Silvija Jestrovic

Theatre of estrangement : theory, practice, ideology

In a world flooded with information, images, and sounds - where the distinction between real and simulated becomes increasingly blurred - one of the most pressing concerns of the theatre is how to subvert the stock responses of an audience and make the well-known fresh and meaningful again. Situating the practice of theatrical estrangement firmly in its social and political contexts, Theatre of Estrangement looks at how this concern has manifested itself in Russian and German avant-garde theatre. Silvija Jestrovic traces the concept of estrangement from its early formulation in the Russian Formalist School of Literary Criticism embodied in the experiments of the Russian avant-garde, to its so-called apotheosis in the theory and practice of Bertolt Brecht. Drawing from a variety of sources - theatrical performances, dramatic works, visual art, film, political events, biographical data - she demonstrates that theatrical estrangement is not only an abstract theoretical postulate, but also a practical artistic strategy shaped by the cultural and historical climate. In the historical avant-garde, Jestrovic argues, estrangement became a way of thinking, a means of comprehending the world, and even a lifestyle. Yet, devices of making the familiar strange are destined to erode in one historical and cultural context and become rediscovered in another to rejuvenate stale art forms and open the door to a fresh and more critical perception of reality. Theatre of Estrangement attempts to make that rediscovery.

Performing like an asylum seeker: paradoxes of hyper-authenticity

This essay investigates performance events that feature actual refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants, but in instances where presence and embodiment are mediated and made ambiguous. My focus is a fashion show by Catalan designer Antonio Miro, who uses refugees from Senegal as models, and Christoph Schlingensiefs public art project Foreigners Out!. In different ways and to varying degrees, these case studies exemplify the phenomenon that I call the hyper-authentic – where the authenticity of the subject is partly constructed through the gaze of the beholder. Although the projects in question use real refugees and asylum seekers as performers, exilic voices and bodies are often subordinated to the creative and/or entrepreneurial concepts of the established Western artists. Nevertheless, I would argue that the relationship between performance ethics and efficacy remains ambiguous, making these case studies difficult to dismiss as merely gratuitous.

Introduction: Framing ‘America’ — Between Exilic Imaginary and Exilic Collective

An unemployed emigre writer sits in his cockroach-infested apartment in New York and reminisces, not without irony, about an anti-American exhibition he saw in his native Poland: The exhibit was meant to evoke horror, disgust, and hatred. It had, however, the opposite effect. Thousands of Varsovians, dressed in their holiday best, waiting everyday in lines as long as those to see Lenin’s Tomb and in solemn silence looked at the display, listened respectfully to the boogie-woogie, wanting in this way, at least, to manifest their blind and hopeless love for the United States. (Glowacki: 103) The situation of the Polish emigre in Janusz Glowacki’s play Hunting Cockroaches embodies the complexities of exile and the ambivalence of “America” as a space one longs to reach. The world of Glowacki’s protagonist encompasses a wide spectrum of the exilic phenomenon covered by the works in this collection. On the one hand, there is internal exile and an almost pleasurable dream of the remote and happier place — the ‘America’ of the exilic imaginary. On the other hand is the reality of physical exile in America that involves its politics, its economics, and its survival strategies. In both instances, albeit from different ends, ‘America’ is constructed through interplays, contrasts, and clashes between an immigrant’s desire and actual experience, each of which helps to shape a communal body of the marginalized and of the displaced, that we will here name the exilic collective.

Semiotics of nonsemiotic performance

Abstract This paper uses Michael Kirbys structuralist theatre and its tendency to be nonsemiotic as a point of departure to address various aspects of structuralist performance including its resistance to meaning and participation in a communication process, its metatheatrical dimensions, and its defamiliarization quality. Although in a ‘pure’ structuralist theatre semiotics should become obsolete, the question is whether structuralist theatre is able to fully resist the process of semiosis. Is it possible for nonsemiotic performance to stay out of semiotic space, which constantly adapts and renews its codes to accommodate new and emerging structures? Examining the scope and ability of structuralist performance to encompass both semiotic and nonsemiotic tendencies in theatre, this work tries to demonstrate that the nonsemiotic quality of structuralist performance is indeed grounded in a suppressed semiotic approach.

Murderous Maids: Reading Contemporary Migrant Domestic Labour Through Genet’s Maids

This paper uses two interwoven points of departure, both involving maids who kill their employers. The first one is the infamous Papin sisters—two French Maids, who brutally murdered their employer’s wife and daughter in 1933. This incident has given rise to numerous works from Jean Genet’s well-known play. The Maids and numerous films, including Claude Chabrol’s La Ceremonie, to Paula Rego’s art piece also entitled The Maids. Simone de Beauvoir and Jacques Lacan analysed this crime further in the context of class inequality. The second point of departure focuses on current issues and press coverage of Indonesian female domestic migrant workers on death-row in Saudi Arabia. The particular case study is the most recent incident of the maid Siti Zainab, convicted of murdering her employer in 1999 and executed on April 13, 2015 in Medina. The approach to these materials will be two-fold: a) To use dramatic, cinematic and other representations of the Papin sisters incident as intertexts (Lachmann) through which to read the current scenarios concerning Indonesian maids on death-row in Saudi Arabia and b) to offer a re-reading and re-contextualisation of Genet’s The Maids (and some of the other related works) through current issues concerning the relationship between class, citizenship, law, and female migrant domestic labour. The paper will explore the scenarios of the murderous maids as they unfold variously in dialectic tensions between documentation and fictionalisation, class and crime, local and global, the incident and its interpretations, to ask questions concerning contemporary issues of international labour migrations and the feminisation of labour (Cheah, Erenreich) in relation to citizenship rights and death penalty.

The University as a Public and Autonomous Sphere: Between Enlightenment Ideas and Market Demands

This chapter explores the role of the modern university, focusing on the usually neglected areas of the arts and humanities, both as hubs of creativity and innovation and as crucial platforms for questioning societal norms and rules. The point of departure is Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of the university as a public space which promotes the culture of human rights and social justice against the moral blindness of utilitarian sciences. How is the contemporary university, under increasing market demands and pressure from the ‘culture of management’ maintaining this ethos? What does it mean to be a critically engaged university in the era of performance benchmarks and league tables, as universities increasingly opt for a pragmatic curricular approach to meet the expectations of big corporate employers? To what extent are innovative transdisciplinary courses and programmes, focusing on learning-as-process, rather than product, able to act as platforms for critical thinking and debate? How do these learning processes become modes of ‘remixing’ culture and knowledge through performances, public actions, workshops, conferences and seminars to activate different social agents?

The maid vanishes

This essay begins with two brief accounts—one of arrival and the other of vanishing. It was the late summer of 2005 when we—my partner, young daughter, and I—moved to the UK, where I was to take up a lectureship at the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick. I came on a Tier 4 working visa, to last for two years, after which I had a choice of either applying for Permanent Residence or UK citizenship. Given that we were coming on Canadian passports (we had emigrated to Toronto in 1995 from the former Yugoslavia as landed immigrants and acquired Canadian citizenship three years later), the whole process of this second immigration was smooth and easy, at least from the administrative point of view. It had eventually added to our experience of having multiple passports and various visas as we have been exercising modes of, what Aihwa Ong (1999), called “flexible citizenship.”

Exiles and the city : Krzysztof Wodiczko’s New York interventions of making the familiar strange

So asks Krzysztof Wodiczko, the artist whose diverse projects have in many instances explored the encounter of the stranger, the immigrant, the marginal, and the homeless on the one hand, and the North American metropolis on the other.