatre Laboratory Sfumato and the studio theatre Alma Alter (a Grotowski-inspired company); the Helikon Opera from Moscow (kitsch mixed with Meyerhold); Prague\u2019s Studio Ypsilon (devised theatre and clowning) and Cirk La Putyka (non-verbal French New Circus meets the pub); Slovenia\u2019s NSK and Janez Janska, whose large-scale experiments \u201csubvert state control\u201d in the tradition of the Mexican Guillermo Gomez-Pe\u00f1a; Borat creator Sacha Baron Cohen; and Germany\u2019s Christoph Schlingensief. That said, a lot has been written about the Belarus Free Theatre, also included here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manole admits early on that the editors were \u201cnot aiming at a comprehensive view of postcommunist Eastern and Central European companies and artists\u201d but were rather simply attesting to \u201cthe ongoing struggle and personal sacrifices of alternative artists, who restore and resignify the legacy of theatre activism\u201d after 1989. (xvi). Again, my argument here is that with greater context the collection might have given that resignification of legacy<\/em> much more meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for Warner\u2019s introduction\u2014\u201cAlternative Theatre in the Postcolonies of Communism\u201d \u2014this Bulgarian-American scholar takes a political-sociological approach to the whole thing and suggests that theoretical studies of the socialist states in Europe indicate that the \u201cautocratic practices of cultural and ideological imposition\u201d created \u201ca bizarre eclecticism of modernity and postmodernism\u201d (xvii\u2013xviii). She suggests that the volume attempts \u201cto locate the alternative theatre of the former Eastern Europe at the junctions of postcommunist histories as well as local and global cultural exchanges. . . . From a historical perspective, a study of their work illuminates the diversity of transnational societies. . . .\u201d (xx). Her conclusion is that \u201cThese forms . . . are part of various theoretical paradigms\u2014postcolonial, feminist, intercultural, and so on\u201d (xxii). That is essentially saying that such theatre practices fit neatly into theoretical constructs. So? Ergo what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That said, three of the essays do stand out for me in terms of clarity and context\u2014one by Hungarian critic and scholar Andrea Tompa (an overview of alternative theatre before and after 1989 in Hungary, which should have been a model for the collection); another by American Dennis C. Beck, which effectively links two Prague groups (Cirk La Putyka and Farma v jeskyni) back to Vaclav Havel\u2019s work and forward to the post-dramatic theories of Hans-Thies Lehmann; and a third, Steve Wilmer\u2019s study of two Slovenian companies\u2014NSK and Janez Janska\u2014which have challenged not only issues connected to migration (Wilmer\u2019s core subject), but also to notions challenging the very idea of the state, citizenship and even personal identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One other essay that fascinated me comes from a writer in the former Soviet Republic of Moldova, an independent country today that not so many theatre people in the wider world are particularly familiar with. A personal story here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was editing Routledge\u2019s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre<\/em> (WECT) back in 1989 and 1990, Moldova was simply one of 15 states within the USSR, and material about it was simply part of the 25,000-word USSR essay being written for us by a team of scholars in Moscow, and which was scheduled to appear in the Europe volume in 1992. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the USSR collapsed two years later, the WECT Europe volume had a major crisis on its hands. Because the encyclopedia was based on notions of nationhood put forth by the UN (it began life with the financial support of UNESCO), we, the editors, suddenly went from having to create one national entry for the USSR to having to create 15 new separate national entries. Never mind the complications of turning two German essays into one (another major issue) or the splitting up of two national essays for Yugoslavia and Czechslovakia into eight. The USSR issue would have been enough\u2014with five Soviet Republics having to be moved into the Asia volume and essays on the other ten republics then having to be split into separate national essays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, the most challenging essay turned out to be Moldova\u2019s. It seemed that not so much had been specifically included about Moldova in the original Soviet overview. And once separated from the USSR-mother ship, the editorial gaps for Moldova\u2019s essay were enormous. I thought for a moment of simply ignoring Moldova entirely. Because it hadn\u2019t yet applied for national status at the UN maybe it wouldn\u2019t be missed. I remember phoning the UN office in New York almost weekly asking them if Moldova was yet an official country. And when they told me in 1990 that it was, I knew we knew we had to find a Moldovan writer. We did in the end find one, but without the financial support of the Soviet government (who would pay for the material?) and because of time pressures, the national essay wound up pretty skimpy at less than 2,000 words. I can say right here that I have always felt guilty about not being able to go further editorially with Moldova than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is to say, in the context of this new volume, that I for one genuinely appreciate the difficulties involved in undertaking any collection or study that includes Moldova. Included here is a rich treasure of material that scholar Angelina Rosca\u2014chair of the Theatre Studies Department at the Academy of Music, Theatre and Visual Arts in Chisinau\u2014produced here. Her contribution is both a valuable overview of Moldovan theatre and an introduction (certainly for me) to a female Moldovan dramatist named Nicoleta Esinencu. Esinescu has apparently been making some real alternative waves not only in Moldova but also in Romania, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Japan, France and Austria in recent years with two shockingly titled plays\u2014Mothers Without Cunts <\/em>and Fuck You, Eu.ro.Pa.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wish, however, that I could be more positive about the whole collection. I absolutely applaud the editors\u2019 hard work and perseverance in simply gathering these essays together for the edification of old theatre scholars like me and for a generation of newer ones. I also applaud the University of Iowa\u2019s willingness to reach out into areas beyond its normal comfort zone to publish material like this. It is, in the end, a contribution to knowledge. But it could have been so much more had it looked back just a bit and sought some of the period\u2019s larger theatrical connections. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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*<\/a>Don Rubin<\/strong> is Managing Editor of Critical Stages<\/em> and editor of its Book Review section. He is the series editor of Routledge\u2019s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre <\/em>and founding Editor of the national quarterly journal Canadian Theatre Review<\/em>. He is Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar in the Department of Theatre at Toronto\u2019s York University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2020 Don Rubin
Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Creative<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":178,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/22\/2020\/04\/CS-21-Postcommunism-cover.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":597,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/argentina-never-abandon-the-theatre-even-in-the-toughest-situations\/","url_meta":{"origin":176,"position":0},"title":"ARGENTINA: \u201cNever Abandon the Theatre, Even in the Toughest Situations\u201d","author":"Don Rubin","date":"May 24, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Halima Tahan Ferreyra* Most theatres in Argentina, both big and small, are offering a variety of online programmes, including not only their past shows, but also their new activities. 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The theatre\u2014after a short, initial period of shock\u2014has moved temporarily to the internet; actually, it has had a presence there for a long\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Covid"","block_context":{"text":"Covid","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/category\/covid\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/22\/2020\/05\/flag-pl-400.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":467,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/mexico-theatre-in-intensive-care\/","url_meta":{"origin":176,"position":2},"title":"MEXICO: Theatre in Intensive Care","author":"Don Rubin","date":"May 9, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Lorena Meeser* The coronavirus pandemic has had a substantial impact on the performing arts in Mexico. Theatre productions are on indefinite pause. 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On March 1, 2020, a\u00a0special programme, combining opera, ballet and drama, made in honour of the centenary of Slovak Theatre, took place in the historic building of the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Covid"","block_context":{"text":"Covid","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/category\/covid\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/22\/2020\/05\/flag-svk-400.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":407,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/canada\/","url_meta":{"origin":176,"position":4},"title":"CANADA: Working through the Cracks","author":"Don Rubin","date":"May 16, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Carly Maga* The effects of social distancing in the coronavirus pandemic hit Canadian theatres hard\u2014slowly, it felt, at first, then all at once. In Toronto, runs were cut short mid-March, but April productions still seemed possible. By the next week, theatres had mostly cancelled the rest of the 2019\/2020 season,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Covid"","block_context":{"text":"Covid","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/category\/covid\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/22\/2020\/05\/flag-canada-400.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":605,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/russia-rethinking-communication-strategies\/","url_meta":{"origin":176,"position":5},"title":"RUSSIA: Rethinking Communication Strategies","author":"Don Rubin","date":"May 7, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Alexandra Dunaeva* All Russian theatres were closed by order of the Ministry of Culture on March 17. Although in mid-April theatre leaders were still hoping to open their premieres in June, it is now completely clear that there is no reason to expect an early opening. 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