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1. This is a kind of performance-lecture, an hour and a half long
play about a play-in-the-making. The audience will have the
opportunity, as if in a painter’s studio, to see out of what and how
a play comes into being – a play about that most important topic,
the crime of genocide, whose dark lingering shadow, twenty-four
years long now, so forcefully eclipses this society that it cannot
constitute itself fully until it casts it aside from its very being.
2. Theatre is actualized, represented imagination; imagination
transformed into life, albeit experimentally, on a small scale, on a
theatre stage, in an amphitheatre, but it is also the kernel of a
possible new life of a society. Therefore, theatre can be the
teacher of the future. In its denial that the mass crime in
Srebrenica constitutes genocide, the Republic of Serbia is annulling
itself as a republic. Why is the Republic of Serbia in denial of the
obvious genocide in Srebrenica – a genocide that was initially a
conceptual project of the cultural elite, and only subsequently
implemented as a military-political project of the Milosevic regime?
Only so that the instigators of the genocide could remain to this
very day the most esteemed members of the cultural and political
elite, and only to have innocent citizens bear on their shoulders
the burden of genocide, paying for someone else’s wrongdoing by
self-inflicted shame and guilt.
3. The priests of the Srebrenica genocide and ethnic cleansing still
make up the same cultural elite in Serbia that determines state
policy towards and the cultural evaluation of those crimes, holding
citizens hostage by imposing the ideological, nationalistic illusion
that by admitting to genocide one will make the entire Serbian
nation guilty. Quite the contrary, admitting to the fact of genocide
in Srebrenica means to distance oneself from it. As long as the
innocent bear the false guilt for a mass crime perpetrated by a
specific regime on their conscience – a crime first committed in the
imagination by its cultural elite which is still in place today –
there will be no public space or time for free imagination or the
freedom of the individual in Serbia.
4. Human beings are, above all, beings of imagination, and this
trait drastically distinguishes them from the animal world. Human
beings are the ones who can in spirit, in imagination, first
transcend the confines of the given, and then, in accordance with
their vision, change it. Theatre is a public representation of
imagination intervening in reality; and this envisioning of the
overcoming of limits of the given is the essence of dramaturgy.
5. Just as in the play “Vox Dei – Civil Disobedience” I tried to
bring to justice the current Serbian government and its sitting
president and to hold them accountable before the appropriate laws
of the republic for the demonstrable transgressions they have
committed against it, and for which society as a whole is as yet
incapable (witness the persistent silence surrounding that play), so
too in the play on Srebrenica I wish to do what society as a whole,
to its own detriment, cannot as yet bring itself to do.
6. It bears repeating that the essence of a republic is to stand on
the side of victims who not necessarily have to be its own citizens,
and against perpetrators who are its citizens. The very essence of
Serbia as a republic could come to fruition if it would proclaim
Srebrenica Genocide Day as its own day of mourning. This would
transform the memory of genocide into a remembrance of solidarity,
compassion, brotherhood and freedom, at the same time abolishing the
sense of guilt. By admitting to genocide committed on its behalf by
those it condemns as its own enemies, a republic finds its own
meaning and becomes the space of freedom for its own citizens. I
believe that a society can best comprehend and feel the capacity for
its own freedom through theatre.
7. To get the audience to act, or to transform the audience into a
(critical) public, this is the objective of the art of theatre. What
I am interested in here, and what otherwise constitutes a first rate
social and aesthetic task, is to - starting first with the
Introduction to the play, and then continuing next year with the
play “Srebrenica. When We the Dead Rise” itself - try and prevent
future mass crimes. For new crimes of old, familiar proportions will
be committed in this region again if we do not extinguish their
cultural, inspirational fountainhead. The dominant cultural elite is
still fanning the flames of the nationalistic culture of hate, of
ethnic cleansing and of genocide – equally today as it did under
Milosevic’s regime on behalf of that regime. They are still the same
people, sham people who generate real crimes.
8. By and large the perpetrators of the crimes have been convicted.
So too have the organizers. Even the instigators have been
convicted. But the academics of the crimes, the poets and priests of
genocide, are still, even today, the most esteemed people of this
society. It is imperative that they be called out, marked and
punished, so that the just and righteous could live proud and free.
Let us begin this task with theatre, namely, let us begin from
theatre! |
