Director Hariš Pasović has always been a
passionate advocate of political engagement, even at the height of
Yugoslavia’s disintegration; it was he who invited Susan Sontag to
stage
Waiting For Godot
in war-torn Sarajevo. More recently, however, he has come to feel that
that engagement must not be on just any terms; in particular, a
disillusionment has set in with the institutional responses of Europe
and especially the EU.
Europe Today is a kind of
Gesamtkunstwerk
featuring live music, video projection, theatre, literature and dance,
which interrogates senses of Europeanness, even as the venture itself
constitutes recently unprecedented international co-operation within
the region. Pasović is a Slovenian-born Bosnian; actor Miki Manojlović
Serbian; dramaturg Dubravka Vrgoč is Croatian; dancer and choreographer
Edward Clug is Romanian-born and Maribor-based, and the band Laibach
are probably Slovenia’s most widely-known contemporary cultural export.
Manojlović’s
spoken text is taken from a 1935 poetical/polemical essay by
Zagreb-born modernist author Miroslav Krleža depicting Europe as a
continent of radical disparities, decadence and social and political
hypocrisies. If it was both observational and prophetic at the time,
then (as abridged by Pasović) it seems scarcely less accurate now. Not
least by dint of its performance in a recently-reborn state now a
member of the EU, the piece questions what it means to be individually
or collectively European, whether “in” Europe or of it. Meanwhile,
Clug’s dance sequences seem sometimes to make him a personification of
Europe, sometimes an Everyman marginalised by it, sometimes the forces
acting upon it. Much of Laibach’s contribution is drawn from their
recent
Volk project,
which remakes various national anthems (including the British). The
results may become brooding industrial throbs, strident and threatening
or awash with neo-classical grandeur, almost national power ballads; in
the latter mode they may be no less stirring than the originals but,
because of the new musical context, we grow aware even as we experience
such sentiments how glib they often are. The various components comment
upon and contrast with one another; while Laibach declaim “Let freedom
rise”, Clug swings helpless in a flying harness. Even our applause at
the end is deconstructed by a final extract from Krleža.
The
75-minute piece also contains one transcendental moment. At one point
Clug, after executing a sequence of non-specific but
nationalist-salute-looking movements, stands stage front, house lights
on. He seems to be expecting a response. Just as I was considering
standing up and giving one, a couple of others n the audience did
precisely that… then more… until plants throughout the house were
making salute sequences in unison. It was quite disconcerting, a little
chilling, and showed that sometimes a non-naturalistic presentation can
be the most real of all.
Written for the Financial
Times.