To be unworthy of national stage. Women’s disobedience as performative practices

Abstract

On August 5, 2015, two dramatizations were played in the public space of a small Croatian city. The scene for the first of them was the theatre stage in Rijeka, where five women of different nationalities "presented" their private stories. Second, its climax had at the door of the theatre, and members of veteran and war volunteer associations, and supporters of the Armada football club played the main roles. The twentieth anniversary of Operation „Storm” seems to be a meaningful example of the way in which the processes and acts of its commemoration took place in public space: at the theatre and streets of the city. The situation of commemoration launched the processes and practices in which social performance became at the same time a creative act that expressed opposition as well as action supporting normative protocols and structures of power. Social dramatizations in Rijeka, both "in" and "in front of" the theatre, show that theatre is a very important type of public space, which not only exists as a specific place of communication, but it also has a status of conceptual subject with a particular history and separate semantic dimensions. In order to understand the entitled "disobedience”, it is necessary to deal with several essential issues, such as: performance of resistance and obedience, categories of "national theatre" and “experts” of everyday life; public space and the right to it; memory and “counter-memory” and relationship between performance and archive.

Keywords

• women
• public space
• “Second war”
• national stage
• performance
• disobedience