Staging the Lived Experience and Socialist Everyday Life in Post-Yugoslav Theater

The Authenticity of Post-Yugoslav Stardom

There are no main or supporting actors in these performances, as all performers have equal roles as witnesses and storytellers. The impression is that the main subject is actually the collective and its collective memory. All performers wear similar, indistinguishable costumes that make them appear as a group, a unified performing body: in Born in YU they are in casual black and white clothes, in Hypermnesia in loose white pants and blouses, in Damned Be the Traitor to His Homeland! in sweat pants and sweatshirts. The plays are organized as sequences of fragments and episodes in different genres: from collective sketches and anecdotes to personal monologues and stylized segments in which music, rhythm, and visuals have greater roles.

Born in YU is the performance that acquired the iconic status of the show that “first” opened the question of Yugoslav identity and legacy. The performance was produced in the Yugoslav Drama Theater in Belgrade, a big venue founded in 1947 as the representative theater of Yugoslavia. It did not change its name after the country’s breakup and still cherishes a certain notion of continuity with the Yugoslav legacy. The first night famously opened with the ensemble singing the Yugoslav anthem Hey, Slavs!—and the audience spontaneously getting up to join them. The fact that the audience felt comfortable performing the ritual, which elsewhere could be interpreted as at least provocative, implies that the meaning of the performance was (at least partly) established even before the first run. Different factors, such as a choice of this particular venue, director, actors and playwrights, already created certain expectations. The fact that director Dino Mustafić came from Sarajevo underlined the notion of post-Yugoslav connections, and if anyone did not manage to notice that, Mustafić repeatedly noted in the media that the Yugoslav cultural identity survived the political system. ¹³ The ensemble was composed of performers recognized for their anti-war activism and anti-nationalistic stance, such as Mirjana Karanović, probably the best-known (post-) Yugoslav actress. On top of that, internationally acclaimed writers, again known for similar values, such as Dubravka Ugrešić, Dušan Jovanović, and Goran Stefanovski, contributed textual inputs for the performance. The high visibility and public profile of the participating artists provided additional meaning for the performance, but also had another consequence. It affected the construction and perception of their experience and testimonies on stage.

After the introductory anthem singing, the performers present themselves with the personal identification number they received in Yugoslavia, popularly known as the JMBG. With this simple act, they connect their off-stage personas with their on-stage performance and maintain this relationship throughout the performance. It has to be noted here that these “stars” already have media-constructed and mediatized images of their “on-stage” (professional) and “off-stage” (private) persona. Their biography, intimacy, personal characteristics, lovers, likings, and interests are constantly discussed in the media, thus being simultaneously constructed and “revealed” for a wide audience. In other words, their “private lives” are public knowledge. And all of this knowledge provides a wider referential context for understanding the testimonies presented on stage. The actors telling their stories in Born in YU are actually building on already existing mediatized images of their public selves, which are media-constructed as their true, honest, and “real” selves. Additionally, stories told on stage are further mediatized: they are (again) picked up by the media and remediated and retold in newspapers or glossy magazines as stories of revelation, defining the stage act as an authentic embodiment of the celebrities’ “true” selves. ¹⁴

Branka Petrić’s story is a good example of this process. Petrić is a famous actress and the wife of an even more famous husband, Bekim Fehmiu, an internationally renowned Yugoslav actor of Albanian ethnicity who lived in Belgrade and committed suicide in 2010. Their love and life story, the stardom version of the Yugoslav “mixed marriages” phenomenon, was and is a part of Yugoslav collective knowledge and popular mythology. Petrić tenderly and openly talked on stage about her life and the death of her husband months after his suicide, which attracted huge attention and evoked great sympathy. The story that was already widely disseminated through the media was thus augmented in theater and then again disseminated through the media, as they reported about Petrić’s performance and invited her to give interviews and retell everything again. ¹⁵ Her story in Born in YU is thus part of a wider remediation of Yugoslav myths and icons in popular culture, the media, and finally theater. This omnipresence of a certain icon, repeated in different media, “makes us forget the presence of the medium and instead presents us with an illusion of an unmediated memory.” ¹⁶ The testimonies of stars who performed their “true” selves thus created the feeling of authenticity and immediacy, of raw and unedited “truth” delivered to the audience. This understanding was also supported by the director, who spoke about the authenticity of experience: “Our history is made up of noble and embarrassing moments. Thus, it is important that theater talks about these topics. Especially if something is founded in documents and biographies, if it is not fiction, but lived experience.” ¹⁷

Another fact contributing to the presentation of memories as “authentic” was that performers often narrated emotional episodes, whether tender memories from childhood or bitter and traumatic experiences from adulthood. This was especially prominent in experiences of the breakup of the country with stories of emotional hardship; loss of identity, family relations, and friends; and political disillusionment. Petrić’s story is telling; Anita Mančić recalled how she couldn’t attend her sister’s funeral because she could not obtain a Croatian visa; Mirjana Karanović talked about the romance with a man who ended up in the war zone. Notions of revelation are embodied in a trembling voice, deeper vocal tones, silence, and interruptions of the monologue. These performances of private struggles again bridged the gap between performers on stage and their mediatized public personas, creating the impression of a performer as a “real” person revealing his or her “authentic” self. This needs to be connected with the general relevance of psychological hardship and trauma in contemporary culture. While psychologically harsh and disturbing experiences were certainly also present in the past, contemporary culture highly values and recognizes trauma, more than other historical periods did. Our cultural space thus abounds with various representations of suffering and trauma, whether in the realm of popular culture, news outlets, or the arts. In this context, trauma can be thought of as a special genre or a cultural code in which the position of a victim is sutured together with notions of innocence and trust, while empathy is required from audience. ¹⁸ A special characteristic of popular trauma culture is the transfer of the traumatic experience to famous people and their psychological struggles, distinctively embodied in the global superstar sufferer, Oprah Winfrey. ¹⁹ Born in YU cannot be simply reduced to the intimate struggles of its famous performers, but it also cannot be completely divorced from the popular trauma culture that characterizes contemporary society.

However, except for the last part of the performance, most memories of Yugoslavia are not memories of hardship; they are set in the realm of everyday culture and intimate lives that become the “safe” place for expressing nontraumatic remembrance. Certain scenes are performed collectively, as a collective experience belonging to all protagonists of a certain period. There is a scene of a “school class,” in which performers ask and answer typical questions that all Yugoslavs learned in the elementary schools. Other stories are various versions of already popularized Yugonostalgic tropes, such as remembering the Adriatic coast, visiting a “mixed family” all around the state, forming a friendship with different nationals during army service, etc. In the context of private lives and everyday culture, even the memory of institutional and political aspects of Yugoslavia, which are negatively portrayed in prevailing authoritative discourses, can acquire a different meaning. Ideological phrases, doxas, and structurally maintained adoration of the state leader Tito are not singled out as a special phenomenon but as one of the elements of the complex fabric of Yugoslav everyday reality. Predrag Ejdus narrates how Tito visited his town and the crowd excitedly organized to cheer and wave. But Ejdus’s recollection develops into a story of adolescent lust: While cheering for Tito, young Ejdus touches the breast of a girl for the first time in his life, so that he explodes with excitement, shouting ideological slogans to simultaneously hide and express his arousal. In this episode, different aspects of reality merge: the personal and sensual is expressed through a social practice maintained by the political and institutional apparatus. It is hard to speak about positive or negative recollections here, as a clear evaluation of the past escapes us, precisely because it is impossible to divorce different levels of social reality. In such a story, when different layers of social life intersect, it is impossible to evaluate the past as either “good” or “bad” or to create characters who are either “in favor of” or “against” the system. Ejdus’s episode points also to the performativity of late socialist rituals, as defined by Yurchak, who points out that involvement in those cannot be interpreted as simply supporting the official ideology. State rituals functioned as necessary formalities that, when respected, allowed for the whole range of meanings, usages, and practices, that were not necessarily determined by authoritative ideological messages. ²⁰ Ejdus’s story thus breaches the binary vision of socialist subjects as either supporters or opponents of the system and socialist life as divided between opposite spheres of private and public. What frames these memories is the feeling of sweet enjoyment of reliving certain moments of Yugoslav and personal history, which cannot be separated. The longing remains even in testimonies that point to the problematic sides of Yugoslav history. For example, Slobodan Beštić remembers his experience with the secret service, while setting his story somewhere between light anecdote and dark humor, underlining bizarre conversations and the character of his persecutor (the daughter of a secret service officer who is infatuated with Beštić), while not exploring this event on its political level. Whatever is remembered in Born in YU is thus framed in the complex mode of reflexive nostalgia, where longing mixes with irony, humor, and criticism and ultimately is not a longing for the restoration of the past but enjoyment in the recollection of what cannot be brought back. ²¹

The other element that is underlined in Born in YU is the supranational character of everyday Yugoslav experience and identity. All kinds of traveling and mixing with other nations are retold with inter-ethnic Yugoslav romance as a constant and recurring motif. It seems that all that Yugoslavs remember is how to flirt, seduce, and fall in love with each other, preferably in the setting of mass organized vacations on the Adriatic coast. Rather than trivializing these enthusiastic expressions of Yugoslav lust, we should read them, like other multiethnic experiences, in the context of the dominant framing of national relations in the current post-Yugoslav nation-states. The dominant national(ist) discourse insists on homogenous and clearly divided nations, frames animosity between nations as “natural,” and explains the violent breakup of Yugoslavia with the binary positions of victims and perpetrators—casting the national subject in the role of a victim. Recollections of the multiethnic fabric of everyday Yugoslav life thus have a specific role. They deny the story of eternal interethnic struggles and hatred and remind us of a different type of everyday reality and perception of the social world. This means not only cohabitation and interaction between different national and ethnic groups, which comes close to the contemporary idea of multiculturalism, but also a memory of interaction in which national and ethnic categories do not play an important role. Yugoslavs fall in love with other Yugoslavs, not necessarily defining their ethnicity, religion, or nationality. Thus, we have memories of not only multinational and multiethnic everyday life but also supranational experience that enables interaction beyond the question of ethnic or national identification, interaction based instead on the civic notion of belonging to the same community and country.

In this regard, Born in YU also differs from some other attempts to “normalize” parts of the Yugoslav past by framing it exclusively as respective national heritages and avoiding the Yugoslav context. For example, the exhibition “Objects of our everyday life” in The Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, Slovenia presented objects and stories as belonging to the Slovenian past from 1945 till 1990, while avoiding the mere mention of a Yugoslav context; ²² similarly, in the official announcement for the exhibition “Sixties in Croatia” in the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb, the covered period is defined simply as “the chapter in newer Croatian history.” The Yugoslav context is avoided or erased, which is problematic for the presentation of any Yugoslav phenomena. In contrast to that, Born in Yu intentionally saves the everyday Yugoslav past as multiethnic and supranational.

Multidirectional Memories and Suffering in Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Pristina

Hypermenesia (2011) is based on similar principles as Born in YU, but differs in its narrative. This is largely due to the composition of the ensemble of actors; they are all of the same generation, in their thirties, but coming from different locations: four of them from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina; three from Belgrade, Serbia; and an Albanian from Pristina who is currently based in Sarajevo. The focus of remembering is childhood, especially relations with parents, and the recollections stretch from Yugoslav to post-Yugoslav times. Memories of the pre-war period belong to the same frame of experience, overlapping habits and events, and everyday rituals that appear as a part of the same world and cultural matrix. Some scenes are again staged collectively—such as parents trying to over-feed the “children” or female performers bitterly remembering how their parents openly preferred male to female descendants. These themes are similar to Born in YU, but here they have additional meaning. Actors—today defined as actors of different nationalities—are staging their childhood as an experience of overlapping and common events. This goes against the nationalist discourse that insists on clear boundaries and defines the national subject as fundamentally different from neighboring nations. The mere fact of having these actors together on the stage also transcends the general notion of national theaters as representatives of (homogenous) national people, traditions, and language. ²³ Second, these actors are staging their childhood experience as a world in which ethnicity does not appear to play an important role. Again, we are talking about a multiethnic, but also supranational, Yugoslav memory stage. This world is abruptly ended with the stories of the breakup and the war, with which even the most basic rituals, such as going to the school, depend on national affiliation. Maja Izetbegović tells how she was not accepted in her first-grade class by Serbian teachers in Sarajevo because of her Bosniak nationality. Her story clearly does not exist without the national categories that provide meaning to the events told. Experiences from the breakup are mostly divided, shaped by location and national “affiliation,” which is not necessarily wanted but usually prescribed and impossible to avoid.

The lived experience is again staged as “authentic” and “real,” but in a different way from the previous case. The direct connection between “the real” and the stage, the notion of “documentarity” is repeatedly created by the constant usage of historical documentary material, material objects from everyday life, and personal archives, such as videos, photographs, letters, and audio material. All these objects testify to the off-stage “reality” from which the narrated stories and memories originated. Photographs of the actors as children are projected on the stage while the actors narrate or perform episodes from their childhood. The video footage of a 1992 demonstration in Sarajevo is reproduced while Ermin Bravo remembers his mother’s shock at hearing the first shots. When Bravo talks about his school, the pages from a school notebook are projected: a pioneer’s oath written by a child’s hand and a drawing of the Yugoslav flag. A recording of Tamara Krcunović (as a child) narrating a poem by Jovan Jovanović Zmaj is included in the scene of her recollections. Krcunović also reads from the diary she kept as a teenager. Letters written by parents are read out loud, and Milica Stefanović reads an anecdote her mother wrote down specifically for the performance. The act of reading these written testimonies—they could be easily (re)cited as monologues—also builds up the “illusion of unmediated memory,” of memory being directly transferred onto the stage. On top of that, the map of Sarajevo is drawn, localities explained, dates mentioned. Supporting a personal story with archival data is an already established convention often used in documentary films, the TV genre of docufiction, and fictional history films. Astrid Erll calls this convention the “remediation-as-reality-effect” and explains that the integration of “older media, which are commonly held to have witnessed the past, produces an effet de reel. The fiction film suddenly seems indexically linked to the historical events it depicts. Hypermediacy thus serves to create immediacy; remediation is used to endow media representations of the past with an aura of authenticity.” ²⁴ Hypermediacy in Hypermensia functions in the same manner, constantly producing the effect that the spectator is faced with something real, true, and unmediated. The theatrical staging of lived experience is thus presented as not only a legitimate, but also the unquestionable, source of direct knowledge of the past.

Actors from Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Pristina have had different experiences, but they also recollect the same historical events from different angles. Although this is already evident from individual scenes, Spahić additionally underlines it with the montage of different recollections about the same event. The bombing of Belgrade in 1999 is retold by Tamara Krcunović from Belgrade and Alban Ukaj from Pristina. Actors interchange in narrating their stories—while Tamara is overwhelmed and panicking, experiencing a military danger for the first time, Alban’s family is warily celebrating the bombing of the opposite side by opening a bottle of Skenderbeg brandy. In the end, they both end up in the bomb shelter. Storytellers question the details of each other’s stories, jumping into the roles of the stories’ supporting characters, and allowing the occasional overlap of the experience, as when Tamara interrupts Alban’s story, shouting in panic, “I do not want to die!” and Alban briefly acknowledges her fear with a comment: “[we felt] more or less the same.” Alban’s and Tamara’s stories differ from the dominant national narrations of the Yugoslav conflict that are based on the notion of innocent victims and evil perpetrators, enemies and defenders of the nation. Still, Alban’s and Tamara’s stories are not presented as identical: it is noted that the fear might be the same, but the events experienced, the consequences of those events, and the position of the storyteller are not. After two weeks of hiding, Tamara exits the shelter, concluding that she overestimated the danger, while Alban’s family is forced by armed men to flee its home.

The fact that Hypermnesia juxtaposes testimonies from actors from Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Pristina creates a special kind of narrative; Portmann calls it multidirectional memory in Rothberg’s sense, as it does not superimpose one story onto the other but allows them to meet. ²⁵ Rothberg’s proposes that memories of different historical events are not necessary competitive, but are complementing each other and working in synergy; for example, awareness of Holocaust can increase understanding of another event, such as consequences of American racism. ²⁶ On the other hand, Hypermnesia centers on the same historical period, but retold in diverse ways. Thus, I would rather call it a multi-perspective memory narrative. Additionally, it includes not only different war experiences and political interpretations but also mixes war traumas with typical teenage stories of hating your parents and falling in love. Hypermnesia allows different expressions of pain and suffering to meet, not comparing them, evaluating them, or imposing a hierarchy among them. Maja Izetbegović talks about the bombing in her Sarajevo neighborhood and observing the dead bodies of her childhood friends. Tamara Krcunović tells about her abortion and problems with obesity. Jelena Ćuruvija remembers the bullying she experienced because of her Serbian nationality at the international school in the Netherlands. This multiperspective memory narrative strongly diverges from the dominant national narration and disturbs its rhetorical pattern. The situation in which different nationals talk from the position of victim and about different kinds of suffering breaks the pattern in which there is only a (national) victim and a (national) perpetrator.

Both performances were produced in Belgrade but traveled throughout the post-Yugoslav region. Born in YU visited Maribor and Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Zagreb (Croatia), while Hypermnesia traveled to Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Pristina (Kosovo). In all of these places they were met with vibrant excitement and affective reactions from the public, including excited clapping during or between the scenes, sounds, loud and standing ovations, and other signs of approval and emotional identification, as was noted by the media and critics. This is especially significant considering that the performances traveled to the countries that were involved in the Yugoslav conflict and have significantly different interpretations of the breakup. When Born in YU—produced in Serbia—visited Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, the atmosphere in Zagreb’s Youth Theater was described as “tense.” This is not surprising considering that, in each other’s national narratives, the two nations play the role of perpetrators and that Yugoslavia is portrayed rather negatively in authoritative discourses in Croatia. Still, the tension was followed by relief, open approval, and long applause in the audience. ²⁷ In all the mentioned cases, it was noted that the audience recognized itself in the stories told on stage and identified with the performers. We should add that plays were performed in capital cities, often in big institutions that have a tradition of experimental theater and/or are aligned with left-liberal values and take an anti-nationalist stance. Based on that, we can suppose that theatergoers shared similar values and a similar background. For example, when Hypermnesia performed in the National Theater in Pristina, the event was sponsored by its co-producer, the Heartefact fund, an American fund for the development of civil society, and a Swiss embassy in Kosovo, ²⁸ which again points to the possibility that the audience represented a specific part of urban Kosovar society.

Considering that performers and spectators made a specific part of society—urban, middle-class, or liberal—we should also understand their memories in connection with their social interests and self-understandings. Memories of Yugoslav supranational or multicultural identity could be connected to traditional class binaries in Yugoslavia, as liberal cultural circles tend to delegate nationalism and responsibility for the breakup to lower classes, imagining them as primitive and backward. ²⁹ On the other side, longing for Yugoslav “cosmopolitanism” was also explained as longing for the social space that enabled privileged position for urban cultural and intellectual professionals. ³⁰ Yearning for Yugoslav “structure of feeling” could thus be interpreted as both yearning for lost privilege and as an attempt of the previous cultural elite to preserve positive self-identification. This could be connected to an episode when Hypermnesia performed in Vranje, a town in south Serbia; it was not met with approval and was performed in an unusually uncomfortable atmosphere. ³¹ Spectators in Vranje, unlike those in urban centers, obviously did not recognize themselves in stories shared on stage. With this I do not want to reduce these stagings to middle-class self-identification, but rather to point to the complexity of meanings inscribed in these practices. They not only are a critique of current nationalism but also belong to wider trajectories of class identification.

Lived Experience as Theatrical Construction

Precisely the issues mentioned above—responsibility and rejection of victimhood—are the focus of Oliver Frljić’s Damned Be the Traitor to His Homeland! (Traitor), produced in Slovenia’s Mladinsko Theater. Traitor’s motifs especially resemble those in Born in YU, as the ensemble consists of actors from different generations living in one city, Ljubljana, Slovenia, thus sharing certain representative experiences of pre-war and post-war reality. The Yugoslav anthem appears in both plays, as does a scene of generational conflict—a young performer curses his elders, rejecting their obsession with Yugoslavia (Raša Vujanović [1985] in Born in YU, and Uroš Kaurin [1984] in Traitor). In both plays there are also scenes parodying the nationalist discourse with playful singing or rhythmic chanting of national slurs and slogans. But in spite of these meeting points, Traitor offers quite a different picture in its relationship to the representation of memory, in its staging of lived experience, and in the position of its performers.

The beginning of Traitor—whose title is the last line of the Yugoslav anthem—and the opening of Born in YU, both combine the anthem and the actors presenting themselves. ⁴² Right from the beginning, Frljić subverts the notions of “authenticity” and “honesty” that underline the previous performances. The play opens with a dimly lit stage, actors lying down, each holding an instrument and slowly performing a melancholic melody. Immediately after this scene, the first verse of the Yugoslav anthem is heard. It is performed in a nonstandard rock version and interrupted by actors who enter the stage, present themselves, and leave. They tell their biographies in the form of obituaries, fusing the factual with the fictional, adding bizarre details from their lives, exaggerating their “achievements” and awards, adding gruesome and grotesque details of their imagined deaths. At the first run in Ljubljana, there was laughter and amusement, spectators recognizing the play between the “real” and the fictional and bizarre. Frljić thus disturbs the notion of a direct connection between off-stage personas and their on-stage presence. The notion of “truthfulness” and recognizing and connecting between audience and spectators, celebrated in Born in YU and in Hypermnesia, is here disturbed, also by the lack of clear signs of what to expect from the performance. Frljić has a reputation as one of the politically most provocative directors in the post-Yugoslav region, and the Mladinsko Theater is known for its experimental and avant-garde approach. Before the first run, there were no sentimental proclamations of post-Yugoslav unity, as was the case in the staging of Born in YU. Even the performance’s title seems to accuse a “Traitor” and symbolically divides rather than unites. It is no surprise that no one even thinks about standing up during the anthem.

During the show, Frljić uses additional tactics to break the connection between reality and stage, testimony and authenticity, “lived experience” and performance. The trademark of the show is constant shooting, which, on the one hand, signifies the saturation of dead bodies in the post-Yugoslav imaginary, while on the other hand reveals the mechanism of theatrical representation. Performers enact their “mortal fall” and immediately stand up again, breaking the theatrical illusion and underlining the fictional aspect of the theatrical situation. Frljić and his dramaturges Šeparović and Toporišič wrote extensively on this matter:

This performance attempts, through the inflation of death, through the incessant repetition of the unrepeatable, to emphasize a theatre mechanism that always remains a representation of a certain outside reality. With its compulsive attempts to stage collective death, this performance challenges the theatrical representation of death, as well as the idea of theatre representation itself. ⁴³

Testimony as a genre that includes suffering and inscribed notions of truthfulness is disturbed here as well. The ensemble is narrating “what they did on the day when Tito died”—the massive crying, bewilderment, and shock that actually happened upon Tito’s death in 1980 makes this a known memory trope that has been repeated and retold as a part of post-Yugoslav collective mythography. While narrating their own stories, performers take off their clothes, embodying the metaphor of “revealing,” start crying, and finally narrate where they were at that moment. But their testimony is marked by exaggerated sorrow, tears, and sobs—they overdo it, ironize it, and disturb the notions of “sincerity” and “believability.”

While Frljić states that “theater lies,” the director of Born in YU, Mustafić, says that his play is based in “lived experience” and biographies, and Spahić uses archival material to underline that her play is rooted in reality. In post-Yugoslav studies, there is a notion that the historical experience of living people should not be ignored but taken as an authentic source of information about the Yugoslav period. ⁴⁴ Following this debate, we could interpret that Frljić is framing Yugoslav experience as fictional and unreliable, while Mustafić and Spahić present it as factual, real, lived experience. Frljić would thus merge with the authoritative discourse and its rejection of lived experience and memories of everyday life, while Mustafić and Spahić would appear to embrace them. I propose a more nuanced interpretation: different staging practices are not (only) about presenting lived experience as factual or fictional but also about the “nature” of theatrical representation. While Born in YU and Hypermnesia do not raise the question of testimonies being constructed through the theatrical process, Traitor does. Its starting point is that every theatrical representation is a construct, which does not mean that experiences used in devised theater are not honest and authentic. Quite the contrary, no matter the authenticity of the remembered experience, the staging of that experience is always (also) a theatrical construction. The performers in Born in YU and Hypermnesia challenge the reliability of their memories; they openly admit that they do not remember certain details, but they never discuss the fact that their recollections, flawed or not, have been taken out of the context of their personal biographies and constructed to fit the dramaturgy and the wider frame of performance. They have been edited and adapted, formed, transformed, and mediated for the stage—they have been (re)created as a certain type of theatrical representation. This is where Traitor differs from the previous plays, as it makes clear that every experience and memory is mediated in the moment it is set on stage and becomes part of a theatrical performance.

Traitor also openly evokes sentimentality and nostalgia, but always in order to question and overturn them. Sites of pleasure, especially popular culture, music, and symbols, simultaneously appear as places of conflict, oppression, and struggle, as they are interrupted with violence, brutalism, irony, and grotesquery. The “recognition” of the spectators, their emotional involvement, and their identification with the performers’ stories are thus constantly disturbed by abrupt changes in the mode and atmosphere of performance. In one of the scenes, actors are performing a “fashion show”: a stylized catwalk with performers dressed only in national flags, some holding knives, accompanied by the catchy popular song “Yugoslav girl”—this attractive scene that could pull some nostalgic heartstrings is disturbed by shooting, shouting, and insulting the audience. In another scene, actors overcome their national differences by joking, hugging, and singing one of the greatest Yugoslav hits, the melancholic love song Bila je tako lijepa (an adaptation of the French ballad Elle etait si jolie)—but the scene is interrupted again with radical violence, the killing, beating, and raping of national “traitors,” still accompanied by the gentle ballad.

The difference from the other performances is the position of the performers—they are cast in the role of antagonists, researching their own compliance with the system, even if their “crimes” are not autobiographical but (collectively) imagined. Simultaneously, they are inviting or pushing the audience to recognize themselves in the same role. First, actors vivisect private relations within their own ensemble, mentioning mutual resentments, which quickly leads them to (fictional?) hate speech and national slurs, showing the operational logic of nationalistic discourse and scapegoating that turns personal resentments into nationalist ones. By mixing the factual and the fictional, they inspect their own nationalist tendencies, pushing their everyday situations to the edge and into the realm of fiction. ⁴⁵ Second, there is the recurring scene of attacking the audience, a nod to Handke’s “Insulting the Audience” (1966): Primož Bezjak addresses the (Slovenian) audience in Serbian, spits national slurs, and accuses the Slovenian public of provoking the Yugoslav breakup and of hypocritically distancing themselves from the nationalistic violence they originally helped to inflame. For the purposes of performing in other countries, this monologue is always changed to attack the specific audience and “its” national myths: in Rijeka, Croatia, Bezjak asks the audience about the killing of Serbs in Croatia; in Novi Sad, Serbia, he makes fun of Serbia losing every war it started; and in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, he even attacks the memory of the siege and makes fun of the miserable post-siege reality: “No electricity, no water, no heating. But you were on television! Now everyone knows where Bosnia is! Wanna enter Europe? You know when? Never!”

If victimhood and loss are positions that enable spectators to recognize themselves, this performance has no intention of triggering a feeling of understanding and “being on the same page” as the audience. Thus, Traitor did not make the audience feel good; it caused controversies everywhere it was performed. The media reported on the uncomfortable atmosphere and reactions from the audience, especially during Bezjak’s monologue: in Rijeka, someone cursed the performers, ⁴⁶ while in Sarajevo the audience angrily started to answer the accusations. ⁴⁷ On the other hand, Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian criticism was very positive and celebratory, ⁴⁸ while even reserved critics ⁴⁹ highly valued the attempt to talk about nationalism, responsibility, and personal role in the breakup of Yugoslavia.

The most mixed reactions came from Slovenia, where Traitor was produced. Reactions ranged from approval and tears ⁵⁰ to “boredom,” disapproval, and even disgust, especially in two unusually fierce negative reviews, written by established and renowned critics. ⁵¹ They dismissed the show as a commercialized, cheap copy of political theater that was already present in the eighties. An analysis of the theatrical form of Traitor and of political theater in the eighties shows that these are two different theater modes, ⁵² which indicates that Traitor was uncritically belittled and rejected instead of being analyzed. Negative criticism focused on Frljić’s portrayal of Slovenian nationalism. While it is certainly possible to agree that the performance of direct and violent national confrontation unfortunately fails to pinpoint neuralgic spots of nationalism in Slovenia, which is performed in a “softer” and indirect manner by legal and bureaucratic means, ⁵³ it is interesting to observe that critics fiercely dismissed any possibility of Slovenian nationalism. Some of them accused the performance of uncritical nostalgia for a communist dictator and the “totalitarian regime” ⁵⁴ or even decisively claimed that Slovenia has no attachment to national symbols and that national mobbing does not exist; that Frljić is projecting problems of his own background and that Slovenia cannot be compared to other post-Yugoslav spaces. ⁵⁵ On the other hand, younger critics unanimously and enthusiastically supported the show, but concentrated on its formal characteristics, while being vague about its topic. ⁵⁶ There is almost no mention that Traitor deals with Slovenia’s responsibility for the Yugoslav dissolution—information that was immediately picked up and underlined by Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian criticism. Traitor polarized views, implying spectators’ compliance in nationalistic breakup of Yugoslavia. Although part of the audience was affirmative, it seemed that any further discussion was blocked by a highly antagonistic interpretation of the performance and an evocation of national feelings.

Is There a Memory of Socialism Beyond Culture and Everyday Life?

Post-Yugoslav theater practices that attempted to widen and diversify the cultural memory of socialism can be seen as a part of the wider process of the gradual reevaluation of socialist life in post-socialist Europe, mostly in the field of culture and arts. As noted by Georgescu, ⁵⁷ this trend marks the shift from political oppression, victimhood, and redistribution to culture, everyday experiences, and intimate recollections, while actors base their authority on remembered personal experience. The same can be traced in post-Yugoslav devised theater, whose main intervention is bringing attention to personal recollections and lived experience—which are ignored in the dominant memory discourse—and treating them as a legitimate source of insight into the past. However, these theater performances also constructed their staged stories as authentic, unmediated sources of past experience—which, possibly unintentionally, expresses a tendency to fix a certain story as an exclusive version of the past. The two plays I analyzed here, Born in YU and Hypermnesia, used several techniques to construct their performances and staged testimonies as authentic, unmediated memory transferred directly to the stage. They also spoke from the position of victimhood, which strengthened the perceived believability of their performance. This had an important role in communicating with the audience, which responded enthusiastically, invested its trust, and identified with stories told on stage. Additionally, building on the concept of “normal life,” they breached the dichotomy between supporters and opponents of the system, state ideology and private lives—showing that state practices opened a space for meaningful everyday life that was not a mere reflection of ideological discourse. On the other hand, Traitor insisted on dealing with personal responsibility for the negative consequences of Yugoslav breakup. In this perspective, everyday life is brought back as the place of ideological battle where everyone needs to trace their own responsibility. Traitor avoided both the illusion of “authenticity” and the position of victimhood, with the result that the audience did not identify with the performance; this created several conflicts with the audience and critics. My analysis has shown that nontraumatic, positive memories of socialist everyday life appeared more acceptable if told from the position of victims and “authentic” witnesses. This points to the question of testimony as a specific genre that merges the notions of victimhood and authenticity and constructs certain modes of performances and narrations as more “believable” and “acceptable” than others.

These memories of and testimonies from everyday life in socialism also belong to a specific social group. Performances were produced by prominent theatrical institutions in capital cities, mostly addressing urban viewership. All these theaters are connected with Yugoslav avant-garde and alternative artistic movements (Mladinsko Theater and Bitef Theater) or Yugoslav cultural ideology (Yugoslav Drama Theater), thus expressing a certain continuity with the Yugoslav legacy. They are also connected with certain political values: antinationalism and a left-liberal stance. The profile of these theaters loosely describes the profile of the performers and their audience, who at least to a certain extent share the mentioned historical legacies and political attitudes—which are not included in the post-Yugoslav authoritative memory discourse based on a national identification and a clear separation from Yugoslav legacy and ideology. So, on the one hand, memories in these performances represent a certain social group, and could be connected to lost privileges and positive self-identification of this group. On the other hand, these performances reached further and attracted a wider range of viewership that reacted emotionally and identified with stories told on stage, which indicates that experiences of everyday life in socialism cannot be so narrowly ascribed to an urban audience with a specific political profile.

Memory interventions in the plays analyzed here were often based on emotional remembrance of everyday life and popular culture; as such, they often balanced between longing and an ironic, critical stance. Special attention was brought to multinational and supranational experiences, which shaped everyday life in Yugoslavia. Although everyday experiences cannot be totally and absolutely divorced from the state mechanisms that underpinned them—just as school experiences cannot be totally separated from state education system—these performances did not leave the realm of private and intimate memories and did not tackle questions connected to Yugoslavia’s state system, institutions, ideas, and ideology. The dominant representation of the Yugoslav state as totalitarian was thus not challenged, but rather sidestepped. We can conclude that these performances widened the existing memory frame, as they included diversified voices and experiences and opened a space for remembrance of everyday culture. Nevertheless, they did not directly engage with the dominant memory paradigm or offer an alternative one.

Although the performances did not leave the realm of culture, the social debate went a step further. The most vivid discussion developed around Born in YU when the weekly Vreme and the political foundation Friedrich Ebert Stiftung invited six left-liberal intellectuals from Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia ⁵⁸ to attend a round table on the Yugoslav legacy; later they published the transcript as a special e-publication. ⁵⁹ The concept of common and intertwined cultural experiences, memories, and identity was repeated, but a new layer was added: the memory of specific social, educational, and working conditions during Yugoslav socialism. Memories of social welfare, self-management, anti-fascist values, and the ethos of equality were articulated, whether in the form of discussion or of an anecdote, as writer Ante Tomić stated: “Socialism taught us that white and blue collars can live next door to each other.” ⁶⁰ Theater scholar Jestrović calls this type of memory “Yugoslavia as political attitude,” ⁶¹ citing another writer, Muharem Bazdulj, who attended the round table and talked about reclaiming the political dimensions of the Yugoslav legacy in order to face current social conditions. ⁶²

This is a rare example of a public, direct, and articulate challenge to the dominant memory of socialism as totalitarianism, while an alternative view of socialism and socialist achievements is offered. On the other hand, the gathered intellectuals represented a narrow circle from a likeminded intellectual elite—a fact that was critically self-reflected during the debate. Thus, the reach of this discursive intervention was unclear, especially as the political and social dimensions of the memory of Yugoslavia are still rarely found on post-Yugoslav stages. On the contrary, the focus on longing for the lost world of popular and everyday culture remains a predominant memory model for remembering Yugoslavia in theater, confirmed by several later plays, such as How We Survived (Kako smo preživjeli) (2014) by the Zagreb Youth Theater and Comrades, I Am Still Not Ashamed of My Communist Past (Drugovi, ja se ni sada ne stidim svoje komunističke prošlosti) (2016) by Bitef Theater. ⁶³ In recent years, there have been a few attempts in theater to focus on the Yugoslav industrial legacy and its subsequent decay, as well as on the Yugoslav ideology of workers and workers’ rights, which are, needless to say, in sharp contrast with present working conditions. ⁶⁴ It remains to be seen whether there will be a new wave of memory focusing on working and social conditions in the previous social system. Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with the director Dino Mustafić, who said he would never stage a performance such as Born in YU today. Asked why, he answered that the question of identity is something his generation needed to answer at the time of that performance. Today, he continued, we already live in a different social moment, addressing different questions, while Yugoslavia is remembered by a generation born after the breakup. It remains to be seen whether this generation will produce different memory interventions on post-Yugoslav stages.