To Be Unworthy of National Stage. Women’s Disobedience as Performative Practices
To Be Unworthy of National Stage. Women’s Disobedience as Performative Practices

Summary/Abstract: On August 5, 2015, two dramatizations were played in the public space of a small Croatian city. The scene for the first of them was the theater stage in Rijeka, where five women of different nationalities "presented" their private stories. Second, its climax had at the door of the theater, and members of veteran and war volunteer associations, and supporters of the Armada football club played the main roles. The twentieth anniversary of Operation „Storm” seems to be a meaningful example of the way in which the processes and acts of its commemoration took place in public space: at the theater and streets of the city. The situation of commemoration launched the processes and practices in which social performance became at the same time a creative act that expressed opposition as well as action supporting normative protocols and structures of power. Social dramatizations in Rijeka, both "in" and "in front of" the theater, show that theater is a very important type of public space, which not only exists as a specific place of communication, but it also has a status of conceptual subject with a particular history and separate semantic dimensions. In order to understand the entitled "disobedience”, it is necessary to deal with several essential issues, such as: performance of resistance and obedience, categories of "national theater" and “experts” of everyday life; public space and the right to it; memory and “counter-memory” and relationship between performance and archive.

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