Notes Part I Belgrade: The City of Spectacle 1. When the protest was over, Ognjenovic´, a distinguished theatre director and playwright, was forced by the authorities to resign from the position of Artistic Director of the National Theatre. By the mid-1990s, the National Theatre was tightly controlled by cultural officials of Miloševic´’s regime, prompting a few members of the ensemble to leave the theatre in protest. In post-Miloševic´ years, Ognjenovic´ became Serbia’s ambassador to Denmark. 2. For lyrics of the Patti Smith song, go to: http://www.metrolyrics.com/people- have-the-power-lyrics-patti-smith.html 3. After the events of 5 October 2000, when Miloševic´ was overthrown, Lecˇic´ became Minister of Culture in the newly formed Serbian Government. He remained Minister of Culture for the next three years. 4. OTPOR was a political organization (of mostly students) active from 1998, whose agenda was the political struggle for democracy against the regime of Slobodan Miloševic´. Occasionally, members of OTPOR were arrested for their political activities. Nowadays, OTPOR is no loner an active organization and some of its prominent members have become leading figures of the political establishment in Serbia. 5. Zoran Djindjic´ was one of the most prominent figures of the Serbian politi- cal opposition to Miloševic´. He became Prime Minister of Serbia in 2001. In March of 2003, Djindjic´ was assassinated by a former paramilitary soldier with links to organized crime. 1 City-as-Action 1. See Dubravka Kneževic´’s ‘Marked in Red Ink’, an article that deals with the anti-regime protests in Serbia that opens with an analogy to the French Revolution. 2. Although students had assumed control of the buildings, it was not possible to fully prevent the infiltration of regime supporters. On more than one occasion, mature ‘students’, whom nobody had seen before, tried to take the upper hand in decision-making. The infiltration of groups and institutions considered subversive, under the pretence of like-mindedness and camara- derie, was one of communism’s tried and true tactics. 3. See S. Jestrovic, ‘Theatricalization of Politics/Politicization of Theatre’, Canadian Theatre Review, no 103. University of Texas Press, 2000: 42–7. 4. This fear was not entirely unfounded. After all, in the protests in 1991 two people were killed, while a number of others was beaten and arrested. In the course of the Miloševic´ regime, journalist Dušan Reljic´ was kidnapped and held for questioning at an undisclosed location for several days; Slavko C´ uruvija, editor of the newspaper Telgraf, was gunned down; Miloševic´’s 213 214 Notes mentor turn political opponent was found dead after missing for a few years; and so on. Numbers of journalists and other prominent public fig- ures that openly expressed their views against Miloševic´ received threats. Nevertheless, disturbing as this account of the regime’s violence was, for over ten years internal retributions of this kind had been relatively limited in numbers, serving perhaps more as a warning than as a systematic way of eliminating oppositional voices. Miloševic´’s regime appropriated a tactic practised in the later years of Tito’s Yugoslavia, where dissidents were not officially allowed, but they were not persecuted either. Miloševic´’s regime went one small step further in this strategy; it did not so much repress oppositional voices, as simply ignore them. To openly oppress the opposi- tion would only have made it stronger; to ignore it, to deny it, to cut all its outlets and treat it as non-existent was a much more efficient way of disempowerment. 5. The work of this company has been closely related to the city itself , which often emerged as both a performance site and a protagonist. For instance, the first performance of DAH was based on Brecht’s poetry and it took place in Knez Mihailova Street in 1991. It both coincided with the disintegration of Yugoslavia and was a reaction to the ensuing bloodbath in the Balkans. The company has since devised numerous projectsm often using streets and found spaces as artistic outlets to actively engage and confront Serbian cultural and political reality. Remaining outside the cultural establishment, DAH has created performances that in one way or another explore the role of art ‘in dark times’ as the title of Brecht’s poem has it. See also Brecht, Bad Time for Poetry: Was it? Is It?. 6. Nikola Džafo, Led Art: 1993–2003 Dokumenti Vremena. Novi Sad: Multimedija Centar Led Art, 2004. 7. Independent Radio B92 was the chief voice of Serbian resistance to Miloševic´’s regime. 8. The Venetian gondola, depicted in Nikola Džafo’s sculpture, used to be a status symbol representing the rise of the working class to lower middle class in the 1960s, when the borders of Tito’s Yugoslavia opened to the West and shopping trips to Trieste became common. The Venetian gondola, usu- ally displayed on the shelf in the living room, was the main souvenir from these trips – testimony of the first encounter between communist ideals and Western consumerism, as well as a memento of everyday life in Tito’s Yugoslavia. 9. Author Jovan Cˇ ekic´. 10. Author Milorad Cveticˇanin. 11. Turbo-folk is a type of commercial music played in Serbia and other parts of the Balkans. It mixes traditional folk tunes with electronic instruments, usually set to sentimental lyrics. It became very popular in the early nineties and is associated with bad taste, kitsch, provincialism and lack of political consciousness. 12. In 2000, Sara Vidal put together a monograph dedicated to the Bivouac performance. 13. Quoted from the article ‘Operacija Puz’ (‘Operation Snail’), by B. Batic published in the Serbian weekly magazine NIN, 10 January 1997, pp. 16–17. Notes 215 2 At the Confluence of Utopia and Seduction 1. It is important to note that the repertoire of leading Serbian theatres in the 1980s was rather eclectic and, although the obsession with national identity and history was evident, shows with very different thematic and aesthetic concerns were produced alongside one another. For that reason, theatre critic Ksenija Radulovic´, analysing the repertoire of the 1980s, argues that the out- burst of Serbian national sentiment in theatres may not have been a result of a premeditated, strategic cultural policy with the tendency to foreground national identity and assert a univocal national perspective. See Ksenija Radulovic´, ‘Nacionalni resentiman na sceni’ [‘National sentiment on stage’], Teatron, no. 118, [Belgrade] 2002: 1–16. 2. The show was directed by Arsenije Jovanovic´, an established practitioner, whose work has not normally been related to national themes and traditional staging. Shortly after this performance, he turned to the exploration of the performance of sound. 3. Ironically, this view was not shared by other republics in the Yugoslavian Federation. Quite the contrary, the neighbouring republics felt dominated by Serbia. Yet under its shadow and that of Tito’s Yugoslavia, they had also started to rediscover their own suppressed national sentiments. 4. I am grateful to Janelle Reinlet for pointing out to me the analogy between the improvisational scenario of The Battle of Kolubara and the ‘Dominus vobi- scum’ (‘The Lord be with you’) salutation followed by the ‘Et cum spiritu tuo’ (‘And with your spirit’). 5. In her article, ‘Invitation to the Battle: Reception of the ‘patriotic’ repertoire from the eighties’ (‘Poziv na bitku: recepcija ‘patriotskog’ repertoara osamdesetih’ Teatron), Slavica Vucˇkovic´ gives a detailed account of the mixed critical response to the Battle of Kolubara. 6. The title ‘the most RESISTANT actor’ is a word-play with the name of the orga- nization OTPOR, since the word ‘otpor’ means ‘resistant’ in Serbo-Croatian. 7. See: http://www.vekoltours.com/online/index.php?option=com_content& task=view&id=95&Itemid=207&lang=EN 8. See: http://www.globus.com.hr/Clanak.aspx?BrojID=307&ClanakID=8519& Stranica=4 3 Epilogue: Endemic Geopathologies 1. In writing that the regime ‘drove us out of Belgrade’, I deliberately refer to the city rather than to the country for two reasons. Firstly, because there is no single name for the country that would be fully accurate. I can no longer call the country Yugoslavia, since it has disintegrated, nor can I identify Serbia as my place of origin. For a long time, I was able to refer to my place of origin only through negation, by naming what it no longer was (i.e., ‘ex-Yugoslavia’ or ‘the former-Yugoslavia’). The second reason that I refer to the city rather than to the State is to emphasize my own Belgrade-centredness, which later in this section I acknowledge to be a problematic aspect of Serbian civic resistance. 2. Michael Warner understands publics and counter-publics as processes gener- ated through discursive practices (Publics and Counter-Publics. New York: Zone 216 Notes Books, 2002, p. 67). According to Warner, publics and counter-publics are particular and exclusive processes rather than fixed entities. 3. Klub svetskih putnika is still in business and because of its unusual setting and live-music it is often featured on tourist websites. 4. This dynamics between public and private spaces of Belgrade confirms Warner’s claim of private space as a myth, because it is effectively conditioned and shaped in relation to public spaces. 5. Cˇ avke was the legendary drummer of the famous Serbian rock band, Elektricˇni orgazam. When the war broke and Yugoslavia’s downfall began, Cˇ avke took part in an anti-war project that gathered a few leading local musicians. The project is best known for its anti-war song, Rimtu-ti-tuki. Soon after the filming of Ghetto, Cˇ avke emigrated to Australia where he lived until his premature death in 1997.