The status of opera artist at the national theatre in belgrade from 1970 to 1980

Abstract

This article deals with the status of the opera artist in the National Theatre in Belgrade in the 1970s. The status of an opera artist is analysed from two, relatively independent standpoints. The first level includes the artist’s position as an employed person in the institution, and the other - his social position at the final stage of the self-management socialism, which was the ideological and organisational framework of the Yugoslav cultural policy in the aforementioned period. The main idea of this article is to utilize the approaches of various sciences - sociology of art, cultural policy, musicology - in order to investigate those aspects that determine the status of artists. The initial research question was concerned with discovering how the status of opera artists in the Theatre was determined. The answer to this question required an insight into artistic work within the Theatre, which was reconstructed on the basis of the available archival material, as well as the artists’ positioning in society, which was achieved by looking at the discourses about an artist from the eighth decade of the 20th century. The fundamental literature for this article was The White Book (Bela knjiga), which was issued in 1970 according to the decision of the Art Council of the National Theatre (Opera and Ballet); its purpose was to define the need for reform at the Opera and Ballet. The goal of this article is to point to different interpretations of the status of the artist in the observed period of self-management in the field of culture. [Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 177004: Identiteti srpske muzike od lokalnih do globalnih okvira: tradicije, promene, izazovi]

Keywords

• cultural politics
• self-management
• National Theatre in Belgrade
• status
• operaartist