Staging the Lived Experience and Socialist Everyday Life in Post-Yugoslav Theater
Staging the Lived Experience and Socialist Everyday Life in Post-Yugoslav Theater

Summary/Abstract: Authoritative models of remembering Yugoslavia tend to exclude experiences of living people while often reproducing the memory trope of “totalitarian legacy.” Several theater performances that appeared in 2010 and 2011 challenged these memory models, as they centered on performers’ personal experiences and recollections as legitimate sources of understanding, imagining, and discussing the past. This article investigates how lived experience is (re)constructed in the theater and whether these performances differ from dominant narratives. Reception analysis of selected performances has shown that public and media appear to find affective memories of socialism more acceptable if told from the position of victims and “authentic” witnesses. Performances widened and diversified the cultural memory of socialism and directed attention to positively evaluated experiences of socialist culture and everyday life, such as multicultural and supranational interactions in Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, the dominant representation of Yugoslav state as totalitarian was not challenged, but rather sidestepped. The focus on popular and everyday culture thus remains the predominant memory model for remembering Yugoslavia in theater, which can be seen as a part of wider processes of gradual reevaluation of socialist life in post-socialist Europe.

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