The Suspense of the Image and Its Reintroduction: Documentary and Democratic Trends in Ukrainian Theater of Revolution and War, 2014-Present

• In Event: Images of Transition in Post-Soviet Visual and Narrative Culture

Abstract

The definitive and irretrievable end of socio-realism and the demise of (national) modernism and postmodernism in many artistic fields of the post-Soviet space in the course of the 1990s led to a kind of zero point in the artistic description of the world: a weariness and mistrust of ontological, narrative and visual languages, which not least at the end of the 1990s fell victim, if not to economic and anti-democratic traps, then often to political reinstrumentalization. Theater and the performative arts, which by virtue of their immediacy of mediation and their particular creation of presence as collective self-experiences, self-affirmations and self-questionings, reacted to this ontological and narrative-visual fatigue with a turn to the unmediated: to documentarism, to verbatim, to a new sincerity. The article examines developments in Ukrainian post-Soviet theater, which, at the latest since the Maidan and then the small and large-scale wars, has been concerned with the destruction of the (narrative, discursive and artistic) image as a symbol that has so often served manipulation and propaganda. However, a return to a form of performative image or symbol will also be examined, which is beginning to play a new essential role, especially in performative projects in revolutionary and warlike contexts, in mass spectacles as well as in theatrical spaces conceived as new forums of a democratic society.

Author

• Anna Hodel, U of Basel (Switzerland)