War and Representation: On The Balkan Trilogy by Dušan Jovanović

• In Event: Yugoslav Responsibility II: Taking a Stand: Culture, Commitment, and Critique

Abstract

The central question of this presentation is the relationship between war and its representation on stage and in literature. It takes a close look at three dramatic texts written in the 1990’s known as the Balkan Trilogy by Dušan Jovanović, a renowned Slovenian theater director and playwright. These plays address the war, survival and exile in Yugoslavia by way of a detour through the myths of Antigone and Sisyphus, and with the help of a reference to Bertolt Brecht’s classic anti-war play Mother Courage, a play that itself speaks about the horrors of a recent war through the detour to an older one. What is the purpose of such detours? Why is it necessary to speak about the horrors of a current war through the prism of myth or historical distance? The claim is that it is neither an attempt to domesticate the horror and to offer us some kind of relief from the present trauma, nor a means to confer an air of historical importance to the ostensibly prosaic contemporary events. Instead, the explicit staging of the war trauma is the only way to encounter its radically opaque kernel. Far from alleviating the pain, such stagings allows the community to engage with and begin working through the collective trauma.

Author

• Gregor Moder, U of Ljubljana (Slovenia)