Subversions in the theatre or: Are they serious about it?

Abstract

In the 1980s in Yugoslavia two theatre companies referred directly to historical avant-garde both aesthetically and rhetorically: Scipion Nasice Sisters Theater - founded at the beginning of 1983 in Ljubljana - by reproducing rituals and procedures of the totalitarian regime and by recycling the Slovenian national myth it converses with the softened but still solid state apparatus, and Montažstroj - founded in 1989 - by adopting rituals and procedures of football and music pop culture it corresponds with the society which has taken these phenomena into the service of increasing nationalism. The strategy of imitative exaggeration in the theoretical discourse is defined as a subversive affirmation (Sorokin, Arns), while Žižek explains its intriguing character by the strategy of high-identification (Žižek). It is still found in the script of post-Yugoslav directors who explicitly deal with nationalistic politics and their consequences; hence its efficiency will be discussed with the aid of Hannah Arendt's concept of 'two-in-one'.