Seeing better : modernist estrangement and its transformations

This essay looks at the concept of making the familiar strange as an integral part of the historical avant-garde, to understand its workings, legacies, and potential to play out the aesthetics and politics of seeing better for our time. The notion of artistic thinking as thinking from the point of view of estrangement, with its paradigms in European modernism, is a point of departure for reflecting on the relationship between aesthetics and politics—for foregrounding the concept of making the familiar strange both as formulated by Shklovsky and Brecht, respectively, and as it has been reemerging through its various transformations in contemporary artistic practices

Worksites of the left

Editorial to the special issue of Studies in Theatre and Performance entitled 'Performing Worksites of the Left' and co-edited with Dr Ameet Parameswaram

Performing Belgrade : itineraries of non-belonging

Performing Cities is an edited volume of contributions by a range of internationally renowned academics and performance makers from across the globe, each one covering a particular city and examining it from the dynamic points of view of performances occurring in cities and the city itself as performance. Cities covered are Jerusalem, Singapore, Belgrade, Los Angeles, Cape Town, Toronto, Paris, Bogotá, Cardiff, Chicago, Sydney and Palermo. Above all the book explores the possibilities of writing itself as a spatial practice that does justice to the city as a place of multiple movements. Where urban writing has for so long been dominated by textual readings of the city – as seen in the hackneyed trope of the 'city as text' – the case is made here for a move towards a form of situational, relational and performative writing that is premised on the multifarious inflections of bodies and actions in space

Nomadksi jezik

(1970) je diplomirala dramaturgiju na Fakultetu dramskih umetnosti u Beogradu, a dokorirala u Centru za dramske studija u Torontu. Docent je na odseku za Teatar, performans i kulturnu politiku Univerziteta Warwick u Velikoj Britaniji. Njeni eseji objavljivani su u brojnim stručnim časopisima u Evropi i Severnoj Americi. Autor je više pozorišnih i radio drama. Sa kolegama iz Toronta je 2003 organizovala interncionalnu konferenciju Pozorište i egzil i uredila specijalno izdanje časopisa Moderna drama na istu temu. Njena knjiga Pozorište začudnosti: teorija, praksa, ideologija (Theory of Estrangement: theory, practice, ideology) objavljena je 2006 godine (University of Toronto Press). Priredila je, sa Yanom Meerzon, zbirku eseja Performans, egzil, i ‘Amerika’ (Performance, Exile, and ‘America’), koja izlazi iz štampe na jesen 2009 u izdanju Palgrave Macmillan-a. Trenutno piše novu knjigu o performansu i gradu, koja se u velkoj meri bavi Beogradom i Sarajevom. Njen poslednji pozorišni komad, Not My Story (Nije moja priča) okupio internacionalnu grupu umetnika i izveden je u Torontu u režiji Dragane Varagić. (1970) graduated dramaturgy at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, and dokorirala at the Center for Study of Drama in Toronto. Assistant Professor at the Department of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy University of Warwick in the UK. Her essays have been published in numerous magazines in Europe and North America. The author has several theater and radio drama. With colleagues from Toronto in 2003 organized a conference interncionalnu theater and exile, and edited a special issue of Modern Drama on the same topic. Her book Theatre of wonder: Theory, Practice, Ideology (Theory of estrangement: theory, practice, ideology) was published in 2006 (University of Toronto Press). She edited, with Yanom Meerzon, a collection of essays performance, exile, and 'America' (Performance, Exile, and 'America'), that comes out of the press in the fall of 2009, published by Palgrave Macmillan's. Currently writing a new book about the performance and the city, which deals with the extent velkoj Belgrade and Sarajevo. Her last theater piece, Not My Story (Not my story) brought together an international group of artists and made in Toronto, directed by Dragana Varagić

Performances of authorial presence and absence : the author dies hard

This book takes Roland Barthes’s famous proclamation of ‘The Death of the Author’ as a starting point to investigate concepts of authorial presence and absence on various levels of text and performance. By offering a new understanding of ‘the author’ as neither a source of unquestioned authority nor an obsolete construct, but rather as a performative figure, the book illuminates wide-ranging aesthetic and political aspects of ‘authorial death’ by asking: how is the author constructed through cultural and political imaginaries and erasures, intertextual and intertheatrical references, re-performances and self-referentiality? And what are the politics and ethics of these constructions

Bringing the left back : radical performances of dissent from the remains of ex-Yugoslavia

This essay focuses on the leftist cultural expressions that emerged from excavations of the legacy of socialist Yugoslavia. It proposes the notion of the worksites of the Left as a critical lens through which to re-examine the socio-political dissent in the region and the emerging of the Leftist public discourse. The essay turns to Etienne Balibar’s concept of the worksites of democracy, Janelle Reinelt’s transposition of the concept to the context of theatre and Alain Badiou’s notion of Event to map the parameters of worksites of the Left pertinent to the given contexts and its manifestations of discontent both through various public protests and through theatre. The essay focuses on two theatrical performances ‘Born in YU ‘(2010) and ‘Our Violence, Your Violence’ (2016) to examine how theatre operates as a worksite not only through its subject-matters and modes of its representation, but also through a degree of unpredictability inherent in the theatrical event. The essay argues that theatre is a unique worksite in its capacity to generate subsequent worksites, looking at ‘Do you Remember Yugoslavia?’ roundtable discussion that emerged from the ‘Born in YU’ performance; and numerous public and media debates, sparked form ‘Our Violence, Your Violence’