54
UDK 792.02(497.4)
UDK 821.163.6.09-2
DOI 10.51937/Amfiteater-2023-1/54-77
Razprava se ukvarja z izbranimi primeri dekonstrukcij nasprotja med reprezentacijo in 
prezentacijo, značilnimi za postmimetično, od neoavantgarde do postmilenija. Sledi 
avtorjem, ki od šestdesetih let prejšnjega stoletja do danes dekonstruirajo dramsko ter 
izumljajo nove oblike redramatizacij in postdramskega medmedijskega prepleta. Avtorji, 
kot so Peter Handke v Zmerjanju občinstva, skupina Pupilija Ferkeverk v Pupilija, papa 
Pupilo pa Pupilčki, Dušan Jovanović v Spomeniku G in Igrajte tumor v glavi, Milan Jesih 
v Limitah in Grenkih sadežih pravice, Matjaž Zupančič v Hodniku in drugih igrah, Dragan 
Živadinov in njegove ekipe v Obredih poslavljanja, Oliver Frljić v Preklet naj bo izdajalec svoje 
domovine!, Simona Semenič v 1981 ter Žiga Divjak in Katarina Morano v različnih projektih 
– čeprav vztrajno ustvarjajo motnje v fikcijskem besedilnem kozmosu – v gledaliških tekstih 
in predstavah - performansih vzpostavljajo močan proces redramatizacije, intenzivnih 
zapletov in razpletov. Kot da bi hkrati z dekonstrukcijo dramskega vbrizgali v postdramski 
proces uprizarjanja in pisave dramsko in dramatično. Postmimetično tako soobstaja 
s predmimetičnim, »slečenje« reprezentacije drame privede do vzpostavljanja fikcije.
Ključne besede: sodobna slovenska drama in gledališče, Dušan Jovanović, Milan Jesih, 
Matjaž Zupančič, redramatizacija, postmimetična umetnost
 
Tomaž Toporišič je dramaturg in gledališki teoretik, redni profesor za področje 
dramaturgije in scenskih umetnosti ter prodekan na AGRFT Univerze v Ljubljani, kot 
gostujoči predavatelj pa izvaja tudi predmet Sociologija gledališča na Filozofski fakulteti 
Univerze v Ljubljani. Je avtor šestih znanstvenih monografij o sodobnih uprizoritvenih 
umetnostih. Njegovi najnovejši eseji vključujejo: »Novo slovensko gledališče in italijanski 
futurizem«, »(Re)uprizoritev retorike prostora«, »Dekonstrukcijska branja avantgardne 
tradicije v postsocialističnem retroavantgardnem gledališču« in »Povezovanje zgodovinskih 
in retroavantgard skozi odnos periferija-center: primer Trsta, Ljubljane, Zagreba in 
Beograda«. Bil je umetniški vodja in dramaturg Slovenskega mladinskega gledališča ter 
soustanovitelj festivala sodobnih uprizoritvenih umetnosti Exodos. Njegova primarna 
področja raziskovanja so teorija in zgodovina uprizoritvenih praks in literature, predvsem 
interakcije med obema področjema; semiotika kulture in kulturne študije.
Tomaz.Toporisic@agrft.uni-lj.si
55
Dekonstrukcije nasprotja med 
reprezentacijo in prezentacijo od 
neoavantgarde do pomilenija: od Pupilije, 
Jesiha in Jovanovića do Zupančiča, 
Živadinova, Frljića, Semenič in Divjaka
Tomaž Toporišič  
Akademija za gledališče, radio, film in televizijo, Univerza v Ljubljani
I. Uvod: k tekstu rizomu
V razpravi
1
 nas bo zanimalo, kako se je v času od neoavantgarde do postpostdramskega 
manifestirala želja povedati zgodbe. Zanimalo nas bo, kakšne oblike redramatizacije, 
refiguracije in rekarakterizacije gledaliških strojev še vedno producira sodobna 
uprizoritvena paradigma. Pogledali si bomo, kako se avtorice in avtorji intenzivno 
posvečajo refleksiji samih sebe, svojih besedil in kontekstov ter recepcije. Pri tem kot 
avtorice - rapsodke vzpostavljajo neposreden dialog z bralkami in bralci, gledalkami 
in gledalci, svojimi bodočimi interpreti.  
Avtorje in avtorske skupine, o katerih bomo govorili in ki predstavljajo različne gledališke 
generacije, lahko štejemo za nedvomne nosilce postdramskega medmedijskega prepleta. 
S svojimi koncepti, predstavami in teksti dokazujejo, da sta se tudi slovenska dramatika 
in gledališče v najširšem smislu besede podala v vode, ki sta jih razburkala oddaljevanje 
od absolutne drame in dramskega ter dejstvo, da intertekst v različnih primerih, od 
Dušana Jovanovića in Milana Jesiha prek Matjaža Zupančiča, Oliverja Frljića in njegovih 
avtorskih ekip do Simone Semenič, Katarine Morano in Žige Divjaka ter Varje Hrvatin 
strukturira sodobno (ne več) dramsko in gledališko pisanje na način, ki je nehierarhičen, 
hkrati pa z medbesedilnega in medmedijskega vidika izjemno koheziven. 
Na telesih predstav in konceptov ter odzivov nanje bomo preverili, kako je absolutna 
drama, v kateri je dialog osrednja komponenta gradnje, postala zgolj eden od možnih 
1 Zahvala: članek je nastal v okviru raziskovalnega programa Gledališke in medumetnostne raziskave (P6–0376), ki ga 
sofinancira Javna agencija za raziskovalno dejavnost Republike Slovenije iz državnega proračuna.
56 dramskih diskurzov. Tako je rizomska struktura nadomestila tradicionalno razumljeno 
fizičnost tiskanega besedila v obliki knjige. Skupaj s to dekonstrukcijo absolutnega 
so se znotraj tekstualnega v sodobnem gledališču pojavile besedilne strategije, ki ne 
vključujejo več dialoga kot osrednjega načela izražanja.
Sedemdeseta leta prejšnjega stoletja so z avtorji, kot so Lado Kralj, Vlado Šav, 
Dušan Jovanović in Tomaž Kralj, v slovenske uprizoritvene prakse vpeljala sisteme 
neoavantgardnih postopkov, ki so jih povzemali in razvijali predvsem po Jerzyju 
Grotowskem in Richardu Schechnerju. Vsi ti avtorji so prisegali na posebno 
procesualnost, hkrati pa tudi na interakcijo vseh udeleženih. Postmimetično je tako v 
času performativnega obrata soobstajalo s predmimetičnim, »slečenje« reprezentacije 
drame je privedlo do vzpostavljanja fikcije. In kar naenkrat smo gledalci postali priče 
dekonstrukciji nasprotja med reprezentacijo in prezentacijo. Spomnimo se samo 
Pupilije, Spomenika G, Igrajte tumor v glavi, Limit, Zmerjanja občinstva in projektov vse 
do obredov poslavljanja devetdesetih let Dragana Živadinova na prelomu iz dvajsetega v 
enaindvajseto stoletje. Geografija teh premen in fenomenov je zelo razgibana in bogata. 
Gledališke in uprizoritvene prakse najvplivnejših ustvarjalcev od performativnega 
obrata na prelomu iz šestdesetih v sedemdeseta leta prejšnjega stoletja naprej je treba 
razumeti v kontekstu tega, kar Alain Badiou imenuje stoletje nemira, zlasti druge 
polovice dvajsetega stoletja, ki so jo zaznamovali tektonski premiki z napovedmi 
odmika od tega, kar je Derrida v svojem temeljnem delu O gramatologiji opredelil 
kot logocentrizem, prevlado vizualnega in okularocentrizma. Favoriziranje pogleda, 
zaradi katerega je dramsko pisanje izgubilo veliko svoje stabilnosti, a dobilo številne 
nove pobude, ni privedlo le do redefinicije, temveč tudi do konca krize dramskega 
avtorja, ki jo je napovedal Antoine Vitez s svojo znamenito izjavo iz sedemdesetih 
let prejšnjega stoletja »On peut faire théâtre de tous« / »Gledališče lahko delamo iz 
vsega« (Autant-Mathieu 13).
II. Estetske revolucije Dušana Jovanovića 
Začnimo z Dušanom Jovanovićem in skupino Pupilija Ferkeverk, s katero je tesno 
sodeloval. Jovanović je kariero začel kot gledališki kritik pri študentski reviji Tribuna 
in kot dramatik. Nedvomno je nanj vplival prvi val eksperimentalnega gledališča 
(Eksperimentalno gledališče, Oder 57, Gledališče Ad hoc), vendar je bil kljub temu 
zelo kritičen do njegovih umetniških taktik. Želel si je nekaj drugega, radikalnejšega. 
Njegova prva (in še do danes neuprizorjena) igra je imela zelo sugestiven naslov 
Predstave ne bo (1962), ki je kazal na metateatralnost in politično cenzuro. Njegova 
druga igra Norci (1963) je na krstno uprizoritev leta 1971 morala čakati skoraj 
desetletje. Medtem se je Jovanović osredotočil na svoje gledališko delo kot vodja 
57 in ustanovitelj novoustanovljenega ŠAG – Študentskega aktualnega gledališča, ki je 
zaradi svojih estetskih mini revolucij ustvarilo svoje prve škandale.
Kljub vsem razlikam sta si »kritična generacija« eksperimentalnega gledališča Odra 
57 in nova generacija Dušana Jovanovića delili ključno »zmago«: odstranili sta četrto 
steno in ustvarili gledališki prostor, v katerem je bila močna interakcija med igralci 
na odru in sodelujočim občinstvom v smislu redefinicije gledališča Maxa Herrmanna, 
ki je vedno poudarjala tretjo paradigmo, gledalca. Ko je gledališče začelo gledalca 
(kot pri Vsevolodu Meyerholdu) razumeti kot tretjega ustvarjalca – tistega, ki v sebi 
dopolnjuje tisto, kar oder zgolj nakazuje – je postalo politično nevarno. 
Nedvomno je to novo razumevanje predstave kot nečesa, kar ni »reprezentacija ali 
izraz nečesa, kar že obstaja drugje – kot besedilo igre – ampak kot nekaj, kar se poraja 
z dejanji, zaznavami, odzivi igralcev in gledalcev« (Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, 
Ritual 23), pomenilo velik dosežek prvih eksperimentalnih gledališč, zlasti Odra 57, 
ki je močno vplival na Dušana Jovanovića in njegovo generacijo, ko je v sedemdesetih 
letih 20. stoletja ustvarila novo »estetsko revolucijo«, in sicer performativni obrat v 
slovenskem gledališču in uprizoritvenih umetnostih. 
Dušan Jovanović je (ob Ladu Kralju) verjetno najvplivnejša in osrednja osebnost 
slovenskega gledališkega neoavantgardnega gibanja, obdobja poznih šestdesetih 
in sedemdesetih let, v katerem je bilo gledališče v rokah generacije, ki je rušila 
kulturne tabuje. Politiko so razumeli tudi v smislu seksualne revolucije, hkrati pa so 
prestopili stroge meje gledališča in se približali izkušnjam hepeninga in performansa. 
Ta radikalna vrnitev gledališča h gledališču v smislu Antonina Artauda in njegovega 
gledališča krutosti je bila nova estetska revolucija, politično dejanje, ki je sprožilo 
burne odzive tako občinstva kot kritikov. 
Jovanović in njegova generacija (Lado Kralj, Zvone Šedlbauer, Ivo Svetina, Milan Jesih, Iztok 
Tory ...) sta zavestno izzivala občinstvo. Ta generacija je odziv in sodelovanje občinstva v 
gledališču razumela kot politično dejanje, v katerem naj bi se občinstvo osvobodilo skupaj 
z igralci. Šele v tem obdobju študentskih gibanj in študentskih gledališč se je poudarek 
resnično preselil s področja repertoarja in besedila na sam gledališki medij, na njegov 
proces osvobajanja, ki je (tako kot gledališče Schechnerja, Grotowskega, Barbe in drugih) 
postal odprt za polje drugih umetniških medijev in področij.
Leta 1968 je Jovanović s skupino Pupilija Ferkeverk v predstavi Pupilija, papa Pupilo 
pa Pupilčki razbil hegemonični jezik dramskega gledališča, da bi se »dotaknil življenja« 
(Artaud 13). Skupaj s predstavo Spomenik G (1972) je ta nenavadna predstava 
utelešala radikalno iskanje gledališča, ki je temeljilo na zavedanju, da je oder fizični in 
resnični prostor, ki zahteva, da ga zapolnimo in mu dovolimo govoriti pravi avtentični 
jezik semiotičnih in fenomenalnih teles v prostoru in času. Ali če še enkrat uporabimo 
58 parafrazo Artauda v kombinaciji s terminologijo Fischer-Lichtejeve: Jovanović je 
poskušal izumiti gramatiko tega novega jezika, ki ustvarja edinstveno »avtopoetično 
povratno zanko« (Fischer-Lichte) med izvajalci in občinstvom.
Sedemdeseta leta prejšnjega stoletja so v eksperimentalnem gledališču prinesla 
redefinicijo vlog besedila ter občinstva in izvajalcev z Jovanovićevo igro Igrajte 
tumor v glavi in onesnaženje zraka (1972) v izvedbi SLG Celje in režiji Ljubiše Ristića. 
Po mnenju Lada Kralja je »tema te igre gledališče samo, v katerem pride do krize 
gledališke organizacije, ustvarjalnosti in končno tudi njegovega bistva« (»Slovenia« 
772). Z drugimi besedami, Jovanović se je v svoji igri osredotočil na neuspeh osnovnih 
premis avantgardnega gledališča šestdesetih let: poudarek na procesu in ne na 
rezultatu, močna interakcija med izvajalci in publiko v tem, kar Erika Fischer-Lichte v 
svoji knjigi Estetika performativnega imenuje avtopoetična povratna zanka, mistična 
katarza, kolektivna ekstaza, razširjena zavest, nadomestitev besedilne govorice z 
govorico telesa in melodičnimi, onomatopejskimi zvoki. 
Po mnenju Dragana Klaića igra Tumor »z anticipacijsko imaginacijo prikazuje razvoj 
avantgardnega gledališča v šestdesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja, kuloar utopičnega 
iskanja skupnosti, bližine, enosti« (»Utopianism« 127). To samokritiko je mogoče 
interpretirati kot radikalen, metaliterarni, metagledališki in metaumetniški diskurz; 
samokritiko v povezavi s temeljnimi premisami osvobojenega, neoavantgardnega, 
artaudovskega in schechnerjanskega gledališča, ki jih je Jovanović sam zagovarjal in 
uresničeval v Pupiliji in Spomeniku G. 
V vode angažirane dramatike in gledališča, ki je zavračalo vsakršno tradicionalnost 
in tudi ideologijo, je Jovanović sicer vstopil že v šestdesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja 
z Norci. Desetletje pozneje je to idejo prevzel in jo v igri Tumor le združil s (samo)
kritiko in (samo)ironijo performativnega obrata hepeninga in neoavantgardnega 
performansa. Ustvaril je »dramski postskript šestdesetim letom in njihovi značilni 
gledališki znamki, napisan, še preden se je obdobje dejansko zares končalo oziroma 
preden smo lahko opazili, da se je končalo in s kakšnim izidom« (prav tam 128). S 
tem je poudaril resnost krize reprezentacije in dramatika na eni strani ter na drugi 
strani dinamiko vzponov in padcev v radikalnih gledaliških praksah druge polovice 
dvajsetega stoletja, neposredno povezanih in soodvisnih od teh kriz.
Po mnenju njegovega sodobnika in kolega, teoretika in umetnostnega zgodovinarja Lada 
Kralja, Jovanović »piše z izrazito gledališke perspektive« (»Slovenia« 772), »številne 
igre nihajo med groteskno ironijo gledališča absurda in brechtovsko dokumentarno 
dramo« (»Goli otok literature« 253), začenši z njegovo blasfemično drugo igro Norci. 
Zgodovina tega, kar so pozneje poimenovali politično gledališče osemdesetih 
let, pa se je nadaljevala in doživela nov vrhunec leta 1975 s povezavo dveh 
59 generacij: Dominika Smoleta, predstavnika kritične generacije Odra 57, in 
Dušana Jovanovića, predstavnika performativne revolucije Pupilije Ferkeverk. 
Združili sta se v Žrtvah mode bum-bum, predstavi, ki je postala prelomna za 
Mladinsko gledališče, hkrati pa tudi za slovensko sodobno gledališče nasploh. 
Po Jovanovićevih pomembnih režijskih akcentih v Gleju, predvsem Spomeniku 
G, ter hkratnih akcentih postdramskega v predstavah gledališča Pekarna (Zajčev 
Potohodec v režiji Lada Kralja, Svetinov Gilgameš, Ristićev Tako, tako) se je z 
Žrtvami tudi znotraj »repertoarnega« gledališča uveljavil popolnoma nov princip 
dela: Jovanovićevo besedilo kot scenarij, neliterarna gradnja predstave. Pobudo je 
dal Dominik Smole.
Dušan Jovanović: Žrtve mode bum-bum, Mladinsko gledališče, 1975. Foto Tone Stojko, arhiv SMG. Na 
fotografiji: Milena Grm, Milojka Šuklje, Vladimir Jurc, Jože Mraz, Sandi Pavlin.
Žrtve mode bum-bum so bile pravi estetski in etični šok, estetska revolucija, ki je 
politizirano umetnost in politizirano gledališče spremenila v eksplozivno telo, ki 
je v samoupravnem socializmu izgradilo novo obliko angažiranega gledališča. To je 
(sicer drugače kot tisto prejšnje generacije, namreč Odra 57, pa vendar) še verjelo, 
da je mogoče doseči bistvene učinke klasičnih oblik političnega gledališča Erwina 
Piscatorja in Bertolta Brechta ter ruske avantgarde. 
60 Jovanovićevo gledališče druge polovice sedemdesetih let, ki se začenja prav z Žrtvami, 
je nastopilo po estetskih revolucijah performansa šestdesetih in sedemdesetih let in je 
že v sami besedilni zasnovi, ki je nastala kot delo barthesovskega pisarja, povezovalo 
literaturo in spektakel, politično angažiranost in gledališki eksperiment, revolucijo 
misli in forme. Zapisalo in uprizorilo je vdore realnega, točke, na katerih se dogaja 
gibanje umetnosti kot proizvajanja lastne resnice. Žrtve, uprizorjene kot otvoritvena 
predstava nove sezone, so delovale kot estetska in ideološka bomba. 
Jovanovićevo angažirano gledališče je uporabljalo in izrabljalo politično, 
revolucionarno v najboljšem pomenu besede. Ta gledališko nadvse privlačni spektakel 
je povezoval grotesko, ironijo in tragično resnost z najčistejšo poezijo. Uporabljalo in 
izrabljalo je politično, revolucionarno ideologijo, do katere je vzpostavljalo različne 
parataktične odnose, ki so na občinstvo delovali katarzično. Namerno se je ukvarjalo z 
igro resnice in videza, fikcije in realnosti, igralcev, protagonistov, gledalcev, gledalk … 
Vseh in vsakogar, v samem ustvarjalnem procesu dela pri uprizoritvi in v vsakokratnih 
neponovljivih dejanjih recepcije vsakokratne ponovitve predstave. Njegova pisljiva 
igra in uprizoritev sta izhajali iz emancipiranega idejnega konteksta šestdesetih let, 
ki pa sta ga že zresnili, do njega ustvarili distanco, hkrati pa ohranili vso dinamičnost 
in željo po spremembah, ki jih je prinašal s študentskimi gibanji. Poleg tega sta ga 
uokvirili v večno ponavljanje vojn, vseprisotnost vojaškega aparata v sodobnem svetu.
Zato ni čudno, da nad predstavo niso bili vsi navdušeni, saj je bila za »pravoverneže« 
v dramsko gledališče in socialistično samoupravljanje sporna, in to tako estetsko kot 
ideološko. Predstava se je ne glede na vročo kri, ki jo je povzročila v slovenski politiki, 
uspešno uveljavila tudi v tujini, npr. na znamenitem festivalu Gledališče narodov v 
francoskem Nancyju, izjemen odmev je imela pri mednarodni kritiki. Predstava je 
dosegla gledališki in angažirani višek, ko med korakanjem fašističnih kolon, med 
nemimi bliski strelov sredi bodečih žic padajo ob vzklikih osvobodilnih gesel ženske z 
otroki v naročju; in nato v naslednji sceni, ko ženske, ljudstvo, ki išče svoje padle – kar 
je zraslo v močan simbol obuditve njegovih, ljudskih večnostnih junakov – prinesejo, 
to pot ne uniform, temveč dele svojih oblačil in v partizanska ljudska oblačila oblečejo 
svoje otroke, ljudsko vojsko, in ko to ljudstvo vsebinsko, ne deklamatorsko, spregovori 
v verzih Prešernove Zdravljice. Tako besedilo kot predstava z izvrstnimi igralci sta 
bila izjemen gledališki dogodek, visoko profesionalna perfekcija igralskih psihičnih in 
fizičnih prizadevanj. 
Po estetskih revolucijah na področju performansa in (ne več) dramskih besedil 
je z igrama Osvoboditev Skopja (1978) in Karamazovi (1980), s katerima je razbil 
socialistične tabuje in odprl dramske postopke za nenavadno mešanico realizma in 
metafikcije, odigral ključno vlogo v jugoslovanskem političnem gledališču. V prvem 
delu so vsi dogodki druge svetovne vojne in družinske tragedije prikazani skozi oči 
61 šestletnega dečka, kar odpira zelo subjektivno in neideološko interpretacijo političnih 
dogodkov. Karamazovi pa so odprli tabuizirano temo jugoslovanskega komunističnega 
koncentracijskega taborišča na jadranskem otoku – posebnost Titovega preloma 
s Stalinom in Sovjetsko zvezo leta 1948 – v katerem so v okviru strogega sistema 
prevzgojnega dela pobili veliko sovjetsko šolanih komunistov. Da bi odprl to temo, 
vstopi v dialog z Dostojevskim in njegovim znamenitim romanom Bratje Karamazovi, 
ki mu omogoča dramatičen prikaz generacijskega prepada med očetom in tremi sinovi. 
Svojo postbrechtovsko tehniko je razvijal tudi v igrah, ki jih je napisal med vojno 
v nekdanji Jugoslaviji in kmalu po njej. Leta 1993 zelo osebno različico Antigone, na 
katero je vplivala v času pisanja še trajajoča vojna v Jugoslaviji. Če je zavestno začel 
dialog z Dostojevskim, da bi pisal o »temačnih« in paradoksalnih dogodkih v zgodovini 
Jugoslavije, je grški mit izbral, da bi se distanciral od dejanske banalnosti vojne oziroma 
da bi pokazal, kako je tudi mitična struktura grške tragedije konec dvajsetega stoletja 
postala nekaj povsem banalnega in predvidljivega. Kot to razlaga Dragan Klaić:
Sovraštvo se je spremenilo v slepo, skoraj visceralno strast brez očitnega vzroka 
ali namena. V Jovanovićevih Tebah je nasilje postalo tako vseprisotno, da je vsililo 
lastno konstrukcijo resničnosti, ki so jo nato vsi prizadeti ponotranjili. Postalo je 
transgeneracijsko in le neka intervencija zunaj sistema je lahko zlomila urok. To bi 
morala biti vloga božanstev, vendar v Jovanovićevi igri ostajajo v ozadju kot vir zla 
in nočejo prevzeti vloge razsodnika ali rešitelja. [...] Celo Antigonin prostor za upor 
postane skrajno zožen, skoraj neobstoječ. (»The Crisis of Theatre« 151)
V svoji drugi igri, posvečeni nasilju na območju nekdanje Jugoslavije, je Jovanović 
začel metagledališki dialog z Brechtom, in sicer v igri Mati Korajža in njeni otroci. V 
Uganki Korajže (1994) se je Jovanović zavestno lotil tudi Brechtovega sistema epskega 
gledališča in njegovih specifičnih ne več dramskih postopkov v smislu odrskega 
prostora. Konvencijo epskega gledališkega prostora je na izviren način preoblikoval 
na podlagi igre pokrajine, v kateri odmevajo psihološka stanja protagonistov in 
njihove drobne mikro zgodbe. 
V času vojne v Jugoslaviji je napisal tudi tretji del Balkanske trilogije Kdo to poje Sizifa, 
pri čemer je uporabil tisto, kar je sam opisal kot dialog z dramsko formo, ki se ukvarja 
z arhetipskimi situacijami. Zavestno se je odločil za dekonstrukcijo in rekonstrukcijo 
klasičnih antičnih in sodobnih iger in mitov: Antigona, Sizif in Mati Korajža.
Tudi njegova zadnja velika igra Razodetja (2009) je žanrski hibrid tesno in gosto 
prepletenih misli, samocitatov iz igre Karamazovi in nekaterih drugih njegovih 
dramskih del, kontaminiranih z današnjim žargonom avtentičnosti (v Adornovem 
smislu). Jovanovićeve igre, napisane v enaindvajsetem stoletju, so rezultat njegovega 
upora proti svetu neoliberalcev, proti telekraciji globalnega sveta, v katerem pisava 
ne more proizvesti svoje lastne razlike. Zato nam velikokrat prikličejo v spomin 
62 dramske in teoretske univerzume Petra Handkeja, Heinerja Müllerja ali Richarda 
Foremana. Vsaka njegova nova igra prinaša nov, alternativen poskus misliti gledališče 
in umetnost. Jovanović je bil prepričan, da po Shakespearu ne moremo več govoriti o 
novih, specifičnih avtorskih oblikah, da obstajata le dve veliki dramski obliki: gledališče 
noh in grška tragedija. Sodobnega avtorja (uporablja izraz svojega makedonskega 
kolega Gorana Stefanovskega) vidi kot plough-wrighta: »Ne pišem, ampak gradim 
igre« (Jovanović, »Muke z vojno« 4).
III. Milan Jesih: Zamolčani prevratnik na sledi nove pisave za 
gledališče nove dobe
Vzporedno z Jovanovićevimi estetskimi revolucijami na področju drame in gledališča 
so potekale tudi ne manj radikalne Milana Jesiha, s katerim sta sodelovala v Pupiliji, 
kasneje pa so se njune gledališke poti oddaljile druga od druge. Prav Jesih je s tem, 
ko je gradil svoje zgodnje igre, gradil tudi novo gledališče. Tako so Jesihov pomen in 
vloga pri dekonstrukciji dramske pisave, še bolj pa njegova vloga pri dekonstrukciji 
t. i. literarnega oziroma dramskega gledališča ter udejanjenju performativnega 
obrata na prelomu iz šestdesetih v sedemdeseta leta prejšnjega stoletja še do danes 
ostali tako rekoč neraziskani. Ne glede na to, da se trditev zdi paradoksalna, že po 
kratkem razmisleku potrdi svojo veljavnost. Tako kot tudi naslednja misel: Hkrati 
pa je njegova »ne več dramska pisava« (termin, ki ga je skovala nemška teoretičarka 
uprizoritvenih praks Gerda Poschmann, se zdi prav pri njem zelo primeren) v 
zadnjih desetletjih razcveta t. i. postdramskega gledališča ostala popolnoma v 
ozadju, tako rekoč neuporabljena, kar je, glede na bližino postdramskim praksam 
tega časa, nenavadno.
Vse preveč smo pozabili, kako njegovi zgodnji teksti udejanjajo nedramska tkanja 
dialoških tokov na različnih nivojih. Te ponovno prilaščene in razgrajene dialoške 
forme drame proizvajajo polifonični diskurz govornih ploskev, za katerega je – 
podobno kot pri Heinerju Müllerju, Petru Handkeju ali Elfriede Jelinek – značilen 
bahtinovsko razumljeni dialogizem. Poliloška forma, ki nastaja, je rezultat citatov, ki 
sestavljajo ekstremne in včasih celo nerazberljive kolaže. Toda ti kolaži – za veliko 
razliko od hermetičnih nemških vzporednikov, ki smo jih omenili maloprej – ne 
proizvedejo intelektualističnega labirinta, ampak labirint vsakdanjika v smešnosti 
njegovih psihopatologij in jezikovnih obrazcev ter avtomatizmov. 
Jesih tako kot Handke z jezika sleče pomen, da bi poudaril današnje oblike jezikovnega 
odtujevanja: ljudje, ki so odtujeni od svojega jezika in svoje govorice, so odtujeni tudi 
od sveta:
63
D: Kaj bi še manjkalo človeku? 
J: Na svetu nič. 
D: Prav nič. 
J: Nič. 
D: Nič. 
J: Nič? 
D: Nič, sem rekel. 
J: Kako: nič? 
D: Nič! Nič! Nič! 
J: Nič, praviš, srček? 
D: Pustite me že na miru! 
(Jesih, Grenki 24) 
Jesihova besedila spodmikajo osnovne postavke absolutnosti drame: dialog, junake, 
dramsko zgradbo. Na prvi pogled se zdi, da ti bloki hitro izmenjujočih se kvazidialogov 
nastajajo kot teksti - reaktorji, ki se kuhajo sami, pisec ali (bolje) barthesovski pisar jih 
zgolj opazuje (Jelinek, In den Alpen 254). Nobene zgodbe, nobene akcije, nobene logike 
razvoja dogodkov in dialogov, nobenega stranskega teksta, skrajna pomnožitev oseb 
in centrifugalnost sklopov besed. Grenki sadeži pravice sistematično spodkopavajo 
dramaturške kategorije. Andrej Inkret je tako ob njih zapisal, da se »‘nonšalantno‘, 
tako rekoč 'z enim zamahom' odvračajo od vsega tistega, kar smo si doslej mislili pod 
kategorijo drame; kljub temu (ali prav zato?) pa so se izkazali gledališko prav izjemno 
učinkoviti ...« (Inkret, »Igra z jezikom« 8).
Teatralnost se ne manifestira s pomočjo zgodbe, akcije in dialogov, ampak nastaja 
iz specifičnega sopostavljanja besed. Veno Taufer opozarja na dejstvo, da Jesih 
hipertrofira in množi pravila klasične dramske zgradbe: 
Namesto enotnosti prostora, časa in dejanja smo priča 33 različnim prizoriščem, na 
katerih nastopi 140 govorečih figur v situacijah, ki v vratolomnem ritmu drznih kolažev 
in prehajanj iz prostora v prostor, časa v čas, spola govorcev v drugi spol govorcev izpiše 
paleto prizorov v najrazličnejših motivnih kombinacijah normativnih vrednot od lepote, 
smrti, izdajstva, ljubezni, hrepenenja, ljubezni do domovine ... (Taufer, Odrom ob rob 166) 
Pri tem se poigra tudi z dramsko osebo, ki jo razprši na 140 vlog, za katere v edinih 
didaskalijah v igri zapiše: »Spol in sklon igravcev nista določena, želeti pa je, da so 
njihove duše široka in svetla pobočja, saj je sonce pokrovitelj življenja in njegov budni 
pastir« (Jesih, Grenki 6). 
64
Milan Jesih: Grenki sadeži pravice, režija Zvone Šedlbauer, EG Glej, 1974. Ikonoteka SLOGI. Na sliki Božo 
Šprajc, Ivo Ban, Marko Simčič, Metoda Zorčič.
Jesih je v Grenkih sadežih pravice na sledi nove pisave za gledališče nove dobe, ki združuje 
inovativnost v obliki in politično angažiranost v vsebini. Razstavi, spodmakne koncept 
dramskega predstavljanja ter izgradi avtonomijo jezika, v kateri jezik ni več podvržen 
dramski formi. Če Dane Zajc v Potohodcu beckettovsko radikalno secira sodobno etiko, 
hkrati pa skorajda do popolnosti razrahlja ostanke klasične dramske strukture, ne da bi 
pri tem spodnesel moč jezika poezije, Milan Jesih – kot opozarja Lado Kralj – v Grenkih 
sadežih pravice res radikalno in dokončno sprejme absurdistično načelo razkroja jezika 
in ga preinterpretira v totalno igro jezika, ki s svojo neobveznostjo že presega horizont 
metafizičnega nihilizma (Kralj, »Sodobna« 107).
Tudi njegove osebe (podobno kot tiste od Jelinek, a vseeno veliko bolj umetelno in 
muzikalično) se pojavljajo kot predimenzionirani jezikovni stroji. Nenehno govorijo 
in govorijo o vsem. Nepretrgano bruhajo iz sebe resničnosti, ki jih psihološko pravilno 
zastavljena figura nikoli ne bi mogla izreči. Jesihovi gledališki teksti izbirajo različne 
načine obvozov ustaljene dramske forme. Zato pri analizi in interpretaciji tovrstnih 
besedil postane problematična uporaba klasičnih pojmov teorije drame, npr. oseba, 
dialog, monolog, glavni tekst in stranski tekst. Hkrati imamo namesto z eksplicitno 
opravka z implicitno teatralnostjo. Tako smo (kot npr. pri dramatikih absurda, 
zgodnjem Handkeju, Heinerju Müllerju ipd.) priča gledališču glasov, ki nadomeščajo 
65 dramske osebe: »Jezik se bori proti svoji vsebini, ki je nadeta kot oblačilo (in ne 
obratno!), vsebini, ki je del mode« (Jelinek, »Brecht aus der Mode«).
Veno Taufer je zato v kritiškem zapisu ob premieri Jesihovega drugega dramskega 
teksta Grenki sadeži pravice, ki ga je pesnik nagajivo (politično provokativno, saj je 
šlo za svinčena sedemdeseta leta, ki niso dovoljevala nobenih interpelacij v smislu 
večstrankarske demokracije, hkrati pa tudi parataktično) zvrstno podnaslovil 
»interpelacija v enem nonšalantnem zamahu«, opozoril na dejstvo, da je avtor v tem 
gledališkem komadu »v dobršni in dovolj prepričljivi meri uveljavil prizadevanja 
tistega dela modernega leposlovja, ki odkriva, da jezik živi svoje življenje, predpostavlja 
svojo samostojno resničnost, se izpričuje kot lastna vsebina« (Taufer, Odrom 166).
Priča smo nastajanju govornih ploskev velike gostote, ki kot nekakšni gejzirji bruhajo 
maso zvočnega materiala, pri kateri ni več jasno, katerim označencem so namenjene 
te verige označevalcev. Jesihova besedilna praksa v Grenkih sadežih pravice tako 
predstavlja osvoboditev od modela, ki ga je Brecht imenoval aristotelovsko gledališče, 
in pa nastavek za nove modele gledališča onstran drame, blizu temu, kar je Brecht 
imenoval nearistotelovsko, Artaud pa gledališče krutosti. Sredstvo osvoboditve je jezik. 
Njegova taktika v Grenkih sadežev pravice, kot npr. tudi v Limitah (1973), Brucki ali 
obdobju prilagajanja (1976) ali Trikoju (1985), je preigravanje trivialnosti jezika. 
Dramske osebe v krizi, ki jih pisar Jesih označi s postbeckettovskimi imeni (Jemavec, 
Dajavec, Grbavec, Gobavec), se v verigi mini prizorov, temelječih na parodiji, igricah 
jezika, vratolomno gibljejo po prostorih - časih. Tekst igre pri Jesihu tako ne nastaja 
z namenom, da bi utelešal mimezis. Tempo je hiter, dogajanje je mehanizirano, 
reprezentacijo ves čas spodkopavajo ironični komentarji in potujitve. Tako kot pri 
Ionescu je tudi pri Jesihu jezik izrabljen, nepopravljivo kontaminiran s trivialnostjo. 
Jesih tako izgradi ne več dramski gledališki tekst, ki razgradi vsakršno tradicijo 
in metafiziko, hkrati pa vedno znova udejanja jezik kot serijo označevalcev brez 
označencev. Njegova taktika je pri tem pastiš in citatno prisvajanje ter hkratna ironična 
predelava predvsem jezikovnih korpusov in leg tradicije, npr. pripovedništva prve 
polovice 19. stoletja, vzpostavitev palimpsestnega umetnega starinskega jezika, ki se 
meša z vsakdanjo govorico, z gostilniškim, pouličnim, političnim, filozofskim slengom:
GOBAVEC: Daj mi od svojega obeda, dobri pastir, lačen sem in žejen!
GRBAVEC: Moj oče Telefunken iz Massachussettsa je hrano, ki jo imam s seboj, namenil 
meni. In kar je mojega, bo ostalo moje, potepuški tujec, to si zapiši za uho.
GOBAVEC: In kako naj te za to nagradim?
GRBAVEC: Zaslužim si, da mi živad pogine v hudi kugi, da mi moj oče v Massachusettsu 
vzame žlahtno ime, da me moja mati na Finskem prekolne in da ostanem sam in izobčen, 
celo od bridkih gorskih vetrov osovražen.
JEMAVEC: Daj mi od svojega obeda, zlatosrčni pastir!
66
GRBAVEC: Ne dam. Kar je moje, je moje, in se tebe nič ne tiče. Kar sem si jaz prinesel v 
planino, bom jaz snedel. 
JEMAVEC: In kakšno nagrado dobiš za to?
GRBAVEC: Prav bo, če mi živina pogine, če jaz oslepim, in če moja noseča žena doli v 
dolini rodi kozla.
DAJAVEC: Daj mi od svojega malega obroka, pastir!
GRBAVEC: Prisedi! In vina ti bom nalil, ki ga hranim za goste in včasih za praznik. Jed je 
skromna, a tečna: mene glej, kako sem zdrav ob njej!
(Jesih, Grenki 28–29)
Jesih v Grenkih sadežih pravice uvede posebno, ne več dramsko taktiko dramaturgije 
hitrih prehodov med prizori. Osebe, označene z abstraktnimi oznakami, ki niso 
vezane na nikakršne dramske like, kot nekakšni nadomestki za dramske like skoraj 
neopazno prehajajo iz enega govornega položaja v drugega. Menjave položajev so 
poljubne, asociativne, tako kot so poljubne in asociativne menjave lokacij (ne več) 
dramske akcije. S tem ko jezik postavi za »protagonista« svoje drame, Jesih (podobno 
kot njegov francoski kolega Valère Novarina) ukine vsako dvojnost med tekstom 
in uprizoritvijo. Beseda sama postane spektakel, ona je tista, ki ustvarja strukturo 
besedila in uprizoritve. (Ne več) drama tako z Grenkimi sadeži pravice znotraj 
slovenske variante pride do svojega ekstrema, do točke, s katere je možna samo še 
vrnitev k elementom dramskega oziroma postdramskega. 
IV. Plough-wright Matjaž Zupančič
Tudi enega najboljših opisov gledališkega dela Matjaža Zupančiča bi lahko povzeli prav 
v dvomestni besedni zvezi, ki jo je skoval Stefanovski: plough-wright. Gledališki režiser 
in dramatik, ki je študiral gledališko režijo in dramaturgijo v Ljubljani in Londonu, je 
v osemdesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja postal direktor Eksperimentalnega gledališča 
Glej in svojo kariero nadaljeval kot dramatik in gledališki režiser ter profesor 
na Akademiji za gledališče, radio, film in televizijo. Kot avtor več kot petdesetih 
gledaliških uprizoritev je konec osemdesetih let prejšnjega stoletja začel pisati (ne 
več) dramska dela in kmalu postal eden ključnih sodobnih slovenskih dramatikov, 
ki je prejel več Grumovih nagrad za najboljšo slovensko dramo, postal pa je tudi 
največkrat uprizarjani slovenski dramatik v Evropi in širše. Za skorajda dvajset svojih 
dramskih del je prejel številne nagrade. 
Njegove igre vstopajo v dialog z lacanovsko psihoanalizo, razkrivajo igre drsečih 
označevalcev in nove različice želje Drugega, označujejo radikalno drugost, drugost, 
ki presega iluzorno drugost imaginarnega. V svojih zgodnjih igrah, napisanih v 
devetdesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja, uporablja in si prilašča samo naravo različnih 
67 žanrov, vključno z underground kulturo trilerjev. To nakazujejo že naslovi njegovih iger: 
Izganjalci hudiča (1991), Slastni mrlič (1992), Nemir (1998) ali Ubijalci muh (2000). 
Igre Matjaža Zupančiča se odvijajo v vmesnih prostorih, na recepcijah in hodnikih, kjer 
so ljudje nenehno v gibanju, prihajajo in odhajajo v skrivnostni verigi dogajanja. 
Zupančič se rad poigrava z različnimi dramskimi tehnikami in slogi, od hiperrealizma do 
misterijev in trilerjev, od neposrednega prikazovanja resničnosti do absurdnega pa tudi 
nenavadno poetičnega. V njegovi črni komediji Bolje tič v roki kot tat na strehi (2004), v 
kateri se slog Montyja Pythona sreča s slogom Harolda Pinterja, liki delujejo kot roboti, ki 
proizvajajo vrsto ponovitev, ki se končajo v nenavadnem občutju črne komedije z uporabo 
besedišča psihiatrije in nevrologije. V igri Padec Evrope (2011) komentira in razkriva 
ozadje sodobne družbe po mileniju. V majhnem lokalnem hotelu na obrobju s pomenljivim 
imenom Evropa poteka zasebna zabava, na kateri lokalni jet set pripoveduje umazane šale 
in sklepa poslovne dogovore. Toda ko vse kaže, da se bo precej opita zabavajoča se družba 
razšla, se zunaj odvije pravi globalni upor z demonstracijami in nemiri. Policija zapre 
vse vhode v mesto, ceste so blokirane, avtomobili gorijo. V teh brezupnih razmerah se 
razkrije lažnivost lokalne elite. Zupančič s svojim sarkastičnim črnim humorjem razkrije 
groteskno realnost sodobnega sveta in krizo etike v današnji družbi, v Evropi in drugod. 
Do posebne zgostitve metagledališkega komentarja in hiperrealnosti sveta 
debordovske družbe spektakla pripelje Zupančič v nenavadni in radikalni igri 
- eseju o sodobni mediatizirani civilizaciji resničnostnih šovov in simulakrov, 
njegovi najbolj (post)dramski oziroma mediatizirani igri Hodnik (2003). Zupančič 
namenoma izbere uprizarjanje v živo, in sicer gledališče kot medij, ki komentira in 
dekonstruira trenutno zelo izpostavljeno obliko medija, natančneje resničnostno 
televizijo. Njegovo izhodišče lahko ponazorimo z izjavo Guillerma Gómez-Peńa: »Vsak 
metier, jezik, žanr in/ali format zahteva različne strategije in metodologije« (73). Kot 
ustrezen medij uporabi »čisto gledališče«, pri čemer se namerno izogne mešanim 
medijskim sredstvom današnjega gledališča in uprizori koridor vseprisotnosti podob 
resničnostne televizije, sam prostor medijskega nasilja v dobi humanitarne nemoči.
Tako razkrije problematičnost subjekta, ki razpolaga s fiktivno svobodo, ki se 
ponuja kot iluzija interaktivnosti, odprtosti za sodelovanje, dialoga, ki se krepi z 
elektronskimi mediji televizije. Zupančič uprizarja resničnost, ki jo interpretira kot 
podobo Auslanderjevega univerzuma televizije, ki je sposobna »kolonizirati 'živost', 
edini vidik gledališke predstavitve, ki ga film ni mogel ponoviti« (Auslander 15). 
Dramatik se popolnoma zaveda problematičnega dejstva, da se je gledališče razvilo v 
posnemanje medijskih diskurzov in da okus današnje javnosti oblikuje televizija, ki je 
postala vzor in telos gledališča. Kapitala ne zanima več ekonomija reprezentacije žive 
predstave, ampak se intenzivno osredotoča na ekonomijo medijske reprezentacije, ki 
se predstavlja kot reprezentacija realnosti tukaj in zdaj. 
68 Matjaž Zupančič izhaja tudi iz dejstva, da (kot opozarja Auslander) »danes 
velikokrat nismo več zgolj priče vdorom medijskih 'tehnik' in tehnik v kontekst 
živega performansa, temveč prej za to, da živi performans absorbira medijsko 
epistemologijo« (Auslander 16). A kljub temu se odloči za živo predstavo, 
natančneje gledališče, ki »v ekonomiji živega ponavljanja [...] ni kaj več kot 
ostanek prejšnjega zgodovinskega reda reprezentacije, zadržek, ki si ne more 
prilastiti veliko kulturne prisotnosti moči« (17). Ker se zaveda, da naš koncept 
bližine in intimnosti izhaja iz obnebja televizije, izkorišča ta koncept in simbolno 
moč televizije kot medija, ki je deležen večje kulturne prisotnosti in prestiža kot 
gledališče, da bi intrigiral gledalce in jih spravil v stanje zavedanja o televizijski 
manipulaciji in njenem »elektronskem hrupu«, ki se predstavlja kot resničnost, 
resničnejša od resničnosti žive predstave.
Vprašanje, ki ga postavlja Hodnik, v veliki meri pa kar večina Zupančičevih dram, je 
torej ključno vprašanje, ki ga Auslander ves čas ponavlja in nanj odgovarja v svoji 
odlični knjigi V živo: ali predstava razpolaga z lastno ontologijo, ki je bolj iskrena od 
televizijskih ponovitev? Odgovor na to vprašanje je ne. Poleg tega Zupančičeva igra 
in predstava, ki jo je sam tudi režiral, izpostavljata ključno vprašanje o možnosti 
subvertiranja resničnostne televizije v živi uprizoritvi. 
Hodnik tako – medtem ko govori o Velikem bratu – s pomočjo izključno gledaliških 
medijev odpira sliko deteritorializirane etike postmodernega sveta in njegovih 
kibernetičnih modelov organiziranja resničnosti, realnega, izdelanega elektronsko, iz 
matric in spominskih bank, ki se sesuje v črno luknjo, ki jo proizvajajo mediji. S tem 
pokaže, da je (kot bi rekel Debord), spektakel tudi v gledališču danes »hkrati rezultat 
in cilj prevladujočega načina produkcije«, je »srce neresničnosti te realne družbe« 
(Debord 6).
V. Živadinov in obred poslavljanja od NSK Supremat
Zgodbi dekonstrukcij nasprotja med reprezentacijo in prezentacijo, značilni za 
postmimetično, lahko sledimo tudi v obredih poslavljanja Dragana Živadinova v njegovi 
postpostretrogardistični fazi. Naš predmet raziskave bo Supremat, podnaslovljen kot 
Obred poslavljanja od Neue Slowenische Kunst in NSK (ki ga Živadinov sopodpisuje 
z avtorsko ekipo kostumografke Dunje Zupančič, dramaturginje Jane Pavlič in 
koreografa Marka Mlačnika), premierno uprizorjen novembra 2002 v Slovenskem 
mladinskem gledališču. Predstava je del zapletene pripravljalne procedure njegovega 
velikega utopičnega projekta 1 : 1, ki se je začel leta 1995. Kot nakazujeta naslov in 
podnaslov, se prvi nanaša na suprematizem Kazimirja Maleviča, drugi na slovensko 
retro- ali transavantgardno gibanje osemdesetih in devetdesetih let, ki mu je pripadal 
69 tudi sam. Supremat je koncipiran kot novi personalizirani obred poslavljanja režiserja 
tako od ruske zgodovinske avantgarde kot tudi od slovenske neoavantgarde. Predstava 
uporablja tehniko pastiša in recikliranja tem in stilov v novem kontekstu. 
Navdahnjen z dramo angleškega avtorja Dustyja Hughesa Futuristi iz leta 1986, se 
Supremat ukvarja s prvim pesnikom - žrtvijo postrevolucionarne Rusije, Nikolajem 
Gumiljovom, začetnikom akmeizma. S tem ko reintegrira zgodovinske trenutke leta 
1921 v Sankt Peterburgu, ujame prav trenutek bistvenega konflikta avantgardne 
umetnosti s politično avantgardo ter sam začetek procesa iztrebljanja prve v procesu 
razvoja druge v obdobju po (sovjetski) revoluciji. Scenarij predstave, za katerega 
je značilna tehnika palimpsesta, pastiša in tehnike prisvajanja, lahko beremo kot 
postdramsko opero aperto, prepletajočo in mešajočo fragmente in parafraze ruske 
poezije te dobe (Majakovski, Ahmatova, Gumiljov, Blok ...) in Spomine Nadežde 
Mandelštam, transformirane z dekonstrukcijskimi intervencijami.
Dragan Živadinov: Supremat, Slovensko mladinsko gledališče, 2002. Foto Miha Fras. Na fotografiji: 
Romana Šalehar (Ana Andrejevna Ahmatova) in Olga Kacjan (Ana Andrejevna Ahmatova).
Supremat označujejo tudi nekatera zelo personalizirana in individualizirana 
prisvajanja del, konceptov in misli avantgarde in neoavantgarde. Prvi in 
najpomembnejši je citat FLUXUS-ovega namiznega tenisa in njegovih loparjev 
z luknjo v sredini. Gre za prisvajanje in retrocitat znamenitih neoavantgardnih 
športnih iger »Fluxfest«. Točneje iger, ki so jih odigrali v Douglass Collegeu v New 
70 Jerseyju februarja 1970. Supremat uporablja loparje za pingpong z luknjami kot 
osrednji vizualni simbol skupaj s prisvajanjem Meyerholdovih biomehaničnih gibov 
protagonistov predstave, vseh predstavnikov ruske umetnosti leta 1921.
Še bolj poudarjeno kot v predhodnih predstavah je tudi uporabljanje specifičnih 
»sestavin« Živadinova, ki je tako značilno za njegovo umetnost. Tokrat gre za 
čistilo PRIL, ki nas seveda spomni na Josepha Beuysa in njegovo uporabo medu, 
filca in masti v šestdesetih letih. Stavek iz predstave »Umetnost je samo začasna 
religija!« kot izjava spominja na in parafrazira znamenito Duchampovo izjavo o 
umetnosti: »Preprosto ne verjamem vanjo z vsemi njenimi mističnimi olepšavami. 
Kot droga je verjetno zelo koristna za številne ljudi, zelo sedativna, kot religija pa 
ni niti tako dobra kot Bog.«
Predstava povezuje med seboj dekontekstualizacije in rekontekstualizacije velikih, 
utopičnih spraševanj umetnosti. Fragmentira jih, dekonstruira in si jih prisvaja za 
svojo uporabo znotraj globalnega sveta postdramske in postgledališke menjave. 
Dehierarhizirana uporaba znakov zavestno uporablja koncepte simultanosti, se 
poigrava z gostoto znakov, muzikalizacijo, specifičnostjo vizualne dramaturgije, vdori 
realnega. Tako spodkoplje jedro gledališča kot posnemanja (mimezisa), hkrati pa 
tudi pojem logocentrizma, ki ga lahko razumemo kot osnovno gledališko dediščino 
koncepta dramskega gledališča. 
VI. Dekonstrukcije in rekonstrukcije reprezentacij: Divjak, Morano 
– Frljić – Semenič 
Dovolimo si na koncu še skok v sedanjost. Po številnih premenah, ki so jih 
prinesla sedemdeseta, osemdeseta in devetdeseta leta prejšnjega stoletja, se 
zdi, da se uprizoritvene prakse novega milenija vračajo k nekaterim postulatom 
eksperimentalnega gledališča in njegovih dekonstrukcij reprezentacije, hkrati pa tudi 
k želji po drugačnih, sodelovalnih in dokumentarističnih pristopih k materialu. 
Vzemimo kot primer Žiga Divjaka in Katarino Morano. Avtorski duet lahko uvrstimo 
v skupino avtoric in avtorjev, ki uporabljajo različne oblike gledaliških taktik, da bi 
dosegli zaželene učinke na gledalca, bralca, npr. režiserjev Oliverja Frljića, Nino Rajić 
Kranjac, Boruta Šeparovića, Janeza Janšo, Simono Semenič, Sebastijana Horvata, 
Jerneja Lorencija … Divjak in Morano preizprašujeta ustroj današnje družbe in vlogo 
posameznika v njej. V projektih izgradita svojo varianto dobesednega gledališča 
ter pri tem med drugim izhajata iz projektov Janeza Janše (predvsem predstave 
Slovensko narodno gledališče) in Oliverja Frljića (predvsem predstave 25.671 o 
izbrisanih). Njuno gledališče uporablja postopke verbatim gledališča, hkrati pa 
71 izhaja tudi iz Brechtovih učnih komadov in Boalovega principa gledališča zatiranih. 
Zvrst dokumentarnih uprizoritev in dobesednega gledališča je dosledno in radikalno 
raziskoval tudi Frljić v predstavi o izbrisanih 25.671 (PG Kranj, 2013), ki je temeljila 
na resničnih dogodkih in dokumentih. Te je prepletla s fikcijo in na neki način celo s 
kvazidokumentarnostjo ter dobršno dozo metagledališkega eseja. Tako je radikalno 
preizprašala status privilegiranega pričevalca, ki si ga včasih prerado podeli 
dokumentaristično in verbatim gledališče. Prav Frljić je v slovenskem prostoru gotovo 
režiser, ki se nikakor ni zadovoljil z osnovno obliko dobesednega gledališča, ampak ga 
je ves čas povezoval z drugimi žanri, predvsem gledališkega eseja. 
Tudi Divjak in Morano v predstavi 6 uporabita klasičen postopek tovrstnega gledališča, 
prepis intervjujev, njihovo kolažiranje in sestavljanje besedila predstave. Montaža 
poteka s pomočjo redukcije večjih količin zbranega materiala ter preoblikovanja 
v avtorski obris gledališkega besedila. Delovna predloga teksta nastaja sproti in 
se spreminja. Divjak in Morano ohranjata vloge igralca, režiserja, pisca in drugih 
ustvarjalcev v procesu, a hkrati so te nefiksirane, izmenljive in spremenljive. 
Ustvarjanje je hkrati individualno in kolektivno, pisec ali barthesovski pisar ni ločen 
od drugih ustvarjalcev, ni edninski, je del procesa, a v njem sodeluje ali sodelujejo 
predvsem kot urejevalec besedila, ne toliko kot dramatik. 
Besedilni korpusi pri Divjaku in Morano nastajajo na različne načine. Postdramska 
dokumentarna obdelava Cankarjevega Hlapca Jerneja in njegove pravice je plod 
raziskovanja resničnih zgodb brezpravnih delavcev. Predstava sledi sodobnim 
hlapcem Jernejem, ki jih najde na terenu, z obiski podjetij, združenj, obalne sindikalne 
konfederacije KS 90 in Delavske svetovalnice. Skozi dokumentarno gradivo spoznamo 
pričevanja delavcev v Luki Koper, čistilk iz čistilnih servisov, gradbenih delavcev, 
voznikov tovornjakov in kombijev, medicinskih sester, prekarnih študentov arhitekture 
v arhitekturnih birojih. Nastane namerno precej grobo obdelan material, ki ga v ritmu 
dela za tekočim trakom interpretirajo, pripovedujejo igralci. Nič spektakularnega ni v 
montaži in uprizoritveni taktiki, a po principu manj je več gledalca predstava potegne 
vase. Ne da bi opazil, postane priča in hkrati že tudi pričevalec prekarnosti. 
Projekt 6 je zasnoval dramaturško-režiserski tim skupaj z delom igralcev (Iztok 
Drabik Jug, Alja Kapun, Katarina Stegnar, Vito Weis in Gregor Zorc) ter sodelovalno 
raziskal nestrpnosti resničnih dogodkov v Dijaškem in študentskem domu Kranj 
februarja 2016. Zgodba je naslednja: ravnateljica doma se je odločila, da bo v 
praznem in neizkoriščenem nadstropju študentskega dela dijaškega doma sprejela 
šest mladoletnih prosilcev za azil brez spremstva. To je sprožilo verigo dogodkov, 
ogorčenje in nasprotovanje dela staršev, krajevne skupnosti … Ustvarjalno ekipo je 
zanimal konflikt med delom kolektiva, dijaškega doma, »ki v osnovi podpira idejo, 
da je treba sočloveku pomagati, da je treba otroke nastaniti v tem domu, ker pač v 
72 končni fazi je bil ta dom zgrajen zato, da gosti mladoletnike, ki se šolajo izven kraja 
[…] svojega rojstva. In potem zaradi pritiskov okolice na nek način podvomi v […] 
to svoje osnovno prepričanje, da je treba pomagat« (Pograjc). Ekipa se je povezala 
z raziskovalno novinarko Majo Avo Žiberna in ravnateljico doma Judito Nahtigal 
ter na podlagi raziskave pripravila dokumentarni material. Približno štiri mesece 
trajajoča raziskava je bila del kreativnega procesa, v katerem so na terenu skušali 
priti v stik s temi mladoletniki, jo razširili na domove v Novi Gorici in Postojni. 
Dokumentarne materiale so v teku procesa začeli povezovati s fiktivnimi, temelječimi 
na verodostojnih dokumentih, a izhajajočih iz igralske imaginacije in improvizacij. 
Tako sta nastala scenarij in predstava, v kateri se ves čas izmenjujeta igra in neigra. 
Žiga Divjak: 6, Slovensko mladinsko gledališče, 2018. Foto Matej Povše, Arhiv SMG.
Iz povedanega je razvidno, da Divjak in Morano v predstavi 6 (podobno kot Oliver 
Frljić v predstavi o izbrisanih 25.671 ali Naše nasilje in vaše nasilje) ne vzpostavljata 
čiste oblike verbatim gledališča. Gre za tipično sodelovalno gledališče z elementi ali 
deli postopkov gledališča zatiranih. Njuno gledališče tako strukturira posebno ne več 
dramsko matrico, pri kateri prihaja do drznih prepletov dokumentarnega in fikcije, 
zaradi katerih slednja mestoma postane prepričljivejša kot resničnost in druga bolj 
nadrealistična od fikcije. Pri tem, spet podobno kot Frljić, z metagledališkim diskurzom, 
ki ga vpleteta v svoje predstave - eseje, sproti komentirata družbeno umeščenost 
predstave, pogoje njene produkcije in možne politične učinke. Hkrati pa dosledno 
utelesita osnovno definicijo dokumentarnega gledališča, kot jo je v razpravi »Notizen 
73 zum dokumentarischen Theater« podal Peter Weiss: »Dokumentarno gledališče se 
izogiba vsaki iznajdbi, uporablja pristna gradiva, ki jih potem – v nekoliko predelani 
obliki, toda vsebinsko nespremenjena – ponovno pokaže na odru« (Weiss 293–94).
Kot primer eksperimentalnih pisav za gledališče v tem času izpostavimo za konec še 
Simono Semenič, ki jo v igrah - scenarijih zanimajo radikalne inverzije dramskega 
in postdramskega. Pri Semeničevi smo izpostavljeni dekonstrukciji nasprotja med 
reprezentacijo in prezentacijo, značilni za postmimetično. Toda kljub temu da avtorica 
vztrajno ustvarja motnje v fikcijskem besedilnem kozmosu, igra vseeno vzpostavlja 
močan proces redramatizacije, ustvarjanja intenzivnih zapletov in razpletov. Kot da 
bi hkrati z dekonstrukcijo dramskega vbrizgali v postdramsko tkivo iger dramsko 
in dramatično. Postmimetično tako soobstaja s predmimetičnim, »slečenje« drame 
privede do vzpostavljanja fikcije.
Semeničeva v svojih igrah, npr. tisočdevetstoenainosemdeset (2013) problematizira 
lastni medij in status avtorja, dela in bralca oziroma gledalca ter hipertrofira proces 
same kreacije. Tematizacija in hkratna samorefleksija in samoironija statusa avtorja 
proizvede vzporedno problematizacijo ontološkega statusa umetnosti, hkrati pa 
tudi realnosti same. Zanima jo, kaj se skriva za videzi in videzi videzov, zato njena 
dekonstrukcija dramskega in fikcijskega proizvaja posebno postbrechtovsko kritiko 
realnega. Dialoško obliko predeluje v družbi z raznorodnimi besedilnimi strategijami: 
od odrskih smernic do opisov, ki so bližje romanu in prozi, pripovednih, esejističnih, 
teoretičnih in drugih tehnik, ki občinstvo opominjajo, da to, kar bere ali gleda, ni več 
realen dialog. Toda pri tem proizvede izrazito dramatične učinke, ki bi jih Birgit Haas 
najbrž imenovala »dramatično dramske« (Haas 45).
VII. Zaključek: sledi eksperimentov in tektonskih premikov v 
sedemdesetih in osemdesetih letih 20. stoletja
Na podlagi preteklih in sodobnih primerov smo zarisali zemljevid tistih praks 
ustvarjanja avtorskega gledališča, ki jih Badiou v Rapsodiji za gledališče poimenuje 
splošna nihanja. Gledalec se mora odločiti, ali se prepustiti tej praznini in sodelovati 
v neskončnem postopku. Ni pozvan k užitku, pač pa k razmišljanju. Primeri in 
taktike, ki smo se jih dotaknili, kažejo, kako so bile uprizoritvene prakse v dvajsetem 
stoletju vzporedno z drugimi umetnostmi v živo in z literaturo podvržene posledicam 
tega, kar Mladen Dolar poimenuje »stoletje postopne in katastrofično naraščajoče 
mediatizacije, ko so mediji tako rekoč prekrili in virtualizirali sam pojem realnosti, 
odeli v podobe in docela zastrli, tako da kriza reprezentacije še nikoli ni bila večja« 
(Dolar, »Gledališče ideje« 118). Tako smo se v enaindvajsetem stoletju znašli znotraj 
obdobja, ki ga izjemno natančno v pogovoru z Nicolasom Truongom v knjigi Eloge du 
74 théâtre definira Badiou s sintagmo »izjemno konfuzen čas«, v katerem se zdi, da je 
prevladal občutek, da smo popolnoma brez idej: »Ta zmedenost sodobnosti je tista 
globokega nihilizma, ki ne samo, da oznanja, kako so ideje izginile, ampak tudi, da 
se bomo na to stanje brez težav navadili tako, da bomo živeli v čisti sedanjosti, ki 
nikakor ne sproža problema sprave med imanenco in transcendenco« (Badiou, Eloge 
du théâtre 69). In po mnenju Badiouja je ena bistvenih nalog gledališča v tem obdobju 
zmedenosti, da »pokaže zmedenost kot zmedenost« (prav tam 70).
Današnji čas tako brez dvoma beleži sledi eksperimentov in tektonskih premikov 
v sedemdesetih in osemdesetih letih 20. stoletja. Uprizoritev in tekst različni tipi 
postdramske gledališkosti na novo postavljajo in preizprašujejo. Gledališče se oddaljuje 
od pojma dramskega, medtem ko družba postaja vse bolj dramatizirana. V zadnjih 
približno desetih letih sta se na evropskih odrih izrisali dve večji usmeritvi, ki ju lahko 
razumemo kot dediščini postdramskega gledališča. Prvi tip je »odrska pisava«, kakor 
jo definira filozof in gledališki kritik Bruno Tackels in jo utelešajo npr. Simona Semenič, 
Milena Marković in Anja Hilling. Ta odrska pisava (ki ni izključno tekstualne vrste) tekstu 
vrne osrednje mesto v ustvarjalnem procesu. Drugi tip, ki ga utelešajo npr. Frljić, Divjak, 
Milo Rau in drugi, pa pisave uporablja kot matrice, ki so lahko likovne, koreografske ali 
transdisciplinarne. Pisanje, pa tudi morebitno pripoved, tu torej opravlja režija v širšem 
pomenu besede, in sicer z vsemi sredstvi, uporabljenimi v predstavi. Ali pa snovalna 
oziroma sodelovalna kreacija, ki ukinja hierarhične in cehovske delitve med igro, režijo, 
dramsko pisavo in drugimi segmenti kreacije.  
Ne glede na zgoraj skicirano možno delitev pa vse oblike, ki izhajajo iz postdramskega, 
poleg pojma mimezis zelo radikalno preizprašujejo tudi reprezentacijo in verjetje 
gledalca v obstoj vzporednega sveta zunaj našega. To preizpraševanje konvencionalne 
pogodbe med igralcem in občinstvom velikokrat prevedejo v vprašanje: sem igralec 
torej jaz ali nekdo v publiki? 
Zgodbi dekonstrukcij nasprotja med reprezentacijo in prezentacijo, značilni za 
postmimetično, smo sledili od neoavantgarde do postmilenija. Neoavantgarda 
performativnega obrata, tako Jesih kot Jovanović, je s svojimi besedilnimi in 
gledališkimi dejanji zaznamovala prehod iz tekstovne v performativno kulturo, za 
katero je značilna prav performativna narava telesne so-prisotnosti. Jesih z Limitami 
in Grenkimi sadeži pravice, Jovanović pa z ritualnim klanjem kure v dvorani Križank 
(podobno kot Handke v Zmerjanju občinstva) ter z doslednim prevodom besedilnega 
v ritualno-telesno v Spomeniku G Jožice Avbelj dokončno udejanjata preobrat od 
gledališča kot umetniškega dela, fiksiranega artefakta, k performativni telesni so-
prisotnosti so-subjektov (igralcev in gledalcev) dogodka / hepeninga. 
Tako predstavo Pupilije Ferkeverk kot performativno naravnanost Jesihove in 
Handkejeve drame absurda lahko interpretiramo tudi znotraj koncepta sodobnega 
75 performansa in gledališča po performativnem obratu v šestdesetih letih 20. stoletja: 
kot različni inačici postdramskih (Lehmann) ali energijskih (Lyotard) umetniških 
korpusov ali dejanj, ki po mnenju Fischer-Lichtejeve »nočejo, da bi jih razumeli, 
ampak da bi jih doživeli. Ne pustijo se podrediti paradigmi hermenevtične estetike« 
(Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik 276). Zato – kot izpričuje Peter Božič ob Spomeniku G – 
»ukinjajo tistega posrednika med igralčevim telesom in njegovo igro, ki mu pravimo 
intelekt oziroma ratio« (Božič, »Razvoj« 37).
Besedilne in uprizoritvene ter konceptualne inovacije obravnavanih avtorjev in 
avtoric lahko torej razumemo kot del specifike zadnjih petdesetih let, ki sta jo 
zaznamovala nemir in badioujevska nezmožnost odločitve med koncem starega in 
začetkom novega. Priča smo bili vrsti estetskih revolucij, ki so zamajale konfiguracijo 
drame in gledališča. Lahko bi rekli, da avtorji, ki smo jih obravnavali v razpravi, 
razmišljajo o drami, gledališču in družbi v (post)dramski obliki zaradi potrebe po 
pripovedovanju novih in novih zgodb o postmilenijski krizi etike in družbe, ki jo 
pogojujeta neoliberalna in postsocialistična družba. Iz geografije njihovih literarnih 
in gledaliških procesov je očitno, da se je tudi slovenska pisava za gledališče podala 
v vode, ki jih je označil tako postdramski kot performativni obrat. To priča o tem, da 
se obravnavani umetniki in skupine gibljejo od lokalnega (Slovenija) do globalnega 
(kjerkoli na svetu), od dramskega do postdramskega, od realističnega do absurdnega, 
od fizičnega do metafizičnega, od gledališkega do metateatralnega, da bi zajeli ostanke 
razbitih in razdrobljenih pomenov, ki jih proizvajajo drsni označevalci, ki se le občasno 
in začasno srečujejo z označencem. 
76
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78
UDK 792.02(497.4) 
UDK 821.163.6.09-2 
DOI 10.51937/Amfiteater-2023-1/78-103
The essay focuses on selected examples of the deconstruction of the opposition between 
representation and presentation, characteristic of post-mimetic art from the neo-avant-
garde to the post-millennium. It discusses the authors who have been deconstructing 
the concept of drama and inventing new forms of redramatisation and post-dramatic 
intermediality from the 1960s to the present day. Despite persistently creating disrup-
tions in the fictional textual cosmos, particular authors – such as Peter Handke in Offend-
ing the Audience, the group Pupilija Ferkeverk in Pupilija, Papa Pupilo and the Pupilceks, 
Dušan Jovanović in Monument G and Play a Tumour in the Head and Air Pollution, Milan 
Jesih in Limits and The Bitter Fruits of Justice, Matjaž Zupančič in The Corridor and other 
plays, Dragan Živadinov and his team in Supremat and other farewell rituals, Oliver Frljić 
in Damned be the Traitor of His Homeland, Simona Semenić in 1981, and Žiga Divjak and 
Katarina Morano in various projects – establish a strong process of redramatisation in 
their theatrical texts and performances. It is as if, alongside the deconstruction of drama, 
they inject dramatic and theatrical elements into the post-dramatic process of staging 
and writing. Thus, post-mimetic art coexists with pre-mimetic art, as this “stripping down” 
of the representativity of drama led to the establishment of fiction.
 
Keywords: contemporary Slovenian drama and theatre, Dušan Jovanović, Milan Jesih, 
Matjaž Zupančič, redramatisation, post-mimetic art
Tomaž Toporišič, PhD, is a dramaturg and theatre theorist, a full professor of the history 
and theory of drama and performing arts and vice-dean of the Academy of Theatre, Radio, 
Film and Television, University of Ljubljana (UL AGRFT). His primary research interests are 
contemporary performing arts, literature and visual culture. He is the author of six books 
on contemporary performing arts. His latest essays include: “The New Slovene Theatre 
and Italian Futurism”, “(Re)staging the Rhetoric of Space”, “Deconstructive Readings of the 
Avant-garde Tradition in Post-Socialist Retro-avant-garde Theatre” and “Linking the histor-
ical and retro-avant-gardes by questioning the periphery-center relationship. The case of 
Trieste, Ljubljana, Zagreb and Belgrade”. He was the artistic director and dramaturg of the 
Mladinsko Theatre and co-founded the Exodos Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts.
Tomaz.Toporisic@agrft.uni-lj.si
79
Deconstructions of the Opposition Between 
Representation and Presentation from the 
Neo-avant-garde to the Post-millennium: 
From Pupilija, Jesih and Jovanović to 
Zupančič, Živadinov, Frljić, Semenič and Divjak
Tomaž Toporišič  
Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television, University of Ljubljana
I. Introduction: Towards the Text-Rhizome
In the paper,
1
 we will consider how the desire to tell stories manifested itself in the pe-
riod from the neo-avant-garde to the post-post-dramatic. We will examine what forms 
of re-dramatisation, re-figuration and re-characterisation of theatrical machines the 
contemporary performance paradigm is still producing. We will look at how authors 
are intensively reflecting on themselves, their texts, contexts and reception. In doing 
so, as authors-rhapsodists, they engage in a direct dialogue with their readers, spec-
tators and future interpreters.
The authors and author groups we will discuss, who represent different theatre gen-
erations, can be considered undisputed carriers of the post-dramatic interplay be-
tween media. With their concepts, performances and texts, they prove that Slovenian 
playwriting and theatre, in the broadest sense of the word, have also ventured to dive 
into the waters that have been stirred up by moving away from absolute drama and 
the dramatic and by the fact that the intertext in various cases, from Dušan Jovanović 
and Milan Jesih to Matjaž Zupančič, Oliver Frljić and his author teams to Simona Se-
menič, Katarina Morano and Žiga Divjak, and Varja Hrvatin, structures contemporary 
(no longer) dramatic and theatre writing in a way that is non-hierarchical but at the 
same time extremely cohesive from an intertextual and intermedial point of view.
1
 
Acknowledgements: The paper was written in the framework of the research programme “Theatre and Interart Studies” 
(P6-0376), co-financed by the Slovenian Research Agency from the state budget.
80 We will examine how absolute drama, in which dialogue is a central construction 
component, has become merely one possible dramatic discourse in the corpora of 
performances and concepts and the responses to them. In this way, the traditionally 
understood physicality of the printed text in the form of a book has been replaced by 
a rhizomatic structure. Along with this deconstruction of the absolute, textual strate-
gies have emerged within the textual in contemporary theatre that no longer include 
dialogue as a central principle of expression.
In the 1970s, authors such as Lado Kralj, Vlado Šav, Dušan Jovanović and Tomaž Kralj 
introduced systems of neo-avant-garde procedures into Slovenian performance prac-
tices, which were mainly taken from and developed according to Jerzy Grotowski and 
Richard Schechner. The above authors insisted on a particular processuality and partic-
ipants’ interaction. Thus, during the performative turn, the post-mimetic coexisted with 
the pre-mimetic, and this “stripping down” of the representativity of drama led to the 
establishment of fiction. Suddenly, we, the spectators, became witnesses to deconstruc-
tions of the opposition between representation and presentation. Let us recall Pupilija, 
Spomenik G (Monument G), Igrajte tumor v glavi in onesnaženje zraka (Play a Tumour in 
the Head and Air Pollution), Limite (Limits), Offending the Audience and other projects up 
to Dragan Živadinov’s 1990s farewell rituals at the turn from the 20
th
 to the 21
st
 century. 
The geography of these transformations and phenomena is very varied and rich.
The theatre and performance practices of the most influential artists since the perfor-
mative turn from the 1960s to the 1970s have to be understood in the context of what 
Alain Badiou calls the century of riots, especially the second half of the 20
th
 century, 
which was marked by tectonic shifts, with predictions of a move away from what, in 
his seminal work Of Grammatology, Derrida defined as logocentrism, the dominance 
of the visual and the ocularcentrism. The favouring of the gaze, which has caused play-
writing to lose much of its stability but also to gain many new initiatives, has led not 
only to a redefinition but also to the end of the crisis of the dramatic author, which An-
toine Vitez predicted in his famous statement from the 1970s, [...] o peut faire théâtre 
de tous” / “We can make theatre out of everything” (qtd. in Autant-Mathieu 13).
II. The Aesthetic Revolutions of Dušan Jovanović
Let us begin with Dušan Jovanović and the group Pupilija Ferkeverk with whom he 
closely collaborated. Jovanović began his career as a theatre critic for the student 
magazine Tribuna and as a playwright. He was undoubtedly influenced by the first 
wave of experimental theatre in Slovenia (Eksperimentalno gledališče, Oder 57, Gle-
dališče Ad hoc) but was nevertheless very critical of its artistic tactics. He wanted 
something different, more radical. His first (and still unperformed) play had the very 
suggestive title Predstave ne bo (There Will Be No Performance, 1962), suggesting 
81 metatheatricality and political censorship. Furthermore, it took almost a decade to 
finally perform his second play, Norci (The Madmen, 1963), in 1971. In the meantime, 
Jovanović concentrated on his theatre work as the director and founder of the newly 
founded ŠAG – Študentsko aktualno gledališče (Student Current Theatre), which cre-
ated the first scandals thanks to its aesthetic mini-revolutions.
Despite all the differences, the “critical generation” of the Oder 57 experimental the-
atre and the new generation of Dusan Jovanović shared one key “victory”: they both 
removed the fourth wall and created a theatre space in which a strong interaction 
between the actors on stage and the participating audience happened, in the sense 
of Max Herrmann’s redefinition of theatre, which always emphasised the third para-
digm, i.e., the spectator. When theatre began to understand the spectator as the third 
creator (e.g., Vsevolod Meyerhold), the one who completes in oneself what the stage 
merely suggests, it became politically dangerous.
Undoubtedly, this new perception of the performance as something that is not “a 
representation or expression of something which already exists elsewhere – like 
the text of a play – but as something which is brought forth by the actions, percep-
tions, responses of both actors and spectators alike” (Fischer-Lichte, Theatre 23) 
was a significant achievement of the first experimental theatres, particularly Oder 
57, which had a profound influence on Dušan Jovanović and his generation when, 
in the 1970s, they instigated a new “aesthetic revolution”, namely, the performative 
turn in Slovenian theatre and performing arts.
Dušan Jovanović (along with Lado Kralj) was probably the most influential and cen-
tral figure of the Slovenian neo-avant-garde theatre movement in the period of the 
late 1960s and 1970s when the theatre was dominated by a generation that broke 
cultural taboos. They understood politics in terms of the sexual revolution, but at the 
same time, crossed the strict boundaries of theatre and came close to the experience 
of happening and performance. This radical return of theatre to theatre in the vein of 
Antonin Artaud and his theatre of cruelty was a new aesthetic revolution, a political 
act that provoked a tumultuous response from audiences and critics alike.
Jovanović and his generation (Lado Kralj, Zvone Šedlbauer, Ivo Svetina, Milan Jesih, 
Iztok Tory ...) deliberately challenged the audience. The generation perceived the au-
dience’s response and participation in the theatre as a political act in which the au-
dience was to liberate itself together with the actors. It was only during this period 
of student movements and student theatres that the emphasis really shifted from the 
field of repertoire and text to the theatre medium itself, to its process of liberation, 
which (like the theatre of Schechner, Grotowski, Barba and others) opened up to the 
field of other artistic media and areas.
82 In 1968, Jovanović and the Pupilija Ferkeverk Theatre broke the hegemonic language 
of drama theatre in order to “touch life” (Artaud 13) in their performance Pupilija, 
papa Pupilo pa Pupilčki (Pupilija, Papa Pupilo and the Pupilceks). Together with Monu-
ment G (1972), this extraordinary performance embodied a radical quest for theatre 
based on the awareness that the stage is a physical and real space that demands to be 
filled and allowed to speak the true authentic language of semiotic and phenomenal 
bodies in space and time. Or, to once again paraphrase Artaud in combination with 
Erika Fischer-Lichte’s terminology: Jovanović tried to invent the grammar of this new 
language that creates a unique “autopoietic feedback loop” (Fischer-Lichte) between 
performers and audience.
The 1970s led to a redefinition of the roles of the text and the audience and perform-
ers in experimental theatre with Jovanović’s play Play a Tumour in the Head and Air 
Pollution (1972), performed by the Celje City Theatre and directed by Ljubiša Ristić. 
According to Lado Kralj: “The subject of this script is the theatre itself in which the 
theatre’s organisation, creativity and, finally, its very essence comes into crisis” (“Slo-
venia” 772). In other words, Jovanović’s play focuses on the failure of the basic prem-
ises of the avant-garde theatre of the 1960s: the emphasis on process rather than re-
sult, the strong interaction between performers and audience in what Fischer-Lichte, 
in her book The Transformative Power of Performance, calls the autopoietic feedback 
loop, mystical catharsis, collective ecstasy, expanded consciousness and the replace-
ment of textual language with body language and melodic, onomatopoeic sounds.
According to Dragan Klaić, Play a Tumour “shows with an anticipatory imagination 
the development of the avant-garde theatre of the sixties, the cul-de-sac of the uto-
pian quest for togetherness, closeness, oneness” (“Utopianism” 127). This self-criti-
cism can be interpreted as a radical, meta-literary, meta-theatrical and meta-artistic 
discourse, a self-criticism in relation to the fundamental premises of a liberated, 
neo-avant-garde, Artaudian and Schechnerian theatre, which Jovanović himself ad-
vocated and realised in Pupilija and Monument G.
Jovanović had already dived into the waters of engaged drama and theatre, which rejected 
all traditionalism and even ideology, in the 1960s with his The Madmen. A decade later, he 
took up this idea and combined it with the (self-)critique and (self-)irony of the performa-
tive turn of happenings and neo-avant-garde performance in his work Play a Tumour. He 
created “a dramatic postscript to the 1960s and to their characteristic brand of theatre, 
written before the era was in fact truly over or before we could notice that it was over 
and with what kind of an outcome” (Klaić, “Utopianism” 128). In doing so, he underlined 
the seriousness of the crisis of representation and the dramatist on the one hand and the 
dynamics of the ups and downs of radical theatrical practices of the second half of the 20
th
 
century, which were directly linked to and correlated with these crises, on the other.
83 According to his contemporary and colleague, theorist and art historian Lado Kralj, 
Jovanović “writes from an explicitly theatrical perspective” (“Slovenia” 772), “many 
of his plays oscillate between the grotesque irony of the theatre of the absurd and 
Brechtian docu-drama” (“Goli otok literature” 253), starting with his blasphemous 
second play, The Madmen.
The history of what was later called the political theatre of the 1980s, however, continued 
and reached a new peak in 1975 when the two generations joined forces: Dominik Smole, 
a representative of the critical generation of Oder 57, and Dušan Jovanović, a representa-
tive of the performative revolution of Pupilia Ferkeverk. The two came together to create 
Žrtve mode bum-bum (Victims of the Bang-Bang Fashion), a performance that became a 
turning point for the Mladinsko Theatre and Slovenian contemporary theatre in general. 
After Jovanović’s necessary directorial accents in the Glej Theatre, especially Monument G, 
and the simultaneous post-dramatic accents in the Pekarna Theatre’s productions (Dane 
Zajc’s Potohodec (The Pathwalker) directed by Lado Kralj; Svetina’s Gilgamesh; Ristić’s 
Tako, tako (So, so)), a completely new principle of work was established with the Victims, 
also within the “repertory” theatre: Jovanović’s text was used as a script, the performance 
was constructed in a non-literary way. It was Dominik Smole who gave the initiative.
Dušan Jovanović, Victims of the Bang-Bang Fashion, 1975, the Mladinsko Theatre, photo by Tone Stojko, 
SMG archive, in the photo: Milena Grm, Milojka Šuklje, Vladimir Jurc, Jože Mraz, Sandi Pavlin
84 Victims of the Bang-Bang Fashion was a proper aesthetic and ethical shock, an aes thetic 
revolution that transformed politicised art and politicised theatre into an explosive 
body that built a new form of engaged theatre in the context of self-managed socialism, 
which still believed that the essential effects of the classical forms of political theatre of 
Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht and the Russian avant-garde, could be achieved (albeit in 
a way different from that of the previous generation, namely, Oder 57).
Jovanović’s theatre in the second half of the 1970s, a period that begins precisely with 
Victims, emerged after the aesthetic revolutions of performance art in the 1960s and 
1970s. Already in its very textual conception, which originated as the work of a Bar-
thesian scriptor, it combined literature and spectacle, political engagement and theat-
rical experiment, a revolution of thought and form. It recorded and staged incursions 
of the real, the points at which the movement of art as the production of its own truth 
takes place. Staged as the opening performance of the new season, Victims had the 
impact of an aesthetic and ideological bomb.
Jovanović’s engaged theatre used and exploited the political and the revolutionary in 
the best possible meaning. This theatrically compelling spectacle combined the gro-
tesque, irony and tragic seriousness with the purest poetry. It used and exploited po-
litical and revolutionary ideology, establishing various paratactic relations, which had 
a cathartic effect on the audience. It deliberately engaged in the play of truth and ap-
pearance, fiction and reality, of actors, protagonists, spectators, of everyone and eve-
rybody, in the very creative process of work on the performance and in the unrepeat-
able acts of reception of each performance. His writing and performance emerged 
from the emancipated ideological context of the 1960s but in a more sober version, 
creating a distance from it while retaining the dynamism and desire for change that 
the student movements brought. They also framed it in the eternal repetition of wars 
and the omnipresence of the military apparatus in the modern world.
It is thus hardly surprising that not everyone was enthusiastic about the performance 
since it was too controversial, both aesthetically and ideologically, for the “orthodox” 
adherents of drama theatre and socialist self-management. However, despite the stir 
it caused in Slovenian politics, the play was also successful abroad, for example, at the 
famous Theatre of Nations festival in Nancy, France, receiving great praise from inter-
national critics. The performance reached its theatrical and thematic climax when, 
during a fascist march, amid silent flashes of gunshots and barbed wire, women hold-
ing children in their arms were falling while shouting out slogans of liberation; and 
in the following scene, when women, the people searching for their fallen loved ones, 
bring not uniforms this time but parts of their own clothes and dress their children, 
the people’s army, in the partisan folk clothes – which grew into a powerful symbol of 
the resurrection of the people’s eternal heroes – and when these people speak in the 
85 verses of Prešeren’s “Zdravljica” (“ A Toast”) in a substantial, non-declamatory way. 
Both the text and the performance featuring excellent actors were an exceptional the-
atre event, a highly professional perfection of the actors’ mental and physical efforts.
Following the aesthetic revolutions in the areas of performance and (no longer) dra-
matic texts, Jovanović played a key role in Yugoslav political theatre with his plays Os-
voboditev Skopja (The Liberation of Skopje, 1978) and Karamazovi (The Karamazovs, 
1980), which broke socialist taboos and opened up dramatic procedures to an unusu-
al mix of realism and metafiction. In the first piece, all the events of World War II and 
the family tragedy are depicted through the eyes of a six-year-old boy, which opens 
up a highly subjective and non-ideological interpretation of political events. The Kara-
mazovs, on the other hand, opened up the taboo subject of the Yugoslav communist 
concentration camp on an Adriatic island – a feature of Tito’s break with Stalin and 
the Soviet Union in 1948 – where many Soviet-educated communists were murdered 
under the cover of a strict system of re-education. In order to open up this topic, he 
enters into a dialogue with Dostoyevsky and his famous novel The Brothers Karamazov, 
which allows for a dramatic portrayal of the generation gap between a father and his 
three sons.
He further developed his post-Brechtian technique in the plays he wrote during and 
shortly after the war in former Yugoslavia. In 1993, he wrote a very personal version 
of Antigone, influenced by the war in Yugoslavia, which was still going on at the time 
of writing. If he consciously entered into a dialogue with Dostoevsky in order to write 
about “dark” and paradoxical events in Yugoslavia’s history, he chose the Greek myth 
in order to distance himself from the actual banality of war, or rather, to show how the 
mythical structure of Greek tragedy had also become something completely banal and 
predictable at the end of the 20
th
 century. As Dragan Klaić explains:
The hatred was transformed into a blind, almost visceral passion with no evident cause 
and purpose. In Jovanović’s Thebes the violence had become so pervasive that it had 
imposed its own construction of the reality, which was in turn internalised by all those 
affected. It had become transgenerational and only some intervention from outside the 
system could break the spell. That should be the role of the deities but in Jovanović’s 
play they remain in the background as a source of evil, refusing to assume the role of 
either arbiter or rescuer. [...] even Antigone’s space for resistance becomes extremely 
narrowed, almost non-existent (“The Crisis of Theatre” 151).
In his second play dedicated to the violence in former Yugoslavia, Jovanović began a 
metatheatrical dialogue with Brecht and his play Mother Courage and Her Children. In 
Uganka Korajže (The Puzzle of Courage, 1994), Jovanović also consciously confronted 
Brecht’s system of epic theatre and its specific no longer dramatic procedures regard-
ing stage space. He transformed the convention of epic theatre space in an original 
86 way based on the play of the landscape, in which the psychological states of the pro-
tagonists and their tiny micro-stories are echoed.
During the war in Yugoslavia, he also wrote the third part of his Balkan trilogy, Kdo to 
poje Sizifa (Who’s Singing Sisyphus), using what he described as a dialogue with dra-
matic form dealing with archetypal situations. He consciously chose to deconstruct 
and reconstruct classical ancient and modern plays and myths: Antigone, Sisyphus 
and Mother Courage.
His last major play, Razodetja (Revelation, 2009), is also a genre hybrid of tightly 
and densely interwoven thoughts, self-quotes from The Karamazovs and some of 
his other plays, contaminated with today’s jargon of authenticity (in the Adornian 
sense). Jovanović’s plays written in the 21
st
  century are the result of his revolt against 
the world of Neoliberalism, against the telecracy of a globalised world in which writ-
ing can no longer produce its own difference. This is why these works often bring to 
mind the dramatic and theoretical universes of Peter Handke, Heiner Müller or Rich-
ard Foreman. Each of his new plays brings a new, alternative attempt to think about 
theatre and art. Jovanović was convinced that after Shakespeare, we could no longer 
speak of any new, specific authorial forms, that there are only two great dramatic 
forms: Noh theatre and Greek tragedy. He sees the contemporary author as a plough-
wright (using the term introduced by his Macedonian colleague Goran Stefanovski): 
“I don’t write, I build plays” (Jovanović, “Muke z vojno” 4).
III. Milan Jesih: The Untold Subversive on the Trail of New Writ-
ing for the Theatre of the New Age
Parallel to Jovanović’s aesthetic revolutions in the field of drama and theatre were the 
no less radical attempts by Milan Jesih, with whom he collaborated in Pupilija, even 
though later, their theatre paths led them in different directions. It was Jesih who, 
while building his early plays, was also building a new theatre. Thus, Jesih’s signifi-
cance and role in the deconstruction of playwriting, and even more so his role in the 
deconstruction of the so-called literary or drama theatre and the realisation of the 
performative turn at the break from the 1960s to the 1970s, have remained virtually 
unexplored to this day. This statement may seem paradoxical, but after a short reflec-
tion, we will see it is plausible. Jesih’s “no longer dramatic writing” (a term coined 
by Gerda Poschmann, the German theorist of performance practices, which seems 
very appropriate here) has remained completely in the background, virtually unused, 
during the last few decades of the so-called post-dramatic theatre boom, which is un-
usual, given its proximity to the post-dramatic practices of the time.
87 We have almost forgotten how his early texts enact the non-dramatic weavings of 
dialogical flows at different levels. These re-appropriated and deconstructed dialogic 
forms of drama produce a polyphonic discourse of language surfaces, which – like 
in the case of Heiner Müller, Peter Handke or Elfriede Jelinek – is characterised by 
a Bakhtinian dialogism. The emerging polylogical form results from quotations that 
form extreme and sometimes even undecipherable collages. These collages, however 
– unlike the hermetic German parallels we mentioned above – do not construct an 
intellectualist labyrinth but a labyrinth of everyday life in all the ridiculousness of its 
psychopathologies and linguistic forms and automatisms.
Like Handke, Jesih peels away meaning from language to underline the present-day 
forms of linguistic alienation. People who are alienated from their language and 
speech are also alienated from the world:
D: What else would a human being lack?
J: Nothing in the world.
D: Nothing.
J: Nothing.
D: Nothing.
J: Nothing?
D: Nothing, I said.
J: What d’you mean: nothing?
D: Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!
J: You say nothing, sweetheart?
D: Leave me alone!
(Jesih, Grenki 24)
Jesih’s texts undermine the basic absolutes of drama: dialogue, characters and dra-
matic structure. At first glance, these blocks of rapidly alternating quasi-dialogues 
seem to emerge as text-reactors that produce themselves, while the writer or (rather) 
the Barthesian scriptor merely observes them (Jelinek, In den Alpen 254). There is no 
plot, no action, no logic in the unfolding of events and dialogues, no side-text, merely 
an extreme multiplication of persons and a tornado of sets of words. The Bitter Fruits 
of Justice systematically undermines all dramaturgical categories. Andrej Inkret wrote 
about the play that it “‘nonchalantly’, as it were ‘in one fell swoop’, turns away from 
everything that we have hitherto imagined under the category of drama; nevertheless 
(or is it precisely because of this?) they have proved to be theatrically extremely effec-
tive [...]” (Inkret, “Igra z jezikom” 8).
88 This theatricality, however, does not manifest itself through plot, action and dialogue 
but emerges from the specific juxtaposition of words. Veno Taufer draws attention to 
the fact that Jesih hypertrophies and multiplies the rules of classical dramatic structure:
Instead of unity of space, time and action, we are dealing with 33 different scenes in 
which 140 speaking figures appear in situations that, in a breakneck rhythm of daring 
collages and transitions between different spaces and times, between different genders 
of the speakers, draw out a range of scenes “in the most varied motivic combinations of 
normative values ranging from beauty to death, to betrayal, to love, to longing, to love of 
one’s homeland [...]. (Taufer, Odrom ob rob 166)
Jesih also plays around with the concept of the dramatis personae, which he disperses 
into 140 roles, to which he dedicates the one and only stage direction in the play: 
“The gender and case of the actors are not determined, but it is to be desired that 
their souls be broad and bright slopes, for the sun is the patron of life and its watchful 
shepherd” (Jesih, Grenki 6).
Milan Jesih: The Bitter Fruits of Justice, directed by Zvone Šedlbauer, EG Glej, 1974, SLOGI Iconotheque, in 
the photo: Božo Šprajc, Ivo Ban, Marko Simčič, Metoda Zorčič
In The Bitter Fruits, Jesih is on the trail of new writing for the theatre of the new 
age, combining innovation in form and political engagement in content. He disman-
tles and subverts the concept of dramatic representation and constructs an autonomy 
89 of language where language is no longer subject to dramatic form. While in his play 
The Pathwalker, Dane Zajc radically dissected contemporary ethics in a Beckettian 
manner and, at the same time, almost completely dismantled the remnants of clas-
sical dramatic structure, without undermining the power of the language of poetry, 
in The Bitter Fruits of Justice, Milan Jesih – as Lado Kralj points out – really radically 
and definitively adopted the absurdist principle of the disintegration of language and 
reinterpreted it into a total play of language, which, with its non-commitment, already 
exceeds the horizon of metaphysical nihilism (Kralj, “Sodobna” 107).
The characters in his play (similar to those of Jelinek, but much more artistic and 
musical) also appear to be oversized linguistic machines. They are constantly talking 
and talking about everything, continuously blurting out realities that a psychologi-
cally correct figure could never utter. Jesih’s theatrical texts choose different ways of 
bypassing established dramatic forms. Thus, it becomes very problematic to use clas-
sical notions of drama theory, e.g., dramatis personae, dialogue, monologue, primary 
text and secondary text, to analyse such texts. At the same time, what we are dealing 
with here is implicit theatricality rather than explicit. Thus (for example, in the case 
of the drama of the absurd, early Handke, Heiner Müller, etc.), we witness a theatre 
of voices that replaces the dramatis personae: “Language battles against its content, 
which is being put on like a garment (and not the other way round!), a content that is 
part of fashion” (Jelinek, “Brecht aus der Mode”).
Thus Veno Taufer in a critical note on the première of Jesih’s second play, The Bitter 
Fruits of Justice, to which the poet mischievously (and politically provocatively, since 
it was during the “lead” 1970s when the system would not allow for any interpel-
lations in the sense of multi-party democracy, but at the same time paratactically) 
attached the genre subtitle “ An Interpellation in One Nonchalant Swoop”, draws atten-
tion to the fact that in his theatrical piece the author “has made a good and convincing 
enough claim of the part of modern literature which is discovering that language has 
a life of its own, that it presupposes its own autonomous reality and expresses itself 
as its own content” (Taufer, Odrom 166).
What we are witnessing here is the emergence of extremely dense language surfaces 
which, like geysers, spew forth a mass of sound material in which it is no longer clear 
for which signifieds all these chains of signifiers are intended. Jesih’s textual practice 
in The Bitter Fruits thus represents a liberation from the model Brecht designated as 
Aristotelian theatre. In turn, it represents a basis for devising new models of theatre 
beyond drama, close to what Brecht called the non-Aristotelian Theatre, or Artaud’s 
theatre of cruelty. The means of liberation here is language. His tactic in The Bitter 
Fruits as well as, for example, in his Limits (1973), Brucka ali obdobje prilagajanja 
(The Fresher or the Adjustment Period, 1976) or Triko (Leotard, 1985), is to play on the 
90 triviality of language. Dramatic figures in crisis, whom Jesih the scriptor labels with 
post-Beckettian names like Jemavec, Dajavec, Grbavec, Gobavec (Taker, Giver, Hump-
back, Leper), move in a breakneck fashion across different space-times in a chain of 
miniature scenes based on parody and wordplay. In Jesih’s case, the play’s text is thus 
not created with the intention of embodying mimesis. The pace is fast, the action is 
mechanised, and representation is constantly undermined by ironic commentary and 
defamiliarisation. Like in Ionesco’s work, Jesih’s language is worn out, irremediably 
contaminated with triviality.
Jesih thus constructs a no longer dramatic theatre text that dismantles all tradition 
and metaphysics while at the same time reifying language as a series of signifiers 
without signifieds. In this, he applies the tactic of pastiche and quotative appropri-
ation and, at the same time, an ironic refurbishing of mainly linguistic corpora and 
modalities from the tradition, e.g., the storytelling of the first half of the 19
th
 century, 
the creation of an artificial palimpsestic antique language mixed up with everyday 
speech, with pub and street slang, political and philosophical jargon, etc.:
LEPER: Give me of your meal, good shepherd, for I am hungry and thirsty!
HUNCHBACK: My father, Telefunken of Massachusetts, has given the food I have with me 
for me alone. And what’s mine will remain mine, remember that, you vagabond stranger.
LEPER: And how should I reward you for that?
HUNCHBACK: I deserve that my cattle die in a terrible plague, to have my noble name 
taken away by my father in Massachusetts, to be cursed by my mother in Finland, and to 
be left alone and outcast, loathed even by the wretched winds of the mountains.
TAKER: Give me of your meal, golden-hearted shepherd!
HUNCHBACK: I will not. What is mine is mine, and is of no concern to you. What I have 
brought to the mountain, I will eat.
TAKER: And what reward do you get for that?
HUNCHBACK: It would be just if my cattle died, if I went blind, and if my pregnant wife 
down in the valley gave birth to a goat.
GIVER: Give me of your little ration, shepherd!
HUNCHBACK: Sit down! And I will pour thee wine, which I keep for guests, and some-
times for a feast. The meal is meagre, but tasty: see me, how healthy I am with it!
(Jesih, Grenki 28–29)
In The Bitter Fruits of Justice, Jesih introduces a special, no longer dramatic tactic of 
dramaturgy of quick transitions between scenes. The persons, marked with abstract 
labels, not attached to any dramatic characters, function as a substitute for dramatic 
characters, passing almost imperceptibly from one speaking position to another. The 
changes of position are arbitrary and associative, just like the changes of location of 
the (no longer) dramatic action are arbitrary and associative. By making language the 
91 “protagonist” of his drama, Jesih (like his French colleague Valère Novarina) abolishes 
any duality between text and performance. It is the word itself that becomes the spec-
tacle; it creates the structure of the text and the performance. Thus, with The Bitter 
Fruits, (no longer) drama in its Slovenian version reaches its extreme, the point from 
which only a return to the elements of the dramatic or post-dramatic is possible.
IV. Plough-Wright Matjaž Zupančič
One of the best descriptions of Matjaž Zupančič’s theatre work could be summed up in 
the two-word phrase coined by Stefanovski: plough-wright. The theatre director and 
playwright, who studied theatre directing and dramaturgy in Ljubljana and London, 
became director of the Glej Experimental Theatre in the 1980s and continued his ca-
reer as a playwright, theatre director and professor at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, 
Film and Television, University of Ljubljana. As the author of more than 50 theatre 
productions, he began writing (no longer) dramatic plays in the late 1980s and soon 
became one of the key contemporary Slovenian playwrights, winning several Slavko 
Grum Awards for the best new Slovenian drama and becoming the most performed 
Slovenian playwright in Europe and beyond. He has received numerous awards for his 
plays which are now close to twenty in number.
In his plays, he establishes a dialogue with Lacanian psychoanalysis, revealing games of 
sliding signifiers and new versions of the desire of the Other, signifying a radical other-
ness, an otherness that transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary. In his early 
plays, written in the 1990s, he uses and appropriates the nature of various genres, in-
cluding the underground culture of thrillers, which is suggested in the very titles of his 
plays: Izganjalci hudiča (The Exorcists, 1991), Slastni mrlič (The Delicious Corpse, 1992), 
Nemir (Restlessness, 1998) or Ubijalci muh (The Fly Killers, 2000). Matjaž Zupančič’s 
plays take place in in-between spaces, in reception areas and corridors, where people 
are constantly moving, coming and going in a mysterious chain of events.
Zupančič likes to play with different dramatic techniques and styles, from hyperre-
alism to mystery and thriller, from the direct depiction of reality to the absurd and 
the strangely poetic. In his black comedy Bolje tič v roki kot tat na strehi (A Dick in 
the Hand is Worth Two Thieves in the Bush) (2004), in a style in which Monty Python 
meets Harold Pinter, the characters act like robots, producing a series of repetitions 
that end in a strange sense of black comedy, using the vocabulary of psychiatry and 
neurology. In his play Padec Evrope (The Fall of Europe, 2011), he comments on and 
reveals the background of contemporary society after the turn of the millennium. In 
a small local hotel on the outskirts, significantly named Europe, they are having a 
private party where the local jet set is telling dirty jokes and making business deals. 
92 However, when the rather drunken party company begins to break up, a proper global 
revolt takes place outside, with demonstrations and riots. The police close off all the 
entrances to the city, all roads are blocked, and cars are burning. In this desperate 
situation, the mendacity of the local elite is revealed. With his sarcastic black humour, 
Zupančič reveals the grotesque reality of the modern world and the crisis of ethics in 
today’s society, be it in Europe or anywhere else.
Zupančič distils a particular condensation of metatheatrical commentary and hy-
perrealism of the Debordian society of the spectacle in an unusual and radical 
drama-essay on the contemporary mediatised civilisation of reality shows and sim-
ulacra, his most (post-)dramatically or mediatised play, Hodnik (The Corridor, 2003). 
Zupančič deliberately chooses live performance, namely theatre, as a medium to com-
ment on and deconstruct a currently highly exposed form of media, namely reality 
television. Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s statement could illustrate Zupančič’s starting 
point: “ And each metier, language, genre and/or format demands a different set of 
strategies and methodologies” (73). Here he uses “pure theatre” as the appropriate 
medium, deliberately avoiding the intermedial means of today’s theatre and staging a 
corridor of the ubiquity of reality television images, the very space of media violence 
in the age of humanitarian impotence.
This way, he reveals the problem of a subject with fictitious freedom that is present-
ed as an illusion of interactivity, openness for collaboration and dialogue, which is 
reinforced by the electronic media of television. Zupančič stages a reality that he in-
terprets as an image of Auslander’s universe of television, which “enabled television 
to colonize liveness, the one aspect of the theatrical presentation that film could not 
replicate” (Auslander 13). The playwright is fully aware of the problematic fact that 
theatre has evolved into an imitation of media discourses and that the taste of today’s 
public is being shaped by television, which has become the model and telos of theatre. 
Capital is no longer interested in the economy of the representation of live perfor-
mance. Instead, it is intensely focused on the economy of media representation, which 
presents itself as a representation of reality in the here and now.
Matjaž Zupančič also derives from the fact that (as Auslander points out) “what we 
are seeing in many cases is not so much the incursion of media-derived ‘technics’ 
and techniques into the context of live performance but, rather, live performance’s 
absorption of a media derived epistemology” (37). Despite that, Zupančič opts for a 
live performance, more specifically theatre, which “in the economy of repetition, live 
performance is little more than a vestigial remnant of the previous historical order 
of representation, a hold-over that can claim little in the way of cultural presence or 
power” (46). Being conscious of the fact that our concept of proximity and intimacy 
is rooted in the horizon of television, he uses this concept and the symbolic power 
93 of television as a medium that enjoys a greater cultural presence and prestige than 
theatre in order to intrigue viewers and to put them in a state of awareness about 
the television’s manipulativeness and its “electronic noise”, which presents itself as a 
reality more real than that of the live performance.
The question posed by The Corridor, and to a large extent by most of Zupančič’s plays, 
is, therefore, the key question that Auslander is continually repeating and answering 
in his excellent book Liveness: Does a performance have its own ontology that is more 
honest than television re-enactments? The answer to this question is no. Moreover, 
Zupančič’s play and the performance, which he also directed by himself, raise the cru-
cial question of the possibility of subverting reality television in live performance.
Thus, while talking about Big Brother, The Corridor uses exclusively theatrical media 
to open up a picture of the deterritorialised ethics of the postmodern world and its 
cybernetic models of organising reality, of the real that is electronically produced out 
of matrices and memory banks, collapsing into a black hole produced by the media. In 
this way, he shows that (as Debord would say), even in theatre, the spectacle is today 
“both the result and the project of the present mode of production”, it is “the heart of 
this real society’s unreality” (6).
V. Živadinov and the Farewell Ritual to the NSK Supremat
The story of the deconstructions of the opposition between representation and 
presentation, characteristic of the post-mimetic, can also be detected in Dragan 
Živadinov’s farewell rituals in his post-post-retro-garde phase. The object of our re-
search will be Supremat, subtitled The Farewell Ritual to Neue Slowenische Kunst and 
NSK (produced by Živadinov in collaboration with the creative team of the costume 
designer Dunja Zupančič, dramaturg Jana Pavlič and choreographer Marko Mlačnik), 
which premièred in November 2002 at the Mladinsko Theatre. The performance was 
part of the complex preparatory procedure of his great utopian project 1:1, which 
started in 1995. The title obviously refers to Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism, while 
the subtitle refers to the Slovenian retro- or trans-avant-garde movement of the 1980s 
and 1990s, to which Živadinov belonged. Supremat was conceived as a new person-
alised farewell ritual of the director from both the Russian historical avant-garde and 
the Slovenian neo-avant-garde. The performance uses the technique of pastiche and 
recycling of themes and styles in a new context.
Inspired by the 1986 play Futurists by the English author Dusty Hughes, Supremat fo-
cuses on the first poet to become a victim of post-revolutionary Russia, Nikolai Gumilev, 
a pioneer of the so-called Acmeist movement. By reintegrating the historical moments 
94 from 1921 Saint Petersburg, the performance captures the very moment of the essen-
tial conflict between the avant-garde art and the political avant-garde and the very be-
ginning of the process of exterminating the former in the development of the latter in 
the aftermath of the (Soviet) Revolution. The script of the performance, characterised 
by palimpsest, pastiche and appropriation techniques, can be read as a post-dramat-
ic opera aperta, interweaving and combining fragments and paraphrases of Russian 
poetry of the time (Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Gumilev, Blok ...) with the memoirs of 
Nadezhda Mandelstam, transformed by deconstructive interventions.
Dragan Živadinov: Supremat, the Mladinsko Theatre, 2002, photo by Miha Fras, in the photo: Romana 
Šalehar (Ana Andrejevna Akhmatova) and Olga Kacjan (Ana Andrejevna Akhmatova)
Supremat is also characterised by highly personalised and individualised appropri-
ations of particular avant-garde and neo-avant-garde works, concepts and thoughts. 
First and foremost, there is the quotation of the FLUXUS table tennis and its rackets 
with a hole in the middle. It is an appropriation and a retro-citation of the famous 
neo-avant-garde “Fluxfest” sports. Specifically, the games played at Douglass College 
in New Jersey in February 1970. Supremat uses table tennis rackets with holes as the 
central visual symbol, coupled with the appropriation of Meyerhold’s biomechanical 
movements performed by the protagonists of the performers, all portraying the rep-
resentatives of Russian art in 1921.
95 In Supremat, Živadinov emphasises the use of specific “ingredients”, so characteristic 
of his art, even more pointedly than in other performances. This time it is the PRIL 
dishwashing liquid, which is, of course, a reference to Joseph Beuys and his use of 
honey, felt and fat in the 1960s. The phrase “ Art is only a temporary religion!” from 
the performance recalls and paraphrases Duchamp’s famous statement about art: “I 
don’t believe in it with all the mystical trimmings. As a drug, it’s probably very useful 
for many people, very sedative, but as a religion, it’s not even as good as God”.
The performance combines decontextualisation and recontextualisation of great, 
utopian inquieries into art. It fragments, deconstructs and appropriates them for its 
own use within the global world of post-dramatic and post-theatrical exchange. The 
de-hierarchised use of signs deliberately applies the concepts of simultaneity, plays 
with the density of signs, musicalisation, the specificity of visual dramaturgy and the 
intrusion of the real. In this way, it undermines the core of theatre as imitation (mime-
sis) but also the notion of logocentrism, which can be understood as the basic legacy 
of the concept of drama theatre.
VI. Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Representation: Divjak/
Morano – Frljić –Semenič
In the end, let us take the liberty of jumping to the present. After the many transfor-
mations brought about by the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the performance practices of 
the new millennium appear to be returning to some of the postulates of experimental 
theatre and its deconstructions of representation, but also to the desire for different, 
collaborative and documentary approaches to the material.
Take, for example, Žiga Divjak and Katarina Morano. The duo could be considered to 
belong to the group of authors who use various forms of theatrical tactics in order to 
achieve desired effects on the spectator or reader, including directors such as Oliver 
Frljić, Nina Rajić Kranjac, Borut Šeparović, Janez Janša, Simona Semenič, Sebastijan 
Horvat, Jernej Lorenci ... Divjak and Morano question the structure of today’s society 
and the role of the individual in it. In their projects, they construct their own ver-
sion of verbatim theatre, drawing, among other things, from the projects by Janez 
Janša (especially his performance Slovensko narodno gledališče (Slovene National The-
atre)) and Oliver Frljić (especially his performance 25.671 about the erased citizens 
of Slovenia). In this, they apply the procedures of verbatim theatre but also draw on 
Brecht’s learning plays and Augusto Boal’s principles of the Theatre of the Oppressed.
The genres of documentary performance and verbatim theatre were also consistently and 
radically explored by Oliver Frljić in his performance about the erased entitled 25.671 
96 (Prešeren Theatre Kranj, 2013), based on real-life events and documents, which he inter -
twined with fiction and, in a way, even with quasi-documentary material and meta-theat-
rical essay for good measure. In this way, the performance radically questioned the status 
of the privileged witness that documentary and verbatim theatre sometimes too easily 
take on. In the Slovenian context, Oliver Frljić is the director who was never content with 
the basic form of verbatim theatre but has continually combined it with other genres, 
most notably the theatrical essay.
In their performance entitled 6, Divjak and Morano also applied the classic procedures 
from this type of theatre, transcribing interviews, collaging them and composing the 
text of the performance. The editing is done by reducing large amounts of collected 
material and transforming it into the authorial outline of a theatre text. The working 
template of the text is created through rehearsals and is always subject to change. 
Divjak and Morano maintain the roles of actor, director, writer and other creators in the 
process but make them fluid, interchangeable and flexible. Creation is both individual 
and collective at the same time; the writer or Barthesian scriptor is not separated from 
other creators. They are not singular but rather part of the process. However, they par-
ticipate in it primarily as the editor of the text, not so much as a playwright.
Divjak and Morano produce their texts in different ways. The post-dramatic docu-
mentary treatment of Cankar’s Hlapec Jernej in njegova pravica (The Bailiff Jernej and 
His Rights) was the result of research into the true stories of workers devoid of rights. 
The performance follows contemporary real-life Jernejs as the creators found them 
in the field through visits to companies, associations, the coastal trade union confed-
eration KS 90 and the Workers’ Advice Centre. Through documentary material, we 
learn about the testimonies of workers at the Port of Koper, cleaners from cleaning 
services, construction workers, truck and van drivers, nurses and precarious archi-
tecture students in architectural firms. This results in deliberately rough material, 
interpreted and narrated by actors in the rhythm of working behind a conveyor belt. 
There is nothing spectacular about the editing or the staging tactics; the performance 
draws the spectators on the principle of less is more. Without noticing, they become 
witnesses and, at the same time, give testimony to the precariousness.
The project 6 was conceived by the dramaturg-director team in collaboration with the 
actors (Iztok Drabik Jug, Alja Kapun, Katarina Stegnar, Vito Weis and Gregor Zorc) and 
collaboratively explored the lack of tolerances in real-life events that occurred at the 
Kranj Student Residence in February 2016. The story was that the headmaster of the 
hostel decided to take in six unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors in an empty and 
unused wing of the student section of the hostel. The creative team was interested in 
the conflict between a part of the staff at the boarding school, “who basically support 
the idea that a fellow person should be helped, that children should be accommo-
97 dated in this hostel as, ultimately, this hostel was built to host minors who are being 
educated outside their place of [...] birth. And then, because of the pressure of the 
surroundings, they begin to question somewhat [...] this basic belief that they have 
to help” (Pograjc). The team collaborated with the investigative journalist Maja Ava 
Žiberna and the headmaster of the hostel Judita Nahtigal and produced documentary 
material based on research. The research, which lasted about four months, was part 
of a creative process in which they tried to get in touch with these minors in the field, 
widening the scope of their inquiry to include student hostels in Nova Gorica and 
Postojna. During the process, documentary materials began to be combined with fic-
tional ones, based on authentic documents but derived from the actors’ imagination 
and improvisations. The result was a script and a performance in which acting and 
non-acting are constantly interchanged.
Žiga Divjak: 6, the Mladinsko Theatre, 2018, photo Matej Povše, SMG Archive
From the above, it should be clear that, in their performance 6, Divjak and Morano 
do not establish a pure form of verbatim theatre (similarly to Oliver Frljić in his per-
formances 25.671 about the erased or Our Violence and Your Violence). It is a case of 
typical collaborative theatre with certain elements or features of the procedures from 
the Theatre of the Oppressed. Thus, their theatre structures a particular, no longer dra-
matic, matrix, with bold interweavings of documentary and fiction that at times make 
the latter more convincing than reality and the former more surreal than fiction. In do-
98 ing so, again, just like Frljić, they use the metatheatrical discourse that they weave into 
their performance-essays to comment on the social positioning of their performance, 
the conditions of its production and its possible political effects. At the same time, they 
consistently embody the basic definition of documentary theatre, as proposed by Peter 
Weiss in his paper “Notizen zum dokumentarischen Theater”: “Documentary theatre 
avoids any invention, it uses authentic materials, which are then – in a slightly reworked 
form, but unchanged in content – shown again on stage” (293–94).
To conclude, let us mention Simona Semenič as an example of experimental writing 
for the theatre at this time. She is interested in radical inversions of the dramatic 
and the post-dramatic in her plays-scripts. In Semenič’s work, we are exposed to the 
deconstruction of the opposition between representation and presentation, typical 
of the post-mimetic. Even though the author persistently creates disruptions in the 
fictional textual cosmos, the play nevertheless establishes a powerful process of re-
dramatisation, creating intense plots and denouements. It is as if, at the same time, as 
deconstructing the dramatic, the drama and the dramatic are injected into the post-
dramatic fabric of her plays. The post-mimetic thus coexists with the pre-mimetic; the 
“stripping down” of drama leads to the establishment of fiction.
In her plays, e.g., tisočdevetstoenainosemdeset (1981), Semenič problematises her 
own medium and the status of the author, the work and the reader or spectator, cre-
ating the hypertrophy of the process of creation itself. The thematisation and simul-
taneous self-reflexivity and self-irony of the status of the author produce a parallel 
problematisation of the ontological status of art and, at the same time, of reality itself. 
She is interested in what lies behind appearances and appearances of appearances. 
Her deconstruction of the dramatic and the fictional produces a specific post-Brech-
tian critique of the real. She reworks the dialogic form in conjunction with a variety 
of diverse textual strategies: from stage directions to descriptions closer to novels 
and fiction, narrative, essayistic, theoretical and other techniques that remind the au-
dience that what they are reading or watching is no longer a real dialogue. However, 
in doing so, it produces distinctly dramatic effects, which Birgit Haas would probably 
call “dramatic drama” (Haas 45).
VII. Conclusion: Traces of the Experiments and Tectonic Shifts of 
the 1970s and 1980s
Based on past and contemporary examples, we have drawn a map of the practices 
of authorial theatre that Badiou In Praise of Theatre calls general oscillations. The 
spectator has to decide whether to surrender to this void and participate in an end-
less process. One is not called upon to enjoy but rather to think. The examples and 
99 tactics we have touched upon show how performance practices in the 20
th
 century, 
alongside other live arts and literature, were subjected to the consequences of what 
Mladen Dolar designates as “a century of gradual and catastrophically increasing me-
diatisation, when the media virtually covered and virtualised the very notion of re-
ality, clothed it in images and completely veiled it so that the crisis of representation 
has never been greater” (“Gledališče ideje” 118). Thus, in the 21
st
 century, we find 
ourselves in the midst of a period that Badiou, in a remarkably precise conversation 
with Nicolas Truong in his book In Praise of Theatre, defines with the syntagm “par-
ticularly confused times”, when the feeling of being completely devoid of ideas seems 
to have prevailed. “This contemporary confusion is that of a profound nihilism, which 
not only declares that ideas have disappeared, but adds that one can very well make 
do with this absence by living in a pure present, which doesn’t at all raise the problem 
of a reconciliation between immanence and transcendence” (Badiou, In Praise of The-
atre 64). And according to Badiou, one of the essential tasks of theatre in this period 
of confusion is to “show the confusion as confusion” (64).
Thus today, we can undoubtedly detect traces of the experiments and tectonic shifts 
of the 1970s and 1980s. Performance and text are being re-situated and questioned 
by different types of post-dramatic theatricality. Theatre is moving away from the no-
tion of the dramatic while society is becoming increasingly dramatised. In the last ten 
years or so, two major trends have emerged on European stages, which can be seen 
as a legacy of post-dramatic theatre. The first type is “stage writing”, as defined by the 
philosopher and theatre critic Bruno Tackels and embodied, for example, by Simona 
Semenič, Milena Marković and Anja Hilling. This stage writing (which is not exclusive-
ly of the textual type) repositions the text as the central focus of the creative process. 
The second type, embodied by Frljić, Divjak, Milo Rau and others, uses writings as 
matrices, which can be either visual, choreographic or transdisciplinary. The function 
of writing, as well as potential narration, is here either taken over by directing in the 
broader sense of the word, with all the means used in a performance, or it becomes a 
devising or collaborative creation that abolishes the hierarchical and guild-like divi-
sions between acting, directing, playwriting and other segments of creation.
Regardless of the tentative division sketched above, all the forms that emerge from 
the post-dramatic, very radically question representation, the spectator’s belief in the 
existence of a parallel world outside our own and the notion of mimesis itself. This 
questioning of the conventional contract between actor and audience is often trans-
lated into the question: who is the actor, me or someone in the audience?
We have traced the story of deconstructions of the opposition between representa-
tion and presentation, typical of the post-mimetic, from the neo-avant-garde to the 
post-millennium. The neo-avant-garde of the performative turn with its textual and 
100 theatrical acts, both with Jesih and Jovanović, marked the transition from a textual to 
a performative culture, characterised precisely by the performative nature of bodily 
co-presence. Both Jesih, with his Limits and The Bitter Fruits of Justice, and Jovanović, 
with the ritual slaughter of a chicken in the Križanke Hall (similar to Handke’s Offend-
ing the Audience) and consistent translating of the textual into the ritual-bodily in 
Jožica Avbelj’s Memorial G, conclusively enact the turn from theatre as a work of art 
and a fixed artefact, to the performative bodily co-presence of co-subjects (the actors 
and the spectators) in the event/happening.
Both the performance of Pupilija Ferkeverk Theatre and the performative orientation 
of Jesih’s and Handke’s drama of the absurd can be interpreted within the concept of 
contemporary performance and theatre after the performative turn in the 1960s: as 
different iterations of post-dramatic (Lehmann) or energetic (Lyotard) artistic corpo-
ra or acts that, according to Fischer-Lichte, “did not seek to be understood but expe-
rienced. They cannot be incorporated into the paradigm of hermeneutic aesthetics” 
(The Transformative Power 158). For this reason – as Peter Božič testified after expe-
riencing Monument G – “they abolish the mediator between the actor’s body and his 
acting, which we call the intellect or ratio” (“Razvoj” 37).
The textual, performative and conceptual innovations of the authors under discus-
sion can thus be understood as part of the specificity of the last 50 years, marked by 
restlessness and a Badiou-like inability to decide between the end of the old and the 
beginning of the new. We have witnessed a series of aesthetic revolutions that shook 
the configuration of drama and theatre. We might say that the authors we have dis-
cussed in this paper are thinking about drama, theatre and society in a (post)dramatic 
form due to the need to tell new and fresh stories about the post-millennial crisis of 
ethics and society conditioned by neoliberal and post-socialist society. The geography 
of their literary and theatrical procedures shows us that Slovenian writing for theatre 
has ventured deep into the waters marked by both the post-dramatic and the perfor-
mative turn. The artists and groups in question move away from the local (Slovenia) 
towards the global (anywhere in the world), from the dramatic to the post-dramatic, 
from the realistic to the absurd, from the physical to the metaphysical, from the the-
atrical to the metatheatrical, in order to capture the remnants of the fractured and 
fragmented meanings produced by sliding signifiers that only occasionally and tem-
porarily encounter their signified.
101
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