For the purpose of my examination of how literature and art take part in the circulation of significations and representations in the construction of social reality, I concentrate on a specific ...feature that links and unites the work of four contemporary European authors—the inflation of death and violence, or the “overflow of corpses” in their novels, plays, and performances. My first example will be Bosnian-Croatian theatre director Oliver Frljić, his disturbing, shocking performances in which he uses his own personal, wartime, and political traumas to ask universal questions about the boundaries of artistic and social freedom, individual and collective responsibility, tolerance and stereotypes. As the second and third example I will take plays by two (no longer) dramatic writers, Anja Hilling and Simona Semenič—two outstanding representatives of German and Slovene (no longer) dramatic theatre and drama, exploring in their texts a tension between repetition and representation in which the first mechanism undermines and challenges the second and produces a specific poetic or aesthetic device—an effect of
or defamiliarisation (Shklovsky). The third example will consist of the novels by Winfried Georg Sebald, in which the German author uses the device of his wanderings between signs, punctuated by black and white photographs, producing a specific emblematic of a mutation of space and time, in which history and geography cross-fertilise, tracing out paths and weaving networks. Besides examining the contestation of subject positions, I concentrate on the dialectics of art and society, where fluid, uncontainable subjects are constantly pushing the contours. Revising the critical consensus that contemporary art primarily engages with the real, the essay describes how theatre and fiction today navigate the complexities of the discourse as well as social realities; how the discussed artists all share the belief that creative expression must also be destruction. Art has to go beyond what we are and what we can identify through understanding. Thus, art negotiates, inflects discursive circulation of stories, idioms, controversies, testimonies, and pieces of (mis)information in the face of global uncertainties.
The essay takes three examples of the recent Slovene politicized post- or retro-avant-garde big stage events in order to discuss their rhetorics and politics of space. It examines closely to which ...extent they can be interpreted as a contemporary version of rituals referring to the performative spatial signs as representations of the Slovene cultural space’s ever changing late- and post-socialist identity. Performed in some symbolic places within the territory of the capital of Ljubljana (The Republic Square, the biggest cultural and congress centre Cankarjev dom) these big scale events confirm and subvert the cultural identity of the community. They traverse the borderlines within the semiosphere of a cultural capital in which peripheries begin to synthesize new texts and introduce innovative ideas that are foreign and unknown to the centre and that might possibly act as catalysts for change. Using signs from peripheries these artistic events generate new meanings, structures and texts that invade the centre. We can interpret this procedure as an animated, dynamic process of the performance: a spatial machine characterized by parallel passages from real to formalized space, from frontal to circular and multi-centred space. Borders of the semiosphere that are originally used in order to separate and create identities, thus also connect and construct these identities by juxtaposing the own and the alien. By appropriating relations between spatial signs in different historical periods of Ljubljana they culturally present and deconstruct the past and present while using postmodern performative reading of objects of the past and present, intermixing and compounding art/theatre/film/music/literature/ballet/sports models. Thus they radically blur the borderline between real and fictive experience.
The aim of the study was to show the principles of nonverbal communication achieved with clothing by using Roman Jakobson’s linguistic method. As demonstrated and established here, clothes and their ...functions can be translated into verbal and written language. The language of fashion, costume and stage design can be analysed in terms of their function and symbolism. Based on the language function scheme, clothing can be interpreted as the language of communication and as a system. Using purely linguistic methods, examples of various clothing analyses demonstrate the clothing function as a visual sign system, which is equal to the linguistic sign system, language and communication. Different kinds of communication can be achieved through garments, as explained by the examples and discussion selected and described.
The aim of the essay is to throw some additional light on the politics of dissent in the Slovene and Yugoslav theatre of the 20th century. It focuses on the specific Central and East European area of ...non-aligned Yugoslavia as a Second World cultural model in the period of socialism and post-socialism. It thus outlines the alternative culture that emerged after Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948 and continued with neo-avant-gardes and movements of dissent in the postmodern era marked by a severe crisis of self-management socialism. The essay starts from the definitions of the political in the post-dramatic by Hans-Thies Lehmann, and the theatre of opposition or dissidence and theatre of consensus by Valentina Valentini. It outlines the specific character of the Slovene theatre and the ideology of mild socialism that continued to define many aspects of the political within the one-party system of the former Yugoslavia. Thus, it maps a new geography of this specific East European theatre of dissent from the experimental theatre of the 1960's and 1970's until the retro-avant-garde subversive theatre of the Neue Slowenische Kunst.
PDF
