Perforations New York 2

Damned be the Traitor of his Homeland. The Deconstruction of the National Ego

At one point, it seems that every culture needs to confront itself with an inner revolt which can help it enter a regeneration process. To postpone it – out of various reasons, such as the lack of courage, the inappropriate context, the lack of spirit of revolt – provokes stagnation, routine, boringness, agony and death. That is symbolical death, of course. Though for a nation that takes huge pride in its cultural values, what can be worse than the extended comma of these values?

We would need for sure – in Romania – such a cold shower directed to the national ego, this mixture of narrow-minded respect for culture and tradition, usually a mimic of respect, seasoned with nationalistic outbreaks that show the true inner mechanisms of the so-called “cultural world” – completely isolated from the real one. This is what I was thinking about getting out from the show of the Slovenian company Mladinsko, Damned be the traitor of his homeland, signed by Oliver Frljic and presented in the frame of the Perforations New York – the festival that was in the general attention here in the last week, in spite of the huge cultural offer of the Big Apple.

The Slovenian show directly attacks a series of dangerous taboos - some general ones and some which are specific to the Balkan cultural space - and it does it in a very upfront way, with the effect of a fist in the stomach. The audience is deeply troubled by this confrontation, especially that it is a permanent part of the show – as a witness, as a partner or as the enemy attacked with insults.

Mladinsko’s is a show that can only be taken personally, especially because of the high content of personal material. Performers, actors of all ages from Mladinsko Theater are the subjects of the show from the very beginning. In the first scene, each of them comes close to the audience and tells a little story about himself using the third person.

Basically, each of them speaks about his/her death and solemnly announces that their entire career and life – awards, honorary mentions – was affected by their work with director Oliver Frljic and especially the wanking scene staged together. This is a scene loaded with irony towards the stagnation in the state theater where nothing happens and the artists take their wages dreaming until death of the unique award they can hope for – Sever Award – and remembering either with proud or with shame of the only moment when they felt alive – the wanking scene.

Other similar scenes follow – ranging from the exacerbated nationalist sentiment, the smoldering suspiciousness between Croatians and Slovenians, the violence that infiltrates in all this geographical area, the professional despise and the denouncing of others as a working method in theater and society. There is the “fashion parade” of the almost naked performers, wearing only the national flag in various combinations, there is also the double meaning dialogue, the menacing of those who are in any way connected to Croatians, the musical scenes meant to spread the tension for a moment only to take the audience by surprise with another more violent intervention. Each moment ends up with one of the actors shooting the others than brutally asking the audience: What the fuck are you looking at? And finally shoots himself in the leg.

The climax of the show is this performer violent discourse including direct accusations addressed to American nation – the one that bombarded the Balkans, the one that permanently tries to “export” democracy at any costs, no matter the part of the world, the one that provoked worldwide financial crises because of which millions of people are suffering. Every phrase begins with “Fuck” and includes a lot of this word variations… the discourse becomes a direct, justified attack towards another kind of nationalistic ego, as dangerous as that of Balkan people. Basically, after a few minutes of this intervention one feels better not to be an American (who knows what could happened if the show would have been played not in the very liberal New York, but somewhere in the middle of America?).

There is also a scene in the show directly dealing with the audience which is abused by the male performers, each of them choosing one spectator to tell him/her what they would do to them in case of a rape. In the end, all performers fire at the audience (even if the bullets used in the show are blank, the effect of these violent acts is still very powerful).

Besides its overtly political content, the show is interesting because its radicalism. It proposes a type of direct dialogue also practiced in different forms by groups like Forced Entertainment and La Carniceria of Rodrigo Garcia. Like these two groups, The Mladinsko group permanently juggles with the limits between real and fictional, adding personal, credible elements, than contradict them and inducing to the audience the feeling that these elements are part of the show’s script. The sliding from complete, open sincerity to the glimpse into the inner mechanisms of the manipulation is a show in itself and is based on the deconstruction of all the rules regarding the relationship between the audience and the performers. This intentional blur of the limits between real and fictional is backed up here by the powerful aggression towards the audience and by a high rate of violence among performers.

Music - consisting in local ballads and folk songs - plays and essential part in the economy of this production, as it is especially chosen to temperate the violent excesses, giving the audience the false impression about what will follow and maintaining a sense of irony for the entire show.

The last scene, even though is the least violent, is the most painful – maybe only for those who come from an area confronted for  a long time with the effects of the terror of denouncing which leaves deep traces in the general way of life and thinking – and asks questions about the basic human values. All the performers are coming in front of the stage and tell their story about the way they confronted each other during rehearsals because of the political content of the show. An older actress wanted to get out of the show, some of her colleagues thought she was right, even if the reasons varied  – another actress wanted to take her part, a fellow actor didn’t want to play alongside her – but the younger actors didn’t understand her arguments at all. One of them asked if it is right not to play your part knowing you will be given your wages no matter what, in a time when so many people don’t know what they are going to eat tomorrow.

Little by little, the discussion – which could be very well a verbatim recording of a real controversy or a completely new written text – brings up to the surface the differences of mentality, between the young people and the old ones, between those who lived all their life in communism and the ones that had to fight their way in the “wild capitalism”. The question that one of the young actors raises at one point remains open: what if the communism they are all talking about, the communism they were fighting against by means of culture is only a piece of cake compared to the wilderness of the capitalism in which young people are trying to find their way nowadays?

A demonstration of anarchic theatre, combined with irony and moments of postmodern relaxation, the show Damned be the traitor of his homeland is by all means a work of its time.

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These being told, I can only underline what I was saying at the beginning of this article: there is a great need in the Romanian society for discussing in artistic forms the problems that troubles the Romanian society – many of them identical with the ones in other cultures. What has happened in time that blocked the critical mechanisms of the Romanian artists and make them become flat, so that there are almost no such reactive works, which are usually a sign of a healthy culture?