Censorship as World Creation
Censorship as World Creation

Summary/Abstract: In 1971 Nicolae Ceauşescu formulated the new promise of a socialist paradise of abundance and happiness in his (in)famous reform program known as the July Theses. This idealized worldview built around Marxist-Leninist or rather Maoist-Jucheist ideology ignores reality. Propaganda makes theatre, along with the other areas of cultural life, the world creation tool of the socialist Canaan. As a result of this process, theatre may no longer reflect reality, but it should function as a mouthpiece of socialist rhetoric, greatly to the detriment of its own aesthetic criteria. One of the most important means of propaganda is censorship, which is flourishing in this period. Censorship creates through these regulations a false reality, an idealized present and an imaginary, idyllic future for socialism, and through restrictions it tries to oust reality from the stage. These two processes are practically inseparable: showing reality would disturb the image of the conjured dream world.

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