Domnica Radulescu - Theater of War and Exile

Also by DOMNICA RADULESCU

Womens Comedic Art as Social Revolution: Five Performers and the Lessons of Their Subversive Humor (2012, McFarland)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-1919-4

2015 Domnica Radulescu. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

On the cover: Image from the Trap Door Theatres production of the play The Word Progress on My Mothers Lips Doesnt Ring True by Matei Viniec

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

For Henry

For all who survive war and exile and the theater artists who tell their stories

For the memory of my father (19262000)

First and foremost I wish to thank my home institution, Washington and Lee University, for the generous support of my scholarly work through sabbatical leaves, Lenfest research and travel grants, and conference funding, all of which has substantially contributed to the creation and completion of this book. In particular I want to thank my colleague, friend, and dean, Suzanne Keen, for her unrelenting support of my work and for facilitating many of my creative endeavors and projects. I also wish to thank Marc Conner for his prompt support with the funding of several components of this book and related creative projects. And I thank Victoria Blackstone for help with indexing.

I would also like to thank the theater artists included in this book who have generously shared their thoughts, ideas, unpublished works, and illustrations of their work, as well as given interviews for the completion of my study: Matei Viniec, Saviana Stanescu, Motti Lerner, Dijana Miloevi and the DAH Theater, Marcy Arlin, Pavel Zutiak, Noa Baum, Milena Markovic, and Radmila Adamova.

Finally, I wish to thank the unknown member of the Women in Black group in Belgrade, Serbia, who welcomed me into her home and handed me a copy of the precious volume of survival stories gathered under the title Women in Black: Womens Side of War.

If, as Peggy Phelan distills, trauma makes a tear in the symbolic network itself because its scope or intensity overwhelms, trauma can simultaneously create an urgent compulsion to express what is beyond speech or pillars of meaning (Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories 5). In so doing it can press survivors and witnesses of political trauma to tremendous creativity and activism. In a way, that is the backstory of Domnica Radulescus exceptional book.

Theater of War and Exile offers an exhilarating studyand bold, multilayered argumentfor theaters role in navigating and transforming traumas of exile and war. As an artist, scholar and (global) citizen, I will keep learning from this volume and the artists it highlights for years. So, I trust, will the field. An migr Romanian scholar and artist, Domnica Radulescu interweaves activist, artistic and scholarly investments by focusing on contemporary theater works that have emerged directly and ferociously out of wars and experiences of exile, out of violent political events and their aftermaths in the Balkans and in Israel-and-Palestine. Radulescu avers that postmodernist modes can express traumatic ruptures and transformations in artistically revelatory, profoundly political ways, expressing the ontologies of exile and processes of war trauma. Surely this is because theater is at once social and material, creative and contingent; the liminal symbolic space of theater provides a forum for intervening at the crossroads of individual and collective experience. Indeed, through her diverse, compelling case studies and multidimensional analysis, Radulescu argues that a conspicuous aesthetics can best engage the psychic and physical wounds of political trauma, constellating the living and dead. Hovering nearby is Diana Taylors articulation of hauntology, building on Derrida: (P)erformance makes visible (for an instant, live, now) that which is always already there: the ghosts, the tropes, the scenarios that structure our individual and collective life (The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas 143). Radulescus inspired book reminds us that the ontologies and hauntologies of exile and war structure cultures and lives in ongoing ways, creating rifts and after-lives of trauma, utopic imperatives and urgent art.

Radulescus astute interdisciplinary research is buoyed here by her sustained expertise in Eastern European culture and exile, theatrical praxis, scholarly expertise on subversive humor and feminist theory, and inventive engagement with postmodernism. The volume contributes to multiple fields, from trauma studies to Balkan Studies, from theater as social change to global performance. In so doing, it reflects on war and proliferating exile/s as well as the relationship between art and societyparticularly in times of crisis, coercion and crossing cultures. When, for instance, Radulescu analyzes Romanian-French Matei Viniecs work and his self-perceived conflict between his two different writing modes (and ethics) as playwright and as journalist responding to war atrocities, the book engages readers in the paradoxes of testimony, querying the distinctive stakes of an aesthetic, not only a body, of theater of war and exile. Radulescus vivid distillations of divergent artists work is a joy to read. Whether describing Romanian-born Saviana Stanescus aesthetic vortex of comedy and tragedy for works premiered in exile in America, Czech-born Pavel Zutiaks experimental dance theater adaptation of Polish-born Jerzy Kosinskis novel The Painted Bird, mingling two Eastern European artists war traumas in a dance of spatial dislocation, or the Serbian DAHs multidisciplinary devised performances of remembrance and rebirth which tour internationally to witness and heal memories of atrocities perpetrated in their home/land, Radulescu listens astutely. She conjures artistic and social praxis as interlinked. And she proffers that some of the most vital, experimental theater today is the work of exiles, refugees and survivors of atrocity from Eastern Europe.

Nowhere do the artistic vitality and ethical provocations of an aesthetic of trauma in theater get more fully probed than in Radulescus twelve case studies of writers, directors, choreographers, and performers for the stage. Drawing equally on repertory and archive, she analyzes their inventive, compelling theater of war and exile with critical precision, com/passion and creativity. She excavates focal works potential to critique, resist, and renew social orders through the symbolic, embodied, collective work of theater. To that end, Radulescus generative scholarship includes original interviews with nine of the twelve international artists, querying their perspectives on the relationship of form to meaning and trauma, which helps her to interrogate arts relationship to war and exile today further and to renew our understanding of political trauma