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The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary
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Abstract: This article focuses on two plays by contemporary East European playwrights, Matei Visniec and Vera Filo. The discussion of East European voices in theater as forms of resistance to oppression and violence is more pertinent today than it has ever been. The decade and a half since the fall of what was known as “the iron curtain” has seen, in fact, a rise in mass abuses and violence against women from these parts of the world, as a result of ethnic wars and the phenomenon of sex trade. East European playwrights such as Visniec and Filo are creating powerful theatrical experiences which tell stories of violence, all while subverting and resisting violence through ironic discourse. In Matei Visniec’s play, the body of a woman is the site of war and violence. His play, explicitly entitled The Body of a Woman as a battlefield in the Bosnian war gives voice to a woman, Dorra, victim of multiple rapes by soldiers, who tries to survive and overcome the gruesome transformation of her body into a site of violence, and ethnic hatred. I argue that the discourse of Dorra in Visniec’s play reflects that which Judy Little has called “carnivalizing the sentence;” this entails a juxtaposition of voices in which the voice of authority is both contained and parodied. It is through the power of her carnivalizing voice, that Dorra transcends the damage done to her body and psyche and revolts against her aggressors. By transforming her aggressors into one concentrated portrait of the “Balkan Man,” whom she parodies and mocks, Dorra, rises above her victim status. I look at Vera Filo’s play, The Tulip Doctor, in terms of feminist theater aesthetics: the author refuses all linearity of plot, and destablilizes the idea of the female protagonist as object of the gaze. The play is a surrealist kaleidoscope combining scenes of war and violence, with vignettes of a decomposing world and figures of authority engaged in absurd dialogues and actions. Filo also “carnivalizes the sentence” and combines obscene language with sharply sarcastic language which mocks all forms of authority, illustrating the Bakhtinian aesthetics of the carnival and the reversals which it engenders. Filo’s carnivalized dialogue uses the ideological language of dictatorships all while she is parodying it and denouncing its repetitive, vacuous quality. Filo’s play gives the sense that the only art which makes sense in a world responsible for so many atrocities, is a form of dramatic expression which is self-subversive and questions not only the entire structure of society, but the purpose of art itself.
Keywords: Matei Vişniec,Vera Filo, violence, resistance, ironic discourse, carnival |
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