by Mihai Lukács The Soviet director Vsevold Meyerhold employed theatre to consciously help the post-Revolutionary effort in the 1920-1930s Soviet Union and to manifest solidarity to workers and to the communist ideals. Radical changes in his (before and after the Revolution) theories prove the politically motivated development of  his theatre-making: by rejecting the pre-Revolutionary theatre and its bourgeois baggage based on oppression and inequality, the former theatrical knowledge was abandoned and un-learned, while at the same time new subject positions and a revolutionary theatre could emerge. By connecting his theatrical explorations with the popular scientific ideas of the time, Meyerhold…

by Mihaela Michailov Play-writing in the 50s and 60s centers on the image of the worker and on the new geography of labor in factories, enterprises and mines. The worker and work undertaken in often precarious conditions represent the themes of playwrights such as Lucia Demetrius, Mihai Davidoglu, Ion D. Sârbu, Maria Banuș etc., playwrights for whom the theatre functions as a means to mobilize class consciousness and create contexts in solidarity with the realities of the times. The workers in the plays of the aforementioned authors believe in the Communist ideals, in the value of the labor shared by…

In 2007 three artists from Ljubljana changed their names, made themselves new IDs and started to sign their works by using the name of the Slovene Prime-Minister, Janez Janša. The statement accompanying their actions was the following: “We live for the things that we create and, with your permission, we would like to quote from the letter you sent us when we entered the Slovene Democratic Party: ‘The More of Us There Are, the Sooner We Will Reach Our Goal’ ” . The essay “Who’s the Real Prime-Minister?” analyses the legitimizing process carried out by every single individual through what…

by Dragan Batancev The story about extravaganza in Socialist Yugoslavia would not be complete without a chapter on its most popular cinematic genre – the partisan films. It is this kind of films that marked the cinematography of this country and secured its place in film history. Amongst the 200 war films produced in Tito’s Yugoslavia, one holds a distinguished title of the most expensive spectacle: Bitka na Neretvi, aka The Battle of Neretva (1969). This film is unique not only because of the incredible endorsement it received from the political elite during its shooting, but also because of its…

by Miruna Runcan In a dense analysis dedicated to the coming of age of performances constructed as social analyses, theatre critic Miruna Runcan discusses the critical, social and political dimensions of Romanian theatre in recent years by focusing on the relationship between state-funded theatre and independent theatre. In a context where state theatre does not assume any socio-political stance, the independent area becomes the center of political critique. One of the main aspects analyzed by the critic is the actor’s contribution to the work process. The actor “is no longer an interpreter of a given text, but its coauthor, in…

by Mihaela Michailov On September 15 1958, “Fani Tardini” Theatre in Galaţi hosted the premiere of The Barefoot Bride, a play directed by Valeriu Moisescu. The text of the play – written by Sütő András in 1950 – centers on the Soviet-inspired collectivization process which took place in Romania between 1949 and 1962, a process which entailed the agglutination of farmland into collective farms. The Barefoot Bride was staged nine times at the theatre in Galaţi and once in Bucharest during the Decade of the Theatre, after which it was cut. Valeriu Moisescu’s performance included Gheorghiu-Dej’s speech in which he announced the end…